Square Inc.'s Cash App is going to integrate support for Taproot-enabled bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin) wallets by December 1, 2021. The company said in an announcement it will first confirm that the mainnet Taproot activation is "working as expected before rolling it out to all customers."
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Cash App says its customers will eventually benefit from the Taproot soft fork as it includes:
- Increased privacy features.
- Reduced transaction fees.
- Better smart contracts.
Taproot went into effect on November 14, 2021, at block 709,632. The upgrade is expected to improve the privacy of the Bitcoin network with the so-called "Schnorr signatures" cryptographic scheme and the concept of Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST). This is the first major upgrade for the Bitcoin mainnet since August 2017, when the blockchain network integrated the Lightning Network and Segregated Witness (SegWit).
In September this year, blockchain developers released Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 with support for the Taproot update. The updated version can fully validate a new type of transaction with a new version of addresses. Support for more complex types of smart contracts, which will be possible on Bitcoin Core thanks to Taproot, will appear later.
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