Bitcoin users upgrade to P2WPKH inputs, rising to 76%

Something boring but important is happening on Bitcoin. The share of transactions using P2WPKH inputs, the native SegWit format that makes Bitcoin cheaper and faster to use, has climbed from roughly 55% to 75.7% in just a few months.

No protocol upgrade forced this. Users and services simply kept updating their software, one wallet at a time, until the network quietly crossed a threshold that makes the old way of transacting look increasingly obsolete.

What P2WPKH actually means (and why you should care)

Bitcoin transactions come in different “flavors” depending on how they structure their data. P2WPKH, short for Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash, is the native Segregated Witness format that was introduced when SegWit activated in August 2017 via a soft fork at block 481,824. It was standardized under BIP-84 and uses Bech32 addresses, the ones that start with “bc1q.”

P2WPKH inputs average around 27 virtual bytes for witness data. That translates to roughly a 38% size reduction compared to legacy formats for a typical transaction.

There was an intermediate step called wrapped SegWit, or P2SH-P2WPKH. It served as a compatibility shim that let older wallets interact with SegWit-enabled ones, but it’s now declining as more users go fully native.

As of early 2026, approximately 85% to 90% of all Bitcoin transactions include at least one SegWit input. P2WPKH accounts for the lion’s share, estimated between 60% and 70% of total inputs by the latest tracking metrics.

Why now, and why it’s happening organically

Major exchanges, hardware wallet manufacturers, and mobile wallet developers have been steadily updating their default address types over the past year. When a platform switches its default from a legacy or wrapped SegWit address to a native SegWit address, every new user automatically starts transacting in the more efficient format.

Meanwhile, Taproot adoption, Bitcoin’s newer upgrade that uses P2TR addresses starting with “bc1p,” remains comparatively modest at between 15% and 20%. Taproot usage tends to spike around specific use cases like Ordinals inscriptions rather than general-purpose payments.

What this means for investors and the broader network

With Bitcoin blocks capped at 4 million weight units, more efficient transactions mean more activity can fit into each block before fee pressure ratchets up. During periods of high demand, the difference between a legacy transaction and a native SegWit transaction can be substantial in dollar terms.

The fact that this adoption is happening organically, driven by service providers and users rather than contentious forks or top-down mandates, suggests the Bitcoin ecosystem is functioning as designed. P2WPKH is nearly a decade old at this point, and Taproot offers meaningful privacy and scripting improvements that remain underutilized at 15% to 20% adoption.

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