Leading bitcoin startups including BitPay, Blockchain.info, Circle, KnCMiner, Bitnet, Xapo and BitGo have come to a consensus to implement Gavin Andresen’s BIP 101, and to expand the current block size to 8 megabytes, after a long discussion with core developers, miners and the companies’ technical teams. A statement of their support was posted on the Blockchain.info blog today signed by Stephen Pair, Peter Smith, Jeremy Allaire, Sean Neville, Sam Cole, John McDonnell, Wences Casares and Mike Belshe.

“We support the implementation of BIP101,” the companies say in the letter. “We have found Gavin’s arguments on both the need for larger blocks and the feasibility of their implementation – while safeguarding Bitcoin’s decentralization – to be convincing. BIP101 and 8MB blocks are already supported by a majority of the miners and we feel it is time for the industry to unite behind this proposal.”

This announcement follows a similar statement released in June by five leading Chinese bitcoin companies, F2Pool, AntPool, BW, BTCChina and Huobi. In this statement, the companies explain their support for 8 megabyte blocks but raise concerns about any larger sizes. These mining pools currently represent over 60 percent of the entire Bitcoin network.

This letter of support follows last week’s announcement by Stephen Pair, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, that the company supports the “Increase maximum block size” or the BIP 101 proposal by Andresen and the merger of BIP 101 into Bitcoin Core.

“Currently, the block size limit is hard-coded to 1mb, which constrains overall transaction throughput. BIP101 proposes to increase that limit to 8mb after January of 2016 when a supermajority (>75) of the blocks being mined indicate they support the increase. The limit on block size will double every two years after that until it reaches 8gb in 2036,” Pair wrote on Medium.

The post continues, “We believe BIP 101 will safeguard Bitcoin’s decentralized nature while providing a reliable, immediate path toward greater network throughput, and we would like to express our support for merging BIP 101 into Bitcoin Core.”

Photo George Redgrave / Flickr (CC)