4 entries
Introduced hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, allowing an entire tree of key pairs to be derived from a single master seed. This eliminated the need for frequent backups and enabled organized key management with parent-child key derivation.
Proposed Segregated Witness (SegWit), the most significant protocol upgrade since Bitcoin's creation. By separating signature data from transaction data, SegWit fixed transaction malleability, enabled the Lightning Network, increased effective block capacity, and introduced a new transaction format — all via a backward-compatible soft fork.
Introduced Schnorr digital signatures to Bitcoin, replacing ECDSA for Taproot transactions. Schnorr signatures are provably secure, non-malleable, and enable efficient multi-signature aggregation — making complex scripts indistinguishable from simple payments on-chain.
Introduced Taproot, the most significant Bitcoin protocol upgrade since SegWit. By combining Schnorr signatures (BIP 340) with Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), Taproot makes complex spending conditions as private and efficient as simple payments, while enabling more sophisticated smart contracts.