BitMEX, the world’s largest exchange in terms of reported volume, has announced its support for Bech32 address format. Users will now be able to withdraw Bitcoin via the native SegWit format.
The exchange announced,
“As of today, BitMEX is delighted to announce that customers can withdraw to all three address formats.”
At press time, BitMEX had also revealed that customers will still need to send BTC via its Pay to Script Hash (P2SH) format addresses, due to its multi-signature wallet feature and the fact that users can only facilitate Bitcoin withdrawals through Bech32 addresses.
The blog post also informed that the current upgrade is part of the exchange’s plan to optimize its Bitcoin wallet and reduce its usage of block weight so that customers are charged with lower transaction fees. One of the main advantages of dedicated support for Bech32 addresses is the fact that users would no longer have to add 20 bytes of overhead while transacting through a non-native wallet using SegWit, hence, generating savings in terms of transaction fees.
The exchange stated,
“Since the savings are generated by the witness discount on the signature/scripts, the more inputs a transaction has, the higher the percentage savings. Therefore larger transactions, with more than one input, will typically experience higher savings.”
The present announcement is a marquee development in the ecosystem as larger exchanges are taking steps to support faster BTC transactions at a reasonable rate with the introduction of SegWit addresses.
In October, Bitfinex had announced a similar upgrade to its exchange platform after extending its support for Bitcoin withdrawals via Bech32 addresses. The functionality put in place at Bitfinex is similar to the one announced by BitMEX. Bitfinex had also highlighted,
“As bech32 addresses only exist on the Bitcoin network, our new support for Bitcoin withdrawals to bech32 addresses removes the possibility of our clients experiencing any cross-chain mix-ups.”
