Segregated Witness (SegWit) is the name of a soft fork that was carried out on the Bitcoin network which changed the transaction format of the protocol. Segwit separates signature data from transaction data within the blockchain to increase the total amount of data within a specific block. By rearranging the data contained in each block more efficiently, more space is freed up which allows for the inclusion of additional data. SegWit is capable of increasing Bitcoin's block size limit from 1MB to 2MB and was designed to mitigate the blockchain size limitation issues that periodically slow down transaction speeds on the Bitcoin network. This is accomplished by "segregating" the transaction into two segments by removing the unlocking signature's "witness" data from the original portion and appending it as a separate structure at the end of the block.
