An introduction to SegWit

What is SegWit?

SegWit (Segregated Witness) improves the transaction throughput on a blockchain network by separating a transaction into two sections. The first part contains the wallet addresses of the sender and receiver and the second part contains transaction signatures (witness data).

SegWit removes the witness data from the main block, therefore greatly reducing transaction size. This increases the amount of transactions that can be included in a block of the same size and the capacity of the Bitcoin network.

Interestingly, the first cryptocurrency to use SegWit was Litecoin and not Bitcoin.