Taproot is the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) upgrade since SegWit (Segregated Witness). A slew of new features have been rolled out, including support for complex transactions involving multiple signatures, as well as the ability to make Lightning channels look like normal Bitcoin transactions.
Since its activation in November 2021, Taproot’s adoption hasn’t exactly taken off, despite its benefits. Data available at transactionfee.info shows that around 0.37% of all Bitcoin transactions currently use Taproot, compared to 85% for SegWit, which was enabled in August 2017.
However, bitcoin developers who spoke with Cryptonews.com say they are confident that the use of Taproot will gradually increase over time, just as it has with SegWit. And while no other major upgrades for Bitcoin are planned anytime soon, a large number of minor improvements are in the works.
Learning from SegWit
Several commentators, including the chief investment officer ofArcane Assets, Eric Wallnoted recently that Taproot adoption remains low.
From 0.0048% of transactions using Taproot on November 14, the day of its launch, the total percentage has only increased very modestly.
Additional information on Bitcoin Wiki shows that the implementation of P2TR (pay-to-Taproot) exits by Bitcoin wallets, exchanges and clients also remains low.
For example, out of the 54 exchanges listed on the wiki, at the time of writing, only two have enabled P2TR transactions so far. Of the 34 software wallets, only five have adopted Taproot, while four plan to adopt the upgrade soon.
As for hardware wallets, three out of 15 have enabled P2TR transactions, and another three plan to do so. Nevertheless, this state of affairs raises the question of whether most people really care about Bitcoin becoming a more complex blockchain protocol, or whether they prefer it to remain a mere investment vehicle and/or store of value.
Still, Bitcoin developers say they strongly believe that Taproot adoption and usage will accelerate over time.
“I think it will still be some time before we see the entire industry adopting Taproot, but I’m optimistic that adoption will continue,” said Bryan Bishopco-founder of Custodia Bank and contributor to Bitcoin Core.
This positive perspective seems to be shared by coders: one developer – who asked to remain anonymous – also points out that adopting Taproot is not just a push of a button, but requires the prior adoption of other standards. .
“Remember, SegWit arrived in 2017 and adoption took years after that. It takes time for wallet developers and others to add support for Taproot and related technologies, like using bech32 descriptor and address wallets,” he told Cryptonews.com.
This is an important point, and on the positive side, the absolute number of Taproot transactions has increased steadily since activation in November. From 30 releases on November 14, the number has increased to 1,940 per day (at the time of writing), with entries rising from 13 to 1,426.
It’s relatively easy to post big percentage gains when you’re starting from zero, but those numbers went up by 6,366% and 10,869%, respectively. That’s good news, especially since integrating Taproot is a more involved process than it first appears.
It should be noted, however, that four months after SegWit was activated, transactions had increased from 0 to 16%. One must therefore consider the possibility that the wider Bitcoin community and ecosystem may not embrace Taproot as enthusiastically as they have embraced SegWit.
Arguably, some of what Taproot offers — like smart contracts and enhanced privacy — competes with other solutions. internet computer (ICP) is for example being integrated with Bitcoin. It is the same for Stacks, a platform that aims to make Bitcoin programmable, and which will allow the launch of non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Continued Development of Bitcoin
However important Taproot is in the short term, Bitcoin continues to evolve, despite the impression – largely fueled by criticisms of its consensus mechanism – that it remains unchangeable.
“A lot of Bitcoin Core development (i.e. what I can talk about) is not so much about adding features as doing behind the scenes work to find and fix bugs and make the software, the more robust, decentralized, secure and resource-efficient protocol and network. These aspects, along with fungibility and privacy, are ongoing concerns,” the anonymous developer said.
The developer also notes that the Bitcoin development community is undertaking ongoing, longer-term work on a wide variety of new technical features. These include Miniscript, BIP324 encrypted p2p, Erlay packet relay, as well as work to separate the various components of the large code base, especially the critical consensus code.
Additionally, “Bitcoin Core v23 will be released soon and contains changes to improve network robustness, add necessary support for nodes to use CJDNS network in addition to Tor and I2P with IPv4/6,” he added. .
In other words, the fact that Bitcoin updates have not yet been used to their full potential shows that, Bitcoin seems to be one of the most deceptively dynamic cryptocurrencies in the industry.
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