BitGo enables sending to SegWit compatible Bech32 addresses

BitGo, the Palo Alto-based digital asset trust company has announced that it will now support sending transactions to Bech32 addresses, while also supporting generation of native SegWit addresses on Litecoin. According to the announcement revealed by BitGo’s software engineer Murch on the official BitGo Blog, when sending transactions, “passing the parameter addressType: ‘p2wsh’ will send change to Native SegWit change addresses.” The blog added,

“Native SegWit receive addresses can be generated via the API by specifying the derivation chain code 20 for new addresses.”

BitGo had previously enabled the generation of Native SegWit addresses from the BitGo V2 API, following which users were enabled to send and receive funds on the Bitcoin network. Murch tweeted,

Bech32

Bech32 is a new Bitcoin address format specified by BIP 0173. Since Bech32 addresses are SegWit compatible, transactions do not need extra space to put SegWit in the P2SH address. This address format was first publicly proposed on March 20, 2017.

A few months later, on 24 August, SegWit soft fork’s lock-in happened and more than two years later, these addresses have witnessed a rise in their adoption, despite an initial setback when well-known exchanges had stayed away from implementing this feature for its users, mostly due to a lack of incentive in migrating from their entire system. However, according to the latest statistics on the Bech32 adoption page p2sh.info, Bitcoin stored in Bech32 addresses are gradually on the rise.

Source: p2sh.info | Bech32 Outputs