The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is gearing up for yet its biggest upgrade in four years, Taproot, since the Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade was activated on the network in 2017.
Whereas no specific date has been confirmed as to when the upgrade should be ready for launching on the network’s mainnet, the hard-fork is expected to launch latest December 2021.
Reduced Fees, Increased Security, Increased Speeds
The proposed upgrade is set to improve the network’s scalability and overall interoperability by adding security features on the network through the enhancement of multi-signature (multi-sig) transaction privacy and unlocking the potential for running smart contracts on the coin’s network. According to Devs’, this upgrade is also expected to increase transaction speeds and greatly reduce fees on the Lightning Network.
Essentially, such large upgrades on layer 1 and 2 networks are the result of a series of smaller upgrades by a community of developers and to this end, the Taproot upgrade is also being implemented in phases. According to excerpts from the Github documentation;
“By combining the Schnorr signature scheme with MAST (Merklized Alternative Script Tree) and a new scripting language called Tapscript, Taproot will expand Bitcoin’s smart contract flexibility, while offering more privacy by letting users mask complex smart contracts as a regular bitcoin transaction.”
Bitcoin’s network is faced with a plethora of headwinds including network congestion, high fees, and other complexities which are set to be resolved once this upgrade is over. Currently, the proposed upgrade is still on the discussion table waiting for a speedy trial by miners who are required to upgrade their nodes to confirm that they are in support of Taproot. (At least 90% of the blocks have to be confirmed to lock in the upgrade- at the time of this report, we are 62%)
Bitcoin Massive Growth Inevitable
The proposal is set to bring outstanding capabilities to the Bitcoin platform placing it in stiff competition with other networks such as Ethereum and Cardano which have already launched their upgrades. Ethereum’s EIP-1559 was activated back in August during the London Hard fork seeing the Ether Network migrate from the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) network. Cardano also recently launched their smart contracts upgrade dubbed the Alonzo hard Fork bolstering Cardano’s transaction capabilities by huge margins.
The Whive community applauds and welcomes the Taproot upgrade. Devs at Whive and the larger community are keeping track and actively participating in these developments given that the Whive protocol is built on Bitcoins blockchain layer and utilizes the Lightning Network in sending and receiving its native tokens earned through Whives mining pool.
About Whive
Whive is an open-source & peer-to-peer blockchain protocol that is incentivizing the building of sustainable distributed energy solutions through trustless rewards. The Whive protocol seeks to empower energy-poor communities to actualize this energy potential by using blockchain-based tokenization and distributed computing to trustlessly reward distributed energy adoption.
