Bitcoin updates are of no interest to Coinbase. Most bitcoin exchanges did not adopt Taproot. The US exchange Coinbase rejects Taproot, the latest Bitcoin update, and puts it away from its top priorities.
According to reports revealed by Murchandamus, Chaincodlabs engineer, Coinbase does not have within its priorities to activate withdrawals and deposits to addresses bech32m, the new Bitcoin address format applied in November 2021 with Taproot, an update that focuses its efforts on improving privacy and efficiency of the transactions carried out in this protocol.
Among other vital contributions to the Bitcoin environment, Murchandamus grouped into a list the exchanges and services that have already adopted Taproot and other implementations. No sign mentions the acceptance of Coinbase to Taproot in the Bech32m and P2TR address formats.
Coinbase also showed its rejection to SegWit (P2WPKH / P2WSH), considering that SegWit is already four years old in Bitcoin and its adoption levels in the industry are at all-time highs.
Notably, on the website, it appears that Binance does not accept Taproot, even considering that, in an announcement revealed in November, they had stated that it does.
Binance’s ranking on the Murchandamus list suddenly changed after a user lost their funds when withdrawing from Binance to a Taproot profile, sparking controversies that ended when the exchange publicly acknowledged their mistake and refunded the funds.
Taproot Node Adoption Has Slight Growth
During December 2021, the account of Bitcoin nodes that accept Taproot experienced an increase of approximately 10%, which is an improvement over the previous months that includes its activation (November).
At least 62% of the nodes that work within the Bitcoin network accept Taproot, allowing users to transfer bitcoins from their wallets with this method. This event equals more than 19,000 nodes that already work within the Bitcoin Core 22.0 software, which Taproot brought as an update to the protocol.
On the other hand, the nodes that do not desire to accept a root and work with previous versions of Bitcoin Core would be declining soon, according to data from developer Luke Dash Jr. The adoption of Taproot has been quite fast regarding the number of nodes but not regarding transactions that spend bitcoins according to this format.
However, the inputs and outputs have increased steadily since November. This situation means that more users already have coins completely ready to spend with this format.
The opposite took effect with SegWit, which though many exchanges and services were slow to adopt the network. By August 2021, 80% of Bitcoin transactions got carried out with this implementation. According to the Transactionfee.info portal, this amount has remained the same from then until these days.
In any case, specialists expressed their hopes regarding Taproot since it would allow better handling of wallet signatures. The taproot will also offer benefits regarding privacy, and it could enable interesting tools like leaving bitcoin inheritances.
By: Jenson Nuñez
