The biggest upgrade to the Bitcoin network after SegWit in 2017 has been finally locked in for activation in November on block 709,632 after the threshold of 1815 of the blocks signaling their readiness was crossed today.

The soft fork required signaling for its deployment from 90% of the blocks by the mining pools within a period of 2016 blocks, roughly 14 days before the next mining difficulty occurs.

“Taproot shows that Bitcoin is still capable of upgrading in a highly disciplined and orderly manner, highlighting its reliability as a store of value,” said Qiao Wang of DeFi Alliance.

Taproot is a soft fork to the largest network that aims to improve scripting capabilities and privacy. It was first proposed by former Blockstream CTO Gregory Maxwell and developed by Bitcoin Core contributors including Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Anthony Towns, Johnson Lau, Jonas Nick, Andrew Poelstra, Tim Ruffing, and Rusty Russell.

Consisting of two upgrades: Schnorr signatures and Taproot itself, it further improves the privacy of Layer 2 solution Lightning Network by making channels look like regular bitcoin transactions between two parties while there might be thousands of payments included in one lightning channel if the Lightning implementations choose to adopt it.

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