Litecoin’s SegWit usage reaches new all-time-high at 75%

A little over two years ago, Segregated Witness was initiated on the Litecoin network. After a stretch where the technology was only moderately adopted, flatlining at around 50% for most of this year for instance, SegWit usage has been on the rise since August. Litecoin’s SegWit usage has now peaked at 75%. According to data from Blockchair, the all-time-high for Litecoin SegWit usage was recorded on 11 November, 2018. In the aforementioned instance, usage was recorded to be 66%.

The news was welcomed by many in the Litecoin community, with a leading Litecoin core developer, Loshan, commenting,

“Litecoin led the way forward in adopting the bloat-reducing tech: SegWit. In the future, we hope to lead adoption in cutting-edge blockchain technology.”

Earlier this month, Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee had celebrated Litecoin’s SegWit usage on the network surpassing that of Bitcoin’s.

Litecoin SegWit usage overtakes Bitcoin and nears 50%.

Thanks @Blockchair for compiling this data. Check them out. They have a very cool SegWit-aware block explorer for Litecoin. https://t.co/QxC1H4Os7C

— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) September 7, 2018

While there was quite a lot of controversy surrounding the topic, especially when it was first introduced, Segregated Witness has been able to fix the malleability issue on the network, eventually paving the way for layer-2 scaling via the Lightning Network. And even though the maximum block size is still limited to ~2.5MB, by separating out the witness from a transaction into a segregated space, the effective block size has increased to 4MB.

In February 2018, when Coinbase began support for SegWit, adoption rate jumped from 9% to 28%. The recent spike in adoption could be linked to some other large service on the network having silently upgraded their systems.