An explanation of the Bitcoin Upgrade Taproot

Taproot is the latest major upgrade to Bitcoin, now locked in for activation in November 2021. This is the biggest upgrade to Bitcoin since 2017 when Segregated Witness was added. SegWit marginally increased block space and enabled the Lightning Network to be safely deployed. 

Taproot was proposed by Greg Maxwell in January 2018, and much of the original work was also done by Chaincode Labs’ Peter Wuille and Blockstream’s Andrew Poelstra. The latest Bitcoin Core client 0.21.1 included the activation parameters for the Taproot soft fork (BIP341), Schnorr signatures (BIP340), and Tapscript (BIP342).