The long-awaited Taproot softfork that aims to make Bitcoin more private, secure, and scalable is finally activated.
The first bitcoin upgrade in four years has just gone live. It is a rare moment of consensus among stakeholders, and it’s a big deal for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. The Taproot update means greater transaction privacy and efficiency – and crucially, it will unlock the potential for smart contracts, which can be used to eliminate middlemen from transactions.
“Taproot matters, because it opens a breadth of opportunity for entrepreneurs interested in expanding bitcoin’s utility,” said Alyse Killeen, founder and managing partner of bitcoin-focused venture firm Stillmark.
Taproot brings Schnorr Signatures to reduce some of the burdens on the network while enhancing simplicity, efficiency, and security. It creates a sort of master key to summarize a set of signatures in a single one. This makes it possible to perform multi-signature multi-input transactions (UTXI) a lot easier, faster, and cheaper.
Additionally, Taproot aims to improve Bitcoin’s scripting language through the concept of Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST). This opens the door for smart contract capabilities on the network, thus leading to even greater adoption.
“It (MAST) can help make smart contracts more efficient and private by only revealing the relevant parts of the contract when spending,” according to Taproot.watch, a dedicated website for the upgrade managed by BTC developer Hampus Sjöberg.
Since Bitcoin was created, its network has undergone numerous community-driven hard and soft forks. While the Taproot upgrade is yet to prove its worth in time to come, the Lightning Network continues to attain new heights.
In fact, this time represents the most visible innovation shift in the history of Bitcoin as the community is happy jumping toward the coming upgrade. Expanding further, as we are all waiting for the roll-out, many people believe that this upgrade will influence Bitcoin price positively.
