Litecoin SegWit usage reaches an all-time high of over 75%!

It’s been a little over two years since Segregated Witness went live on the Litecoin network, and during that time adoption of the technology has been rather modest, plateauing at around 50% for most of 2019. Since August, those numbers have skyrocketed to record highs. According to data provided by Blockchair, a new all-time high for this indicator was reached at 75% yesterday, shattering the previous high of 66% in November last year.

We reached out to Litecoin core developer Loshan about this news.

Litecoin has led the way in adopting SegWit, a technology that reduces bloat. Going forward, we hope to drive the adoption of cutting-edge blockchain technology.

Segregated Witness was a controversial change to the network due to political disagreements that became known as the block size debate. This includes a fix for the network’s malleability issues, which helps pave the way for Layer 2 scaling over the Lightning Network, and secondly, separating witness data from transactions as their own data, increasing the effective block size to 4MB. Several changes were made possible: However, the maximum actual block size is still limited to ~2.5MB.

Segwit also offers higher transaction efficiency and lower fees for those who use Segwit instead of legacy address systems. Although Segwit has become the majority of networks, adoption of Bech32 (Native Segwit), which offers much higher efficiency, has been slow. This is mainly because it takes time for large service providers and exchanges to upgrade their infrastructure.

When Coinbase first rolled out support for this technology, adoption grew quickly, from 9% to 33% in February 2018, and for a time, adoption was somewhat correlated with Bitcoin’s adoption rate. The network has been quietly upgraded.