What Is Taproot?
Taproot is a major Bitcoin protocol upgrade activated in November 2021 that enhances privacy, efficiency, and smart contract flexibility. It introduces Schnorr signatures and enables more complex Bitcoin scripts to appear identical to simple transactions on the blockchain.
Privacy Through Uniformity
With Taproot, complex multi-signature setups and smart contracts look the same as regular single-signature transactions. This makes it impossible for outside observers to distinguish between different transaction types, significantly improving privacy.
Key Improvements
Enhanced Privacy
By making all transactions look similar on-chain, Taproot obscures the details of complex spending conditions, protecting user privacy while maintaining Bitcoin's transparency for verification purposes.
Lower Fees & Better Efficiency
Schnorr signatures enable signature aggregation, reducing the data size of multi-signature transactions. This results in lower fees and more efficient use of block space.
Taproot builds on SegWit and works alongside Miniscript to enable more sophisticated Bitcoin applications while keeping the network secure and private. It represents a significant step forward in Bitcoin's evolution.
Quick Facts
- •Activated in November 2021
- •Enables MAST (Merkelized Alternative Script Trees)
- •All transactions look similar on-chain
- •Lower fees for complex scripts