Bitcoin Soft Fork 2020 Could Push Price To Over $10,000

Some say the "halving" will send Bitcoin's price flying, and some say it will not. Still, the king of cryptos is undeniably on a tear since Jan. 3, and the halving is not until May. Although BTC has not closed above the $9,000 level yet, prices over $10,000 seem to be within reach as of the moment.

Here to possibly accelerate BTC's ascent are a few key fundamental events for Bitcoin this year (excluding the halving). Lucas Nuzzi, the co-founder and Director of Technology for Digital Asset Research, tweeted critical soft forks affecting Bitcoin's layer one, "Bitcoin will soft-fork this year. It will be one of the most innovative additions to L1 thus far: bip-schnorr+bip-taproot+bip-tapscript. These are powerful foundational technologies that will bring novel smart contracts to Bitcoin's base layer. 2020 will be good."

Taproot, Schnorr, Tapscript

One of the blemishes of BTC that have led some people to call it outdated technology is its limited support of smart contracts. The soft fork upgrade Taproot, which was first proposed by Bitcoin Core contributor and former Blockstream CTO Gregory Maxwell, is aimed at improving that as it will permit BTC to be more adaptive to smart contracts.

Taproot is also proposed to "improve the privacy and efficiency, and flexibility of Bitcoin's scripting capabilities without adding new security assumptions." The soft fork will also utilize Schnorr signatures, which offer provable security, non-malleability and linearity, and Taprscript, a newer version of BTC's programming language.

These changes are believed to be positive for BTC's price as these developments are directed at enhancing the flagship crypto's adoption.

What about the halving?

It's already apparent that the topic of the halving is a point of contention for a lot of folks in the crypto space. The addition of Bakkt futures last year apart from the CME's version in 2017 and the recently debuted BTC options make price discovery not vested solely in miners anymore. This is what Meltem Demirrors said that will cause BTC to not appreciate in value since it's becoming more financialized.

However, some traders still believe that what transpired in the past will likely happen again in the future, and their estimate forecasts a BTC over $33,000 before May.