Bitcoin exploded in 2020, and the community saw an increase from around a little over $3,000 to now eyeing yet another high of $30,000. As the world’s largest cryptocurrency gains more and more recognition, in yet another positive news for the ecosystem, Bitcoin just received a seal of approval from Binance for one of its most anticipated technological upgrades.
According to the latest development, BTC’s Taproot update appears to be set for activation, with more than 91% of the hash rate have extended support for it. The latest news was revealed by Alejandro De La Torre, VP of Poolin who congratulated the BTC community.
It was Gregory Maxwell who first proposed Taproot back in January 2018. And this upgrade is perhaps the most anticipated soft-fork in Bitcoin since SegWit was activated in 2016.
A quick primer: Taproot is essentially aimed to upgrade BTC’s smart contract capabilities, enabling the network users to send smart contracts disguised as regular transactions on the network. The goal is to modify the way Bitcoin’s scripts operate in a bid to improve privacy, scalability, and security by implementing a new digital signature scheme called, Schnorr. Implementing the upgrade requires a “soft fork” of Bitcoin’s code.
It was earlier seen that Binance Pool, which happens to be a recent entrant to the Bitcoin space, had not responded for the activation of the upgrade. Prior to the approval, out of the major mining pools, Binance Pool was the only one to withhold support.
Despite launching in just April of 2020, it turned to be the third-largest pool controlling over 11% of the hash rate, and hence its vote on the matter was crucial. Apart from a few smaller Bitcoin mining pools, the prominent ones had already given the green light to this upgrade.
Earlier in October 2020, the codebase for the smart-contract upgrade to BTC’s blockchain was reportedly merged into the BTC Core library, nearly a month after BTC core dev, Pieter Wuille created a pull request to merge the feature. Despite the fact that the finalization of the code for Taproot was the biggest upgrade in years, the Bitcoin developers were divided as to how to go about with its activation.