Veriphi researchers found that cryptocurrency companies and users could save over half a billion dollars in BTC by applying affordable scaling methods.
The Veriphi report states that companies could save 21,131.97 BTC in fees equivalent to $ 195 million at the time of publication if all transactions from January 2012 to June 2020 were sent using the transaction grouping method.
Grouping or "bundling" transactions is a way of sending a transaction to multiple recipients at the same time to reduce the fees for each individual transaction. For example, in March, the American exchange Coinbase began to group BTC withdrawal transactions in order to reduce the load on the Bitcoin blockchain and reduce the size of commissions.
Users could also save 36,685.72 BTC in fees (roughly $ 339 million) if SegWit was used in all transactions from August 2017 to June 2020. In total, the savings of cryptocurrency users and companies would have amounted to 57,817.69 BTC, at the time of publication of the report, the equivalent of $ 534 million.
As a reminder, SegWit was activated on the Bitcoin blockchain in 2017. However, each cryptocurrency service needs to individually add support for this type of transaction. BitPay and Bitstamp are among the last companies in the industry to support the technology.
The slow adoption of SegWit by cryptocurrency services is due to the fact that for many companies adding technology to their platform infrastructure is not a priority initiative. For example, exchanges or online wallets simply pass commission costs onto their customers.
Gustavo Flores, head of research and development at Veriphi, notes that SegWit and batch processing have been around for years. And users of wallets and services could save a lot of money if these technologies were used all this time.
“I saw on the news a couple of months ago that Coinbase started grouping BTC withdrawal transactions. And I thought it happened very late. "Bundling" has been available since 2011 or 2012. We wondered how big the impact of all these companies and users who didn't embrace "packaging" and SegWit? It turned out to be significant, ”said Flores.
In the report, Veriphi recommends that any person or organization responsible for sending a large number of transactions think about ways to save on fees.
"The potential for savings is significant, and those with high transaction volumes should seriously consider using these tools to stay competitive and save money."
According to Bitinfocharts, the average BTC transaction fee today is $ 5.8 - over the past month, the average cost of sending BTC has increased by 525%.