Gemini, the Winklevoss brothers-backed crypto exchange, has announced the addition of full support for Segregated Witness (SegWit) support to its wallet platform.
“As part of the upgrades this year, we introduced support for Segregated Witness (SegWit) addresses and transaction batching,” the official announcement stated.
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“As our customers may have noticed this means that SegWit addresses — which begin with bc1 — can now be used for Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals. Both of these improvements required end-to-end integration through our online and offline signing systems (along with many other efforts).”
Very proud of our team! @Gemini becomes the first major exchange to launch full support of SegWit, complete with native SegWit deposit addresses by @bajohns https://t.co/Xbbn6uVqqB
— Tyler Winklevoss (@tylerwinklevoss) April 15, 2019
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Introduced in 2017, SegWit was primarily introduced to fix Bitcoin’ transaction malleability. However, later it was found that the introduction of the protocol upgrade can also increase the number of Bitcoin transactions as more data can be stored in the 1 Mb block due to the reduced signature information.
“SegWit allows digital signature information to be stored separately (or segregated) from its transaction data,” Gemini explained. “Without signatures, Bitcoin transactions weigh around 30–40 percent less, thus taking up less “block space” on the network and reducing the transaction fee. As block space is limited, any decrease in transaction size allows for more transactions per block and greater overall throughput in the network.”
The exchange also outlined that its decision to integrate SegWit was taken to increase the block space and security of its infrastructure.
Gemini is not the first crypto platform to adopt SegWit. However, no other company of its scale has added full SegWit support before.
Along with Gemini, CoinDeal has also added SegWit support and is giving its customers an option to migrate to the new system for 50 percent lower fee on Bitcoin payouts. Last month, crypto storage platform BitGo also added SegWit support on its API.
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