Adam Back Sees Covenant Opcodes as 'Last Soft-Fork' for Bitcoin
Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, has publicly endorsed covenant opcodes as a potential 'last soft-fork' for Bitcoin. This move aims to reduce the frequency of future protocol changes while enhancing security through formal semantics and mathematical proofs.
The proposal relies on two interconnected ideas: reducing the need for new soft forks and improving security in Bitcoin Script. Soft forks are backward-compatible upgrades that can be slow and contentious, requiring broad coordination among miners, node operators, and developers.
Covenant opcodes would enable rules to be attached to coins, restricting their future spending. This feature is being tested on the signet network through draft Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) 119 and 347. Back's stance aligns with his long-held preference for modular opcodes over specific ones.
The executive's 'last soft-fork' framing suggests building a general toolkit that can be combined in various ways, reducing the need for future upgrades. This approach has been evident since at least 2021, and its implications for Bitcoin development are being closely watched by developers and researchers.