Blockstream Engineers Curate a Multi-Signature Bitcoin Contract Upgrade

As the world awaits Bitcoin’s Taproot Upgrade, Blockstream employees- Engineers- decided to take advantage of this and create a new arrangement that will facilitate the upgrade of multi-signature transactions. With Taproot, multi-signature transactions which are obliged to have signatures from at least more than one private key to enable spending will enjoy a bunch of advantages.

The Taproot upgrade introduces Schnorr signatures into Bitcoin’s codebase- this is a cryptographic signature arrangement which will facilitate the easy creation and implementation of smart contracts on the Blockchain.  

Via a recent blog post, Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing, two engineers from Blockstream drafted a novel “multi-signature design” implemented to lessen the tech complications that come with multi-signature transactions. What is more, this new mode also ensures that all participant’s privacy rights are protected.

The two engineers also collaborated with Yannick Seurin, a member of the French National Security Agency to release a cryptographic e-journal on the “MuSig2 design” which is now being reread. 

Contactless Signing

The good thing about MuSig2 is that it requires minimal contacts between signatories of a multi-signature contract and it also ensures privacy protection.  This new innovation merely requires two phases of contacts between signatories before executing a contract unlike its precedent (MuSig1) that calls for parties to the contract to converse severally. 

Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing’s blog release notes that:

“It offers the same functionality and security as MuSig1 but makes it possible to eliminate almost all interaction between signers. With MuSig2, signers need only two rounds of communication to create a signature, and crucially, one of these rounds can be pre-processed before signers know the message that they want to be signed.”