Taproot adds some ETH-like functionality to Bitcoin?

[Adam Nealis]

I noticed in the Feb 2025 newsletter the mention that Tether was now on Taproot and there is a section called “The Death Of ETH?”.

It seems Taproot works on the Bitcoin blockchain. It might be similar to ETH’s smart contracts &/ or NFTs. I don’t know. Colour me cynical, but the explanation I read at Xverse seems to use the Java programmer’s trick of inventing new jargon for concepts that already exist. I had to learn about Bitcoin Ordinals to help me understand better what Taproot does.

Anyhow, I recently decided to empty my Metamask wallet of some Tether, and I was deeply irritated<SUP>[1]</SUP> by the process of transacting on the ETH blockchain. How does transacting in USDT on the Bitcoin blockchain work? Is it the same as USDT on the Ether ‘chain in that you have to pay fees in BTC?

Regardless, I hope PAXG starts to offer this. I would love to see a PAXG/BTC trading pair.

[1]: The source of this irritation being the concept of “gas”. I was sending USDT, but I had to pay the gas fees in ETH. I couldn’t grasp the idea that I couldn’t somehow say “send all my USDT by deducting ETH X for gas and send the balance”. I had to first swap some USDT for ETH to use as gas. My brain rejected this crap as unreasonable and inefficient. So I got on a metamask support chat to someone and proceeded to wind up this poor person with my refusal to accept that this was the norm. The support guy also annoyed me by saying that on the Bitcoin blockchain there are also “gas fees”. Strictly speaking there are not.

[tccadmin]

Hi Adam – I should have made the separation clearer that the Tether on Bitcoin (via Taproot) was a separate item from “Death of ETH”

You are correct in your annoyance with how ETH gas fees work (or don’t work). You usually do need some units of the base L1 to conduct your transactions, but across most other chains (Solana, Polygon or Sonic, Stacks) the gas fees are so small and the transactions so fast, you kind of forget it’s an issue.

On ETH, not so much, as when network congestion is high and all you want to do is move something it’s suddenly costing you $15 or $50 to do it, even if you’re just trying to get up to an L2 on Ethereum.

With Lightning and Taproot on Bitcoin it’s all the same units: satoshis (sats) with the main difference being you’ll initially move some amount of your BTC “offchain” essentially, when you move it into your Lightning wallet – from there you open channels, etc – but it’s super fast, super cheap and never as much of an issue getting from onchain to Lightning as it is ETH to L2.

[Author]

Posts