The Taproot soft fork for Bitcoin (BTC) has locked in, as per Taproot.Watch, and is now set to be activated in November on block number 709,632.
What Happened: The threshold of more than 90% of all blocks signaling support for Taproot was crossed Sunday morning. This meant that at least 1,815 of 2,016 blocks within a 2-week difficulty period signaled support for the upgrade.
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Taproot is expected to improve the privacy and fungibility of Bitcoin, alongside lowering transaction fees and incorporate efficiency improvements.
See Also: How To Buy Bitcoin
The soft fork will be the most significant upgrade to Bitcoin’s blockchain since SegWit, a soft fork activated in 2017.
As part of Taproot, the existing elliptic curve digital signature algorithm of Bitcoin will be replaced with Schnorr signatures, considered to be more secure, privacy-oriented, and better-suited for multisignature transactions by proponents.
The 5-month period between the locking and the implementation of the actual upgrade allows miners the time to upgrade to the Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 software.
Price Action: Bitcoin traded 3.3% lower at $35,900.28 at press time on Sunday.
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