Major Crypto Wallet Provider Reaches A Record Of Over 41.5M Users But Still No SegWit in Sight

Blockchain.com has reached a record of more than 40 million wallet users, 41,527,053, to be exact, as of August 27, 2019.

Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency information service and cryptocurrency wallet for Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Ethereum (ETH). Launched in 2011, it provides data on recent mined blocks, transactions, and charts, among other statistics on Bitcoin economy.

The cryptocurrency wallet service provided by this website has seen a constant uptrend over the last 8 years and continues to rise still.

Blockchain Wallet Users, Source: blockchain.com

However, these wallet does not support Segwit.

Segregated Witness (SegWit) was first presented by developer Peter Wiulle in December 2015 at the Scaling Bitcoin conference and was activated on Bitcoin on August 23, 2017, since then 25.2 million Blockchain.com’s wallet has been created.

Aimed at Bitcoin’s scaling problem, this protocol upgrade changes the way the data is stored. Due to the maximum block size being 1MB, the number of transactions that Bitcoin can process is restricted to about 7 per second.

SegWit tackled this issue by increasing the block size limit by removing the signature from Bitcoin transactions. This removal of certain parts (signatures) of a transaction then frees up space that can be used to add more transactions of a blockchain.

SegWit adoption reached its highest level at 45.8% on May 25, 2019, but has dropped down seen. Currently, it is below 40%.

Bitcoin Segwit Adoption, Source: charts.woobull.com

This slow adoption to a large extent is attributed to Blockchain.com which is yet to support SegWit.

Blockchain.com conducts a total of approximately 75,000 daily on-chain transactions — not SegWit supported — that accounts for more than 20% of all Bitcoin transactions, which are overpaying on BTC transaction fees.

Why no SegWit support?

To a large extent, it’s because, like any soft fork, those bitcoin network participants that haven’t upgraded to SegWit can still follow the same network. As such, exchanges and business have put off the adoption despite the low-fee advantage it brings when sending Bitcoin payments.

These companies might not care about millions of dollars their users are paying in Bitcoin fees but once Bitcoin price reaches a new high, they might feel the burn.

…before the hostile Core replies come: yes I support SW. Yes we are ready for it. And yes I've encouraged others:)

— Peter Smith (@OneMorePeter) January 31, 2017

However, back in 2017, Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.com said that they were in support of SegWit and “ready for it,” though now after about two and a half years there nothing showing their agreement for the same.

“It took a few years to go from single address wallets (you had to manually generate new addresses) to hierarchical deterministic wallets. Maybe give it another 12-18 months?,” replied, George Mandrik former Users Operations at Blockchain on the latest data.

Earlier this year, Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of crypto exchange Gemini said that retrofitting exchange wallets was a “very tricky” procedure that requires a new hot wallet to be built “from the ground up.”

Gemini, however, actually delivered on its promise by adding full SegWit support in April. As for Blockchain.com, it would suffice to say there seems to be no intention for the same, for now.