BitMEX Adds Bitcoin Taproot Support

• BitMEX has added support to Taproot, Bitcoin’s latest upgrade.
• As Taproot adoption increases, users will benefit from increased privacy, reduced transaction fees, and more flexible smart contracts.
• Taproot was activated on the Bitcoin protocol on November 14, 2021 at block 709,632.

Cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX added support to Taproot addresses, the company said in a statement Friday.

“As of today, BitMEX supports withdrawals to Bech32m Bitcoin addresses,” per the statement. “The first BitMEX client withdrawal to such an address occurred earlier today.”

Taproot was activated as a soft fork upgrade to the Bitcoin network in November to improve privacy and efficiency of transactions while increasing the flexibility of Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities. The upgrade introduced a new output type, Pay to Taproot (P2TR), using the new Bech32m address format and allowing bitcoin spending to look the same regardless of whether it involves a simple transaction, a more complex multisig one, or a Lightning Network-related transaction.

According to Bitcoin Optech newsletter issue 154, Bech32m is slightly different from its predecessor, Bech32, as it changes the “0x01” constant in the checksum function for “0x2bc830a3.”

“BitMEX is proud to use the latest Bitcoin technology, to provide better features and lower fees for our users,” per the statement.

The more complex the spending conditions, the more the user can save in transaction fees by using Taproot as the new address type makes nearly any transaction look like a simple, single-signature one. The upgrade also enables larger and more complex operations to be deployed on Bitcoin that were previously unfeasible or almost impossible.

BitMEX took a step in the right direction by enabling the latest Bitcoin functionality to its users as most of the possibilities unlocked by Taproot can only be actualized once a considerable chunk of the network starts using the upgrade.

Popular mobile financial platform and broker Cash App added support to Taproot in December.