Coinbase has made a major announcement earlier today. The company confirms all of their users will benefit from Segregated Witness next week. The testing solution has been completed as we speak. Starting next week, all users will begin their phased rollout, which will hopefully benefit users in the future.
Segregated Witness has been an intriguing creature for many different reasons. The solution has been production-ready for some time now. Even so, most companies struggle to integrate this new protocol accordingly. It has not been an easy battle for most exchanges and service providers. Coinbase has been working on their integration for some time now. As of today, the company finally made the progress they have been looking for.
A Positive Change for Coinbase Users
It is expected the phased rollout of SegWit will commence in the next few days. If everything goes according to plan, full support should be available by mid next week. This is a positive development for all Bitcoin users. With SegWit, Coinbase users get faster transactions and lower fees. It is a win-win situation for all parties involved in every transaction.
This news comes at a rather interesting time for Bitcoin. The Core developers released a new client not that long ago. As part of this updated software client, SegWit support is now enabled by default in a convenient manner. It is unclear if this release has anything to do with the news provided by Coinbase. It is possible they embrace this new solution just to get it over with. Integrating this scaling solution is direly needed for the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole.
Our engineering team has finished testing of SegWit for Bitcoin on Coinbase.
We will be starting a phased launch to customers over the next few days and are targeting a 100% launch to all customers by mid next week.
— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) February 20, 2018
Whether or not this is a positive development, remains to be seen. Coinbase will certainly benefit from this concept. Most Bitcoin users will also note vast improvements. However, there is still some hesitation as to whether Bitcoin can effectively scale. Given the influx of popularity, such a solution is needed now more than ever before. Coinbase is leading the charge in this regard, which is certainly a positive sign.
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