Bitcoin’s SegWit adoption skyrockets; fees still low as txns go close to equaling 2017 peak

Bitcoin suffered a fatal fall of 20% recently, shedding quite a lot of its market cap instantly. It is however, recovering from this fall. As BTC moves steadfastly on the road to price recovery, its SegWit adoption has received a generous boost recently. The interesting fact is that the number of transactions that Bitcoin blockchain is handling is only 14% away from its all-time high, yet the fees are very low.

SegWit was proposed in December 2018 and was implemented in BIP 141. It was a consensus layer proposal which theoretically, was meant to improve transaction batching since increasing block size limit wasn’t an option. Even before its implementation, SegWit faced a lot of criticism. However, adoption seemed to be rising steadily until recently, when it increased radically.

Source: ChartsWooBull

An adoption jump of this scale was last seen in March 2018, when it hiked from 13% to 30%. However, at press time, SegWit adoption had increased from 36% to 50% in a period of over 30 days. As mentioned above, the transaction count, at press time, was around 346,000, only 14% less than the peak of 2017. And yet, the fees are today dramatically lower i.e. $0.6746. For approximately the same number of transactions, the average fees was $15 in January 2018.

Higher transactions in tandem with lower transaction fees indicate improvement of the Bitcoin blockchain, especially with the adoption of secondary scaling solutions like Lightning Network, sidechains implemented by Blockstream, or a base layer solution like SegWit.