Coinbase adds Segregated Witness Support to its Cryptocurrency Platform

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Coinbase is one of the most important and famous cryptocurrency platforms in the market. As of November it had more than 13 million users. According to a blog post written by Dan Romero, Vice President and GM of Coinbase, the platform will be adding Segregated Witness (SegWit). The intention is to help Bitcoin scale and give the community an upgrade that was asking for since long time.

Coinbase Adds Segregated Witness

SegWit is one of the most important developments in Bitcoin during the last times. It is one important piece that will help the Bitcoin network to scale. Segregated Witness is a change in the transaction format of Bitcoin that reduces transaction sizes. That would allow for lower fees and faster transaction times.

Coinbase, as well as other wallets, exchanges and platforms, have decided to add support for SegWit. The decision taken by this platform is important because it has an important amount of users.

Dan Romero wrote about that:

“Many of our customers have been asking for SegWit, and we’re working out a way to implement this upgrade safely. We store billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin on behalf of customers and any change to our infrastructure is done with significant planning and consideration for the security and stability of our platform.”

Coinbase has also explained that the main priority that they have is to securely store customers’ funds. Besides that, and before adding SegWit, Coinbase’s priority is to ensure that the platform remains performant during periods of peak volume. After security and performance, Coinbase is focused on adding new features for its customers.

Our engineering team has begun the final testing phase of SegWit for Bitcoin on Coinbase.

SegWit compatible Bitcoin sends/receives will be available for customers in the next few weeks.

We previously wrote about SegWit on our blog: https://t.co/3YPQPkYy4C

— Coinbase (@coinbase) February 5, 2018

“In terms of our engineering priorities, securely storing customer funds remains our top priority,” commented Mr Romero. “Our next priority is to ensure that our platform remains performant during periods of peak volume. Following security and performance, we are focused on adding new features for our customers,” he added.

Lightning Network and Bitcoin Scalability

One of the most important problems that Bitcoin faces is the scalability problem. Developers are now focused developing the Lightning Network, the off-chain scaling solution for Bitcoin. In this way, transactions would take just a few seconds to be processed and almost no fees.

At the moment, there are more than 150 cryptocurrency platforms working in order to implement SegWit. In the future, with the Lightning Network, Bitcoin will be able to keep being used as a cryptocurrency for payments.

Once the lightning network will be implemented, another important development will be Atomic Swaps. This would allow Bitcoin to be instantly converted to another cryptocurrency like Litecoin. These two currencies will be able to work together, increasing the capacity of the Bitcoin network.

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