The code for the scaling feature Segregated Witness will be added to the version 0.13.0 in the upcoming weeks. Its activation, however, will not happen until at least one more update of the Core.

By adding the new code to the next version of the client prior to its activation, the developers aim at smoother and safer final implementation of the Segregated Witness. For now, to make software testing more available to a larger number of developers, the Core team plans to activate the new feature on the bitcoin testnet in regression testing mode.

The inclusion of the SegWit is considered the most significant code change in the new Core version. Apart from that, the upcoming release will also provide such features as fee filtering, which improves the connection between nodes and peers, and compact block relay, which reduces the amount of bandwidth required to deliver new blocks to full nodes.

The first time the Segregated Witness concept was presented to the public in December 2015, at the “Consensus” meeting of the bitcoin community leaders in Hong Kong. They discussed possible ways to resolve the issue of the bitcoin scalability without any risk to the network.

SegWit is a soft fork, which means that after implementation, only miners will be required to make an immediate software upgrade. All other users can join in whenever they want without any risk of disconnection from the network. SegWit is expected to temporarily solve the block size problem, freeing 1 MB of additional space within a block. The decision to implement SegWit was the answer of the bitcoin core developers to the scalability crisis and disagreement in the community over the block size.

Advocates of the immediate increase of the block size via a hard fork, known as Bitcoin Classic group, claim that SegWit is far too complex a way to scale the system, many of them accusing the Core team of ignoring the interests of bitcoin users.

Lyudmila Brus