Bitcoin Taproot upgrade is all set to get activated by this Saturday nearly five months after getting locked in nearly five months ago in June. The taproot upgrade is being seen as one of the biggest upgrades on the BTC network in a decades time. The much-awaited upgrade promises to help with privacy, efficiency, and security.
Taproot promises to bring programmable scripting quite similar to Ethereum smart contracts and thus could make way for other ecosystems working on top of it. In today’s time even though Bitcoin is clearly the top crypto asset, its functions are not as vast as smart contract networks such as Ethereum, and Polkadot.
With a focus on privacy, the Taproot upgrade would introduce MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree) which would make it easier to obscure the source of transactions and make the Bitcoin network more privacy-centered. The upgrade would make it difficult for an outsider to differentiate between multi-signature transactions and Lightning Network transactions.
Is Taproot Upgrade Priced In?
Any major upgrade for a crypto blockchain has obvious implications on its price, mostly in a bullish manner. It was seen during Ethereum’s London Hardfork as well as in the runup to Cardano’s smart contract upgrade. In both the mentioned cases the price of the native crypto-assets rose to new ATHs due to the anticipation around it. The same can be said for the Bitcoin network as well given Taproot is one of the biggest upgrades that would various aspects and functionalities.
BTC’s price is currently trading at $64,670 after recording a new ATH above $69,000 on several exchanges. The price retraced soon after reaching the ATH and dipped by nearly $5K, however with the taproot upgrade just days away, BTC could get out of the consolidation phase to retest ATH. Many market pundits also believe that the Taproot upgrade is already priced in for the top cryptocurrency.