segwit

SegWit, short for “Segregated Witness,” is a Bitcoin protocol upgrade introduced in 2017 to improve scalability and fix transaction malleability. It works by separating (or “segregating”) digital signature data—the “witness” information—from the main part of a transaction. This change reduces the data size of each transaction recorded on the blockchain, allowing more transactions to fit into each block and enabling second-layer scaling solutions like the Lightning Network.