Bitcoin's Taproot is ready to go, but it's unlikely to be included in the next release

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 340 through 342 were merged into the Bitcoin codebase on Thursday, signaling that the anticipated Taproot upgrade is ready.

Taproot and the associated technology of Schnorr signatures are considered to be the most important upgrade for Bitcoin in the past year.

As Cointelegraph reported previously, Taproot hides every additional spending condition beyond the one that was activated.

While the initial code for Taproot was submitted for review in January, some complications primarily related to Schnorr signatures required an extensive amount of refinement.

The proposals have now been fully reviewed by Bitcoin core developers and are ready to be included in a client release.

The process could potentially last for years, though Taproot is generally considered much less controversial than previous upgrades like SegWit.

Taproot seems to have come slightly at the wrong time for immediate activation.

Jonas Nick, researcher at Blockstream and Bitcoin core developer, told Cointelegraph that "Taproot is not ready for activation yet."

The codebase reached "Feature freeze" on Thursday, with the base Taproot code making it just in time.

The logic to activate Taproot on mainnet is likely to be included in a future minor version, but in the meantime, Nick said that "Taproot could be activated on something like signet or testnet if someone produced the code for that," as the raw implementation is already present.