- The adoption reduces transaction fees for the users by 37%, according to the exchange’s calculations.
- It is possible that that the exchange adopting SegWit can decrease the load significantly on the Bitcoin blockchain.
BitMEX, a crypto derivatives exchange, announced that it has enabled withdrawal support for Bech32 Segregated Witness (SegWit) addresses. For deposits, however, customers should still send transactions to a regular multi-signatures address. As SegWit transactions use less data than the regular ones, it reduces transaction fees for the users by 37%, according to the exchange’s calculations.
However, users will not have any savings from the initial withdrawals from the exchange. When they spend their Bitcoins next time, they will save 37%, if they send Bitcoins to a Bech32 address. Given that BitMEX is the largest Bitcoin derivatives exchange, it is theorized that by adopting SegWit, they can decrease the load significantly on the Bitcoin blockchain, reducing transaction fees across the network.
The adoption also shows that the upgrade is becoming mainstream, and is likely to increase the chances of more exchanges and crypto firms adopting it. This would make the Bitcoin blockchain more scalable. ButMEX is also planning on implementing native SegWit for deposits in the future.