• Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX has adopted SegWit, resulting in transaction fee savings for users

BitMEX has announced that they have enabled withdrawal support for Bech32 Segregated Witness (SegWit) addresses, although for deposits customers must still send to a regular multi-signature address. This upgrade reduces transaction fees for customers, since SegWit transactions use less data than regular transactions. BitMEX calculates that customers will save 37%.

However, the caveat is that the initial withdrawal from BitMEX will not result in any savings for customers, but when a customer spends their Bitcoins next time they will save the 37%, if they send the Bitcoins to a Bech32 address.

BitMEX is the largest Bitcoin derivatives exchange with billions of USD of trading volume every day. Therefore, it is possible that BitMEX adopting SegWit could lead to significantly less load on the Bitcoin blockchain, which would reduce transaction fees across the network, although this remains to be seen. Also, BitMEX adopting SegWit shows that the upgrade is becoming mainstream, and increases the chances that more exchanges and crypto companies will adopt it, which could lead to the Bitcoin blockchain being more scalable.

BitMEX is planning on implementing native SegWit for deposits at some point in the future, which will further reduce strain on the Bitcoin blockchain.

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