Research has shown that the number of on-chain Bitcoin transactions has risen dramatically throughout 2019, nearing the volume of Bitcoin’s peak in December 2017. Even so, transaction fees are a fraction of what they were around bitcoin’s all-time high, likely due to the continued uptick of SegWit transactions on the network.These findings were published in the May 6 edition of digital asset publication Diar. Among other research related to DApp adoption on Ethereum, Diar found that fees rose 200 percent in April versus March. Still, fees are negligible compared to the $30 some users paid during the peak of bitcoin’s price climb at the end of 2017, and transaction times are 84 percent lower, as well.Diar reports that this is mainly due to the growing impact of SegWit on Bitcoin’s transaction landscape. The data platform estimates that on average, the protocol is used in 35 percent of blocks and thus is “alleviating fee pressures.”“2018 average SegWit usage was only 26% and only 11% at Bitcoin’s peak highlighting the continued adoption by major players,” it notes.Source: DiarActivated in late 2017, Segregated Witness, or SegWit for short, is designed to alleviate some of the scalability concerns created by blockchain size limitations and, by extension, fees and transaction times. The protocol increases a block’s data limit by removing the need to attach signatures (the mechanism by which users prove they own the bitcoin in a ...
