Global neobank and fintech company Revolut is now compatible with Segregated Witness (SegWit) addresses for Bitcoin ($BTC) transactions. The integration comes with on-chain withdrawal and receipt options.
With a user base of over 30 million, the development comes off as an attempt to push the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin. It seeks to make Bitcoin transactions more efficient and convenient.
Revolut users will now benefit from lower transaction fees and faster confirmation times. SegWit is a technology that changed the way Bitcoin stores transaction data in the blockchain. It improved the scalability and efficiency of the Bitcoin network.
SegWit was introduced as a soft fork on the Bitcoin network in 2017 as an improvement over the then-blockchain. It reduced the size needed to store transactions in a block and by separating the transaction signatures from Bitcoin transactions, allowing more transactions to fit within one block. This efficiently resulted in smooth and rapid Bitcoin transactions.
Along with the SegWit integration, Revolut has also allowed on-chain withdrawals and receipts. This offers users the option to manage their Bitcoin funds directly within the app.
Other than Revolut, various other platforms have added SegWit support too. Last year, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, announced a similar integration. The move aimed to improve Bitcoin transaction efficiency, allowing its users to withdraw or send their Bitcoin holdings to SegWit addresses.
Crypto exchange Coinbase was one of the first ones to initiate the integration process for SegWit. The implementation of the protocol was aimed at scaling Bitcoin to meet its increased demand while decreasing congestion in the cryptocurrency’s network. This helped in making the transaction time faster and offered a substantial reduction in transaction fees as well.
Revolut reigns as a leading financial technology company that offers banking services in more than 200 countries and regions. Revolut Bank UAB is licensed and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania within the European Union. It boasts over 30 million personal users and 500K business users. Given these figures, it has proved itself to be at the forefront in implementing cutting edge technologies and driving the adoption of cryptocurrencies.
In other news, researchers at Florida International University have come up with an innovative solution to facilitate Bitcoin transactions offline. In an approach called LNMesh, they harnessed the power of the Lightning Network, which is a layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain known for its high speed and cost-effectiveness.
The process makes use of local mesh networks where nodes are connected directly via Bluetooth and WiFi, bypassing the need for an internet connection. Their paper further explained: “The Lightning Network protocol allows for the settlement of such payments offline as the payments are off-chain and not recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. Therefore, as long as nodes can communicate with each other via wireless technologies such as WiFi or Bluetooth, they can perform offline LN payments.”
The model is different from existing asynchronous payment methods, where an online node can send payments to an offline node. LNMesh goes beyond this by demonstrating the ability to make payments even when all nodes are offline. This innovation could emerge as an integral point in revolutionising the accessibility of cryptocurrencies around the globe.
