After years of trailing behind other platforms, Coinbase has rolled out a highly anticipated feature that will allow its users to send Bitcoin to Taproot addresses. This major update, announced on Tuesday, brings Coinbase in line with other leading exchanges, enabling millions of users to take advantage of Taproot’s enhanced privacy and cost-saving features.
Taproot, introduced in November 2021, has been heralded as the most significant upgrade to Bitcoin since the SegWit update in 2017. It offers users more efficient and private transactions by compressing data and lowering fees. However, Coinbase users had long expressed frustration with the platform’s lack of support for Taproot, leading to delays and failed transactions when trying to interact with Taproot addresses.
Prior to this change, Coinbase customers were unable to send Bitcoin to Taproot addresses, a gap that left many feeling sidelined while platforms like OKX, Binance, and Kraken implemented the feature much earlier.
With this new integration, those issues have finally been addressed.
In a short X post Tuesday, Coinbase said that the update will “create access to more onchain destinations,” providing users with the opportunity to benefit from Taproot’s privacy enhancements and scalability improvements.
“Better late than never!” BitGo, reacted to the news, emphasizing that the firm has been offering Taproot assets for the past three years.
BitGo has been offering Taproot assets for 3 years now!
Better late than never! 🐢https://t.co/fwnWgWq4Hv
— BitGo (@BitGo) October 8, 2024
Taproot was proposed by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell and introduced a significant improvement by incorporating Schnorr signatures. These signatures allow complex Bitcoin transactions, such as multi-signature transactions, to be compressed into smaller data packages, making them appear similar to standard Bitcoin transfers. This minimizes the amount of information stored on the blockchain, thus improving scalability, reducing transaction fees, and making it more challenging to trace individual transactions on the public ledger.
By enabling Bitcoin transfers to Taproot addresses, Coinbase users can now fully utilize these privacy and efficiency features, which have been available on other platforms for years.