Electrum Wallet To Support SegWit In The Next Release

The new version of Bitcoin Core (0.13.0) has been released and SegWit being the key feature of this major release, is already taking the bitcoin world by storm. A well known bitcoin wallet called Electrum has recently announced that it will be rendering support for SegWit in the forthcoming update of the bitcoin wallet app. The Electrum wallet team took to twitter on sunday to make the announcement. It further added that the new update is going to arrive some time around christmas this year.

Undeniably, the SegWit support might be very crucial for the wallet as the transactional data will be segregated into multiple blocks instead of piling up onto the same block. This also resolves the major issue of the bitcoin block size limitation prevalent in the bitcoin network.

Also read Bitcoin Core Releases New Update.

What Is SegWit?

The word SegWit stands for Segregated Witness. The word “Witness” refers to the transaction signature. So the term SegWit loosely defines the segregation of transaction signatures across multiple blocks in a blockchain. The SegWit feature enables the bitcoin network to separate out the transaction signatures (Witnesses) from the entire transactional data. This further helps the miners in placing those signatures outside the traditional block structure.

The use of SegWit not only streamlines the transactional storage, it has its own set of perks and many other benefits. As a matter of fact, SegWit provides many long-term benefits. For instance, It also creates room for adding new features, resolves the malleability issues and increases the capacity as well as the overall efficiency of the network. Some major benefits of SegWit are listed below.

• Dealing With Malleability Issues

Transaction Malleability had been a major problem in the bitcoin network for years. There have been many attempts to deal with the transaction malleability issues but we didn’t get an effective cure. Partly because none of those previous solutions took on the root of the problem. Until now. SegWit can prove to be an effective solution in this context. The segregation of transaction signatures allows the transaction generating software to calculate the txid (transaction identifier) without referring to the transaction signatures. In this way, it eliminates of the potential threats of unwanted transactions.

• High Scalability

The SegWit features increases the scalability of the Bitcoin network up to great extent as it moves the transaction data out of the traditional block structure and places it into multiple blocks. This further increases the overall capacity of the network and creates room for adding new features.

The announcement made by Electrum to support SegWit in the next update of its bitcoin wallet has sparked the speculations of the latter rendering support for the Lighting Network in the near future. The Lightning Network is an incredibly fast blockchain payment system based on Smart Contracts. To this, the Electrum team rubbishes the rumors and states that it has no plans of doing that as of now. However, the company has buckled up to make this wallet available on the iOS App Store as well.