GDAX now supports Segregated Witness (SegWit) transactions according to an official announcement by the company yesterday. The company said it was thrilled to support SegWit, being an important step towards the development of Bitcoin.
The update from GDAX comes after SegWit implementation on Coinbase and Bitfinex. GDAX hopes that this update, alongside other upcoming scalability improvements, will lower transaction fees. It said it will also continue implementing other improvements such as transaction batching and improved UTXO management.
“The process of sending and receiving Bitcoin will remain the same. We expect that customers sending Bitcoin from GDAX or Coinbase will pay less in fees to the network on average when sending their transactions. Though there are many factors that go into determining the network/miner fee, this change will help reduce the size of the fee required in order to prioritize your transaction. Overall network throughput is expected to improve, reducing the chance of delays.”
With the update, GDAX users will be able to send transactions to an external address with SegWit, freely. When depositing Bitcoin from an external address, customers will get a new SegWit address compatible with BTC addresses.
Following the update, customers can no longer send Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin addresses.
The announcement said in the announcement,
“One important change is that SegWit addresses no longer share the same format as Bitcoin Cash (BCH). As a result, any Bitcoin Cash (BCH) sent to a Bitcoin (BTC) address will result in permanent loss of funds”
However, the process of sending BTC remains the same.
SegWit is an upgrade to Bitcoin that separates the main part of the transaction data from the part authorizing transaction. This not only makes a transaction secure and efficient but also reduces transaction size.
It will facilitate Lightning Network that makes sending crypto through peer-to-peer method easier and quicker
Originally published at coinpedia.org
