Clarifying SegWit adoption
I’ve been asked by a number of people these last two weeks to clarify SegWit activation across a variety of blockchains and when it occurred. I don’t know why but it seems to be a hot topic again.
This is relatively simple to find on your own on a PC (Though I’m aware a lot of people prefer to use just mobile for their cryptocurrency interactions). You can download the Core Wallet for each respective blockchain, bring up the Debug menu, and type “getblockchaininfo”
This will bring up a bunch of useful information about the blockchain, along with the block details for when each upgrade was activated:
For comparison, Bitcoin originally started SegWit signalling November 15, 2016, and it was activated almost a whole year later on the 24th of August 2017.
NOTE: When originally written, I only included 4, however it was pointed out to me that Monacoin actually activated second, and so it has now been included in this list.
So, here’s 4x blockchains that I’m aware of that activated SegWit prior to Bitcoin:
5th place: Litecoin
Signalling start timestamp: 1485561600
Start time: Saturday, January 28, 2017 12:00:00 AM
Block activation: 1201536
Activation date: 2017–05–10 16:03
Litecoin was the last of the pre-BTC upgrade pack. Regardless of the common narrative by both Charlie Lee and Litecoin users in-general at that time touting themselves as being a ‘testbed’ for Bitcoin (We have BTC testnet for this), at this point they were simply late to the activation game. Despite only having 4–5 pools needing to upgrade to provide a 70% majority, it took Litecoin 102 days to activate SegWit. Still, they beat Bitcoin by 2 months, so kudos to them.
4th place: Vertcoin
Signalling start timestamp: 1488326400
Start time: Wednesday, March 1, 2017 12:00:00 AM
Block activation: 713664
Activation Date: 2017–05–07 09:40
Activating 3.5 days ahead of Litecoin, Vertcoin reached SegWit upgrade consensus on their blockchain after just 67 days. Originally forked from the Litecoin codebase, Vertcoin have maintained a more (pro)active development since inception, with miners and users being more likely to be aware of the upgrade, and this showed with Vertcoin beating Litecoin to SegWit activation.
3rd place: DigiByte
Signalling start timestamp: 1490355345
Start time: Friday, March 24, 2017 11:35:45 AM
Block activation: 4394880
Activation Date: 2017–04–28 16:21
Activating a whole two weeks ahead of Litecoin, despite having a far more distributed and decentralized mining, the DigiByte blockchain enabled SegWit, being the first blockchain in the Top 100 in Market Cap to do-so. DigiByte was also quite fast to activate it after a mere 35 days, despite it’s later start-time and the most independent mining pools required to make up the activation threshold. This is mostly due to several dedicated members of the team contacting pools etc individually to ensure timely upgrades.
2nd place: Monacoin
Signalling start timestamp: 1488931200
Start time: Wednesday, March 8, 2017 12:00:00 AM
Block activation: 977760
Activation Date: 2017–04–27 10:29
Monacoin was a lesser known blockchain in the western world, given it’s primary focus was around being a “Japan coin”, based on a Japanese ASCII art character.
Despite it’s regional-specific appeal, and moderate levels of mining centralization dominated by just two pools out of China, Monacoin was an early adopter of SegWit in late April 2017.
1st place: Groestlcoin
Signalling start timestamp: 1484956800
Start time: Saturday, January 21, 2017 12:00:00 AM
Block activation: 1439424
Date: 2017–01–24 14:50
Groestlcoin had a 2016 block retarget period, from Block 1435392, and achieved 95% lock-in from Block 1437408. This lock-in occurred a mere 35 hours after signalling commencement, with activation occurring in just 3 and a half days!
Unfortunately this ability to activate it so insanely quickly is due to the mining centralization at the time (Overwhelmingly mined by Suprnova), which is still a weak-point for GRS to this day. However, they were the first to activate SegWit by a VERY long margin, and that’s an achievement in and of itself, for which they should be commended.
So, well done Groestlcoin on being the first blockchain to activate SegWit in January 2017, a whopping 7 months prior to Bitcoin.
