August 28th, 2021 | Updated on March 9th, 2022
SegWit — or Segregated Witness — is the name given to a Bitcoin (BTC) protocol upgrade, which was implemented on Aug. 23, 2017. As in any decentralized blockchain, if Bitcoin’s algorithm needs updating, it’s up to the Bitcoin developers and contributors to agree on how and when to make changes together.
Completed in this way, the SegWit protocol upgrade was designed to help Bitcoin scale and fix some bugs that represented a risk to its trustless characteristic. SegWit is most known for the way it updates how data is stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain.