Coinbase to Integrate SegWit: What It Means for You

investopedia.com:

Coinbase customers may see some changes to their cryptocurrency wallets and transactions in the weeks to come. The largest cryptocurrency brokerage and exchange in the world announced this week that it would officially complete the process of integrating Segregated Witness (SegWit) by the end of February.

According to a report by Coin Journal, this is the final step in a process initiated in December 2017, when Coinbase vice president and general manager Dan Romero indicated to investors and users that the exchange would adopt the scaling solution protocol sometime in 2018. The question for many Coinbase users, though, is how this will impact their transactions and cryptocurrency holdings.

The implementation of the SegWit protocol, an oft-debated measure introduced as a means of scaling bitcoin to meet increased demand, is expected to decrease congestion in the cryptocurrency's network. The result is that transaction times could be faster, and users may see a substantial reduction in transaction fees as well.

At this point, the bitcoin blockchain is able to process about 237,000 transactions per day, with fees below $0.1. This could be a result of the recent slump in bitcoin prices, which has been linked with a halving of bitcoin transaction volume since January.

Proponents of SegWit believe that it will help to scale bitcoin even in periods when the price of the cryptocurrency is thriving and transaction volume is significantly up. (See also: SegWit (Segregated Witness).)

(Infographic: PricewaterhouseCoopers)

Dan Romero said Coinbase has considered the implications of adopting SegWit very carefully. Coinbase has already been criticized for its failure to integrate SegWit. «In terms of our engineering priorities,