Slow but steady wins the race: Coinbase to add batched Bitcoin transactions

The recent spike in bitcoin prices and the skyrocketing number of daily outputs has had a direct impact on the transaction fees and the congestion of the mempool.

After more than a year since Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, claimed that his team was working on batching transactions, the young entrepreneur recently stated that the feature will be added within the next few months.

In a twitter thread, Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill, pointed out that the bitcoin mempool, which is where pending transactions are held, has seen a number of transaction spikes that do not clear out overnight, which could be related to traffic between exchanges.

Although the number of transactions in the mempool is significantly lower than in December 2017 when its size reached 135 million bytes and transaction fees rose to $50, an important percentage of the available space is being consumed by exchanges that are not optimizing their transactions.

Kotliar called out Coinbase for not batching their transactions even though in 2018 the exchange said and it was "Actively working" on it.

He also mentioned BitMEX, for putting 4MB of unoptimized transactions on the blockchain on a daily basis.

Every day at 9.15 AM ET they dump ~4 MB of just comically unoptimized withdrawal transactions.

As the twitter thread gained popularity, Armstrong saw the opportunity to clarify that the company had been working on getting other milestones accomplished, but the implementation of batched transaction will be coming soon.

Batched transactions should be coming out in a few months.

After SegWit was integrated into BTC via soft fork on August 2017, to allow more transactions to fit in a block, the firm took more than seven months to enable SegWit transactions on the platform.