8 basic facts about Taproot

Taproot was an upgrade that enabled smart contract initiatives for the Bitcoin blockchain in 2021. The efficiency of BTC transactions was also enhanced, as was the privacy.
It was composed of three Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, namely BIP340, BIP341, and BIP342. These BIPs were interdependent as the benefits they created built up on one another.
BIP340 enhanced privacy within the blockchain by allowing several public addresses and signatures on the same transaction to be consolidated into one single transaction called a Schnorr signature.
BIP341 made possible the opening or closing of a payment channel on the Lightning Network.
BIP342 boosted the efficiency of the BTC blockchain because it enabled the batching together of various signatures for verification. Such batching facilitated the development of smart contracts on the BTC blockchain.
Taproot was activated on November 14, 2021 at Bitcoin block 709,632. The last major Bitcoin upgrade was SegWit in 2017.
In April 2022, Bitcoin Core 23.0, the then-latest update of the software originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, empowered users to choose the new Taproot wallet type when creating a new Bitcoin Core wallet.
Because the Taproot upgrade decreased the cost of storing arbitrary data, it brought about the development of Bitcoin Ordinals as users inscribed the data they wanted - up to 4 MB - onto Bitcoin block space.

References

Bitcoin (BTC)

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