- Cash App will add support to Taproot, Bitcoin’s latest upgrade, by December 1.
- Over time, users may benefit from the upgrade’s enhanced privacy features, reduced transaction fees, and better smart contracts.
- Taproot went live on the Bitcoin network on November 14 at block 709,632.
Cash App will add support to the Taproot Bitcoin upgrade by December 1, the company said in a statement. The highly anticipated upgrade went live in the Bitcoin network on November 14 at block 709,632, and the financial services app owned by Square will roll out support for taproot addresses by early next month.
“To ensure a seamless update, we will confirm that the mainnet Taproot activation is working as expected before rolling it out to all customers,” per the statement. “By December 1, 2021, all Cash App customers should be able to send bitcoin to Taproot-enabled wallets.”
Taproot was activated as a soft fork on the Bitcoin network on Sunday to enhance the privacy and efficiency of transactions as well as enable better and more robust smart contracts. The upgrade brought about a new address type, Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR), allowing bitcoin spending to look similar regardless of whether the sender is making a simple payment, a complex multi-signature transaction, or using the Lightning Network.
Moreover, Taproot addresses will allow users to save on transaction fees compared to previous address types; the more complex the spending conditions, the more the user will save. By reducing the transaction size and making nearly any transaction look like a simple, single-signature one, Taproot will also enable larger and more complex operations to be deployed on Bitcoin that were previously unfeasible or almost impossible.
By adding support to Taproot addresses, Cash App, a mobile financial platform and broker owned by Square, will enable its users to use the most recent features live on the Bitcoin network. The move is important because some of the possibilities enabled by Taproot will only be actualized once a considerable chunk of the network starts using the new address type frequently.