Litecoin Activates Taproot Upgrade

On March 18, Litecoin officially released the Core 0.21.2rc5 version update, which has activated the Taproot upgrade, aiming to enhance the security, privacy and scalability of Litecoin. At the same time, this update also includes bug fixes and updated translations, laying the foundation for the extension module (MWEB). Earlier, it was reported that Litecoin's MimbleWimble privacy protocol code was officially reviewed and the activation time would be decided by the community. Litecoin plans to achieve a certain degree of privacy protection and substitutability through the Mimblewimble extension module (MWEB).

Before enabling the Mimblewimble extension module, the Taproot upgrade was chosen first. Litecoin, like Bitcoin, is a PoW token. Bitcoin has completed the Taproot upgrade in November 2021, enhancing Bitcoin's privacy, scalability and flexibility of smart contracts.

What role does Taproot play? Let’s use Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade to explain its role.

The Taproot upgrade includes Schnorr signature, taproot, and Tapscript.

Schnorr signature is a safer, lighter and more flexible cryptographic signature that supports "key aggregation" and ensures that single-signature transactions, multi-signature transactions and complex smart contracts are indistinguishable on the blockchain.

Schnorr's key aggregation feature allows all parties in a multi-signature transaction to collaboratively combine their public keys and generate a signature that is valid for the sum of their public keys. This saves block space, improves privacy, and enables faster transaction verification.

Taproot specifies rules for new Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) output types, improving the privacy, efficiency, and flexibility of Bitcoin scripting functionality without compromising security.

Taproot implements Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), a privacy solution that uses Merkle trees to commit only the execution conditions of a transaction to the blockchain, rather than the full details of all other possible outcomes.

By only publishing the details of executed transactions, thereby recording less data on the blockchain, Taproot provides greater privacy and scalability for Bitcoin users.

Tapscript updates the script coding language used to write BTC transaction parameters to provide Schnorr and Taproot technologies to users who choose to upgrade. In addition, Tapscript also makes future opcode updates to Bitcoin easier to implement. The implementation of Taproot may also lay the technical foundation for DeFi on Bitcoin. Once activated, Bitcoin can implement large-scale smart contracts with tens of thousands of signatures while hiding all participants and keeping the size of single-signature transactions small.