Coinbase and Bitfinex announced support for SegWit

Today, with a difference of a few hours, the largest cryptocurrency exchanger in the US Coinbase and one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges announced support for SegWit.

SegWit is an improvement of the Bitcoin Protocol, the purpose of which is to reduce commissions during the transaction and increase their speed.

In Bitfinex argue that the transaction fee will now be about 15-20% less than before, and the speed of transactions will increase several times. In order to take advantage of SegWit users will need to generate a new wallet address that supports SegWit. Only after that it will be possible to input and output bitcoins through SegWit.

Coinbase has announced that they have completed the testing process this week and will gradually start introducing SegWit support for their customers. Presumably by the middle of next week all 100% of Coinbase clients will be transferred to SegWit addresses.

Despite the fact that the Protocol change itself was adopted a few months ago, large companies such as Coinbase were in no hurry to implement its support for their customers. In turn, users pressed the company as much as they could and even issued a special petition on the site change.org, which was supported by more than 12,000 people.