Glossary
Taproot
A 2021 Bitcoin soft fork that introduced Schnorr signatures, signature aggregation, and a unified script tree — improving privacy and complex-contract efficiency.
Taproot activated on Bitcoin in November 2021. It introduced Schnorr signatures, Merkleized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), and Taproot itself — a scheme where complex multisig and contract spending paths can be made indistinguishable on-chain from a single Schnorr key spend.
The upshot: multisig wallets, Lightning channels, and complex contracts look identical to ordinary single-signature transactions on-chain. That improves privacy and shrinks the data footprint of sophisticated Bitcoin scripts.