Crypto Markets Experience Slight Uptick After Week Of Lows
The crypto markets are seeing a slight upward trend Saturday, March 31, after , according to data from .
(BTC) is above $7,000 again, trading for around $7,140 and up over 2 percent over a 24 hour period to press time. BTC saw a 24 hr low today of $6,623, and is currently trading 8 percent higher.
(ETH) is also in the green, up almost 3 percent over a 24 hour period and trading at around $406 by press time, up from a 24-hour low of $371.
All of the top ten coins listed on are showing positive gains, with (XLM) showing the most growth, over 13.5 percent on the day, trading at an average of $0.21 at press time. Of the top ten, is showing the least growth on the day, still green, but up only 0.16 percent over a 24-hour period.
This week’s market slump has been attributed to , as well as MailChimp’s .
However, the week has also seen some wins for crypto adoption – possibly causing the slight market gains today – as capital Seoul has announced and thus create a friendlier environment for crypto and innovation.
, a country that made the news last month when it was uncovered that its , is also now opening up towards crypto tech adoption, with one of Poland’s largest banks .
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After a development process and even more debate and political struggle, finally on the bitcoin network last week. The protocol upgrade introduced a number of benefits which can enable more advanced second-layer protocols. It also offers a block size limit increase for wallets that utilize the new feature, meaning users can enjoy lower fees and faster confirmation times.
One week in, Segregated Witness has been implemented in several wallets, though overall adoption is off to a bit of a slow start. While many wallets and services prior to the activation that they would be ready for the upgrade, many are taking a bit of a conservative approach when it comes to main-net release, while others have since faced unrelated difficulties that demanded their attention.
So far, hardware wallets are among the first to have jumped on the new opportunity. Both and have fully implemented and enabled Segregated Witness. This is not very surprising: Hardware wallets stand to from SegWit more than most wallets, as it helps to significantly speedup the signing process.
“But we mostly implemented Segregated Witness to help the network first,” Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca told bitcoin Magazine. “The more Segregated Witness transactions are used, the more space there is for everybody. In a way we’re also doing our part to disarm the 2x part of the SegWit2x hard fork.”
Another hardware wallet provider,, also implemented Segregated Witness in its firmware, cofounder and bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli told bitcoin Magazine, but it still requires a compatible desktop app to utilize the feature. This is a work in progress.
Full node wallets like bitcoin Core are also in the process of implementing Segregated Witness. But bitcoin Core developers decided to not include the feature straight away in order to avoid edge-case attacks that become harder to execute as time passes. bitcoin Core will instead release a new version of the software, 0.15.1; this could take another month or two before it’s available.
As for regular wallets, it seems that’s could well be the first to offer the feature.
“It’s days away,” GreenAddress developer Lawrence Nahum told bitcoin Magazine. “We were ready a while back; however, during testing we found that fees were a bit higher in one of our wallets. That’s because some software libraries available now weren’t available when we implemented SegWit. At this point it’s mostly a matter of more testing.”
Most other wallets are also in various stages of implementing the feature, but for various reasons haven’t gotten to the point of release quite yet. In some cases, like and, this had to do with the prioritization of integrating bitcoin Cash into their service; the new cryptocurrency launched unexpectedly only a couple of weeks ago. Similarly, told bitcoin Magazine it has been implementing new features which diverted some time and attention away from SegWit.
Other popular wallets, including (also known as Schildbach’s bitcoin Wallet), , , , as well as webwallet confirmed that they are implementing SegWit, and all told bitcoin Magazine that they expect this should be available soon — though none gave a specific timeframe for it.
