This past Sunday at block 1,663,200, the Taproot soft fork activated on the world’s leading sidechain, marking the Liquid Network’s latest upgrade, and bringing new technology, functionality, and use cases to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Taproot opens the door for many improvements for Liquid.
- Scriptless scripts using Schnorr signatures for moving bitcoin onto and off Liquid using swap transactions
- Privacy improvement via unused script branch hiding
- More efficient multisignature transactions
- New blech32m encoding for Confidential addresses
Along with Taproot, new additional opcodes are now available for use.
The new opcodes included in the upgrade enable exciting use cases. A few examples:
- Automated market makers
- Covenants
- Vaults
The Taproot soft fork activation marks the completion of a crucial step towards implementing Simplicity on Liquid. Simplicity is a more expressive blockchain programming language intended to replace Bitcoin Script used on Liquid and potentially on the Bitcoin mainchain, given there is consensus to include the change.
To keep up with the latest Liquid Network developments, be sure to follow us on Twitter and join the Liquid Community group on Telegram to discuss all things Liquid.