SegWit was implemented in 2017 and has a deep history in the blocksize war, causing divides in the community dating back to 2015. Although this war may be over, it is still fairly recent. This conflict was resolved 4 years ago by hardfork, and the network continues to move forward.
Bitcoin has come a long ways since 2017, and SegWit has given Bitcoin the ability to implement new features and protocols, such as the Lightning Network and Taproot. Not only that, but SegWit transactions are up to 40% more efficient when compared to older transactions. This means that as wallets continue to upgrade to SegWit addresses, the fees per payment should drop significantly.
Over the last 6 months, SegWit adoption has increased by 35%. As well, the number of transactions to segwit transactions increased while the fees have dropped significantly.
It has taken over 4 years for SegWit to get to where it is today. This means wallet upgrades and user adoption. For some this is automatic when creating a new wallet, and others need to transfer funds to a SegWit address. But in the end users are incentivised to upgrade considering they spend less on fees. Below is a chart of SegWit spending Payments, which is the number of UTXO spends that are SegWit. This shows more accurately how many people are using these transaction types.
Currently sitting at 84%, SegWit payments had an extremely high adoption rate all things considered. As the network moves forward, we will see some changes taking place that could be years from now. Taproot was just activated and when compared to how quickly SegWit was adopted, it may be more or less the same. But no one really knows since this is all very new. The one thing that is certain, is that incentives drive the network, and there are many more to come.
