Moonshot to $90K — After Bitcoin Upgrade Taproot Activates, Crypto Advocates Expect the Price to Rally

In mid-June, the ‘Speedy Trial’ lock-in period for the Bitcoin network upgrade Taproot locked in at block height 687,285 and was mined by the bitcoin mining pool Slushpool. Taproot is expected to activate on the network on Sunday, November 14, 2021, and the upgrade is considered one of the largest changes the protocol has seen since Segregated Witness (Segwit) went live in 2017.

Bitcoin Upgrade Taproot Expected to Activate on Sunday

Taproot is expected to activate and go live on the main network on Sunday, November 14, 2021, following the lock-in period this past summer. When activated, Taproot is expected to enhance the digital currency network’s scripting capacity and the ability to leverage Schnorr signatures (BIP340) will be made available. Taproot is also expected to amplify bitcoin transactions by allowing certain types of complex, ‘smart’ transactions.

Schnorr signatures can help transactions scale as they are more compact than ECDSA. Schnorr can also allow key aggregation, which provides a slew of multi-signature transaction schemes. While Taproot (BIP341) creates new rules for a new Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) output type, the upgrade is a soft fork and is entirely opt-in like its predecessor Segwit.

“Taproot is a proposed Bitcoin protocol upgrade that can be deployed as a forward-compatible soft fork,” the Github “Taproot-Activation” documentation notes. “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.”

Decentrader Market Analyst Expects ‘the Price to Rally up to the $85K – $90K Region in the Coming Weeks’ — Taproot Upgrade Could Also Be Priced In

Discussions concerning the Taproot upgrade are all over cryptocurrency forums and social media platforms during the last few days. The much-anticipated Taproot upgrade will officially go live at block height 709,632. The activation of this specific upgrade has caused people to speculate that BTC’s price may spike significantly higher after a successful soft fork.

On November 12, a bitcoin market update blog post published by decentrader.com says that market sentiment could spark a rally after the Taproot upgrade. Despite bitcoin’s (BTC) current volatility after the crypto asset tapped $69K, Decentrader explained the analysts are still “bullish” about BTC’s price rising higher. The market update states:

We remain bullish on high time frames and continue to expect price to rally up to the $85,000 – $90,000 region in the coming weeks, which aligns with the 1.618 fib retracement level.

Overall, people believe that once the network gets improved scalability and fungibility, the upgrade could bring a new all-time high (ATH). The Bitpanda Pro Twitter account discussed Taproot today and noted that the upgrade comes at a very opportune time. “The Taproot upgrade comes at a very bullish time,” Bitpanda tweeted on Friday. “Both for the total crypto market, which recently surpassed a value of €2.6T for the first time, and for Bitcoin itself, which has hit new ATHs multiple times over the past few weeks.”

However, Bitpanda also admitted that the upgrade’s value could already be priced in, and the recent ATH to $69K could have been the spike. “However, it appears that the bulls may still have some power left to push the price higher once the upgrade comes into effect,” Bitpanda added. “Taproot, after all, is here to make Bitcoin better, more efficient, and more private, all of which are factors that could justify a higher price,” the digital asset exchange concluded.