Holdouts Are Not Stopping Bitcoin Taproot Activation

Taproot activation for Bitcoin (BTC) is likely to happen this year as over 90% of the 2,016 mined blocks have already signalled for it.

Yesterday was the fourth day of the two-week period for the Taproot activation, which follows the rules of the Speedy Trial — a deployment method merged into Bitcoin Core. The mechanism will allow miners and mining pools to coordinate the softfork deployment by signalling support in their mined blocks.

At press time, 97.63% of blocks had signalled for Taproot between May and August.

One Holdout Remains

Mara Pool, a BTC mining pool operated by Marathon Digital Holdings, signalled for Taproot on May 31 after adopting the latest codebases offered by Bitcoin Core developers.

While not all of Mara Pool’s mined blocks have signalled, as the company upgrades its miners it may start signalling support in the coming week.

A Vital Upgrade for Bitcoin

Taproot is likely to mark 2021 as a historic year for Bitcoin. It would improve BTC’s network privacy by only revealing relevant parts of smart contracts when spending, besides providing scalability to the network, lower fees and faster transactions.

A week ago, 95% of major BTC mining pools briefly signalled for Taproot, but declined to almost 60% in a short period. The upgrade lock-in was unlikely at that stage, but if the current signalling ratio remains above 90%, then Taproot will be implemented in November.