Gemini,one of the leading US-based exchanges, has unrolled a full service for SegWit addresses, the market operator
announced on its blog. The Gemini exchange has chosen to offer full support for this type of addresses to ensure lighter transaction load, as well as more security.
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“Our choice to use native SegWit addresses was based on block space savings as well as safety concerns. Specifically, native SegWit addresses work only
on the Bitcoin blockchain — they do not work for other cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, however, cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin can be sent to
a legacy (non-native SegWit) address, which can cause loss of funds,”, explained Gemini software engineer Brian KimJohnson.
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SegWit is an approach allowing the miners to load up lighter transactions where the digital signature of the transaction is stored separately from other
transaction data. Other market operators so far have offered only partial SegWit support.
SegWit is supported by more than 9,000 Bitcoin Core nodes, as well as other minor version nodes, shows
CoinDance data.
The SegWit update was contentious as a form of scaling, leading to offers of further scaling the network by adding larger blocks. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) abandoned
the SegWith approach, instead choosing to scale through block size. The adoption of SegWit toward the end of 2017 also led to a gradual lowering of fees,
reaching recent lows around $0.05.
Gemini is one of the relatively minor exchanges in terms of volumes, but an important fiat entry point, due to its fully legalized status. Gemini also
earned a BitLicense for operating in the state of New York.
The exchange carries a trading volume of around $13 million per day, much smaller compared to crypto-only exchanges. The market operator is attempting
to stand out as an exchange targeted to mainstream investors. The Gemini Dollar (GUSD) is also trying to break out as one of the more usable stablecoins,
although with a relatively small supply of around 62 million coins.
