Taproot is a proposed Bitcoin protocol upgrade that can be deployed as a forward-compatible soft fork. By combining the Schnorr signature scheme with MAST (Merklized Alternative Script Tree) and a new scripting language called Tapscript, Taproot will expand Bitcoin’s smart contract flexibility, while offering more privacy by letting users mask complex smart contracts as a regular bitcoin transaction.
More information can be found in this Bitcoin Magazine article by Aaron van Wirdum: Taproot Is Coming: What It Is, And How It Will Benefit Bitcoin
A soft fork is a change to the Bitcoin protocol wherein only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. Since old nodes recognize the new blocks as valid, a soft fork is forward-compatible. See more here: Soft fork bitcoin wiki
Soft forks can be activated in several ways. Multiple of the previous soft forks were activated using BIP9, which required a supermajority of hash power to signal support for the upgrade. BIP8 is the successor of BIP9. BIP8 gives the option to activate the upgrade at the end of the signaling period even without a supermajority of miners signaling support. In the listed activation proposals below, the 'true' or 'false' indicates whether a signal period would end in activation. BIP9 worked equivalently to BIP8 without activation at the end.
More in-depth information on Taproot activation proposals can be found in the Bitcoin Wiki.
The aim of this site is to assist in the activation of the Taproot soft fork. We have reached out to several Bitcoin mining pools to find out if:
- If they support the Taproot upgrade
- If so, which activation method they prefer
- If they want to insert a coinbase message in a block to announce their preference (even before the actual activation window opens)
Note: TBD = To be decided
| Mining Pool | Taproot? | Activation | Coinbase Signal | Proof of Support | Global Hashrate % (1 month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poolin | Yes | BIP9 equivalent, BIP8(false, 1y) | taproot/bip9 | Tweet | 12.71 % |
| Slush Pool | Yes | BIP8 | Tweet | 2.60 % | |
| BTC.com | Yes | Modern Soft Fork Activation | TBD | 10.96 % | |
| F2Pool | Yes | TBD | TBD | Pull Request | 19.18 % |
| AntPool | Yes | BIP8 | TBD | 10.43 % | |
| Luxor | Yes | BIP9 equivalent | Tweet | 0.4% | |
| SigmaPool | Undecided | 0.16 % | |||
| NovaBlock | Yes | BIP9 equivalent, BIP8(false, 1y) | taproot/bip9 | Tweet | 1.04 % |
| ViaBTC | Yes | Tweet | 7.85 % | ||
| Binance Pool | NO ANSWER | 9.56 % | |||
| Huobi Pool | Yes | TBD | TBD | 10.36 % | |
| 58COIN&1THash | Yes | TBD | TBD | 6.36 % | |
| SpiderPool | Yes | TBD | TBD | 0.55% |
Total hashrate (1 month average) in support of Taproot: 82.6%
Want to be included in the list? Email alejandro@poolin.com or create a pull request here. Media enquiries: please reach out to alejandro@poolin.com or contact @bitentrepreneur on Twitter.