The Next Step to Improve Bitcoin’s Flexibility, Scalability and Privacy Is Called MAST

The soon-to-be proposed Segregated Witness soft fork is set to extend Bitcoin’s potential in several ways. One potentially promising innovation enabled by ‘SegWit’ is MAST, an abbreviation for Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees. While mainly designed to increase smart contract flexibility, MAST would increase scalability and privacy on the platform at the same time.
The idea of MAST originates from Blockstream developer Russell O’Connor, Blockstream and Bitcoin Core developer, Dr. Pieter Wuille, and Bitcoin Core developer, Peter Todd. It was recently drafted into an initial Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) by Bitcoin Core developer Dr. Johnson Lau.
Given its potential, MAST is surprisingly straightforward.

This post was published at Bitcoin Magazine on Oct 13, 2016.