🗓 [Analysis] Bitcoin’s tech trends of 2018: what this year brought us - Aaron van Wirdum

In part one of a two-part series Aaron van Wirdum reflects on Segregated Witness and the Lightning Network, two of the biggest tech topics in Bitcoin ($BTC) during 2018.

Segregated Witness, or SegWit, was a controversial soft fork activated in August 2017 that aimed to enable second layer protocols. Adoption was slow at first, with less than 15 percent of transactions using the feature. While this has grown to around 40 percent it is still lower than some had expected by this point. On top of SegWit adoption the bech32 address format, which requires less data and therefore leads to cheaper fees, saw its first non-trivial adoption.

Lightning Network was one of the most anticipated debuts of the year, though it is still technically in a testing phase. Lightning is a second layer solution which allows for noticeably cheaper and faster transactions on top of the bitcoin network. Throughout the year a bevy of applications have been built on the network and adoption has continued to grow. Developers continue to flesh out and build the underlying codebase to support new features and traffic in the future.