That was necessary because, with fewer miners online, less hash rate was being employed on the network, and blocks took much longer than the 10-minute mining interval target, per Glassnode data.
As miners started getting back online in the last couple of weeks, the network’s hash rate increased simultaneously.
After the newest Bitcoin Core software release, the difficulty adjustment window of 2,016 blocks also serves as Taproot’s activation signaling epoch.
The soft fork’s first signaling epoch has just ended, marked by the increased mining difficulty in Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment today.
A new Taproot signaling epoch has just begun, and per Taproot.watch, 63% of blocks have signaled readiness at the time of writing.
If activated, the upgrade will pave the way for further improvements to be implemented in multi-signature wallets, the Lightning Network and other types of smart contracts that can be deployed on the Bitcoin blockchain.