Blockstream's Adam Back Sees Covenant Opcodes as Bitcoin's Last Soft-Fork Opportunity

Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, has publicly endorsed covenant opcodes as a potential 'last soft-fork' for Bitcoin. This proposal aims to reduce the frequency of future protocol changes while making Bitcoin Script more secure.

The idea behind this concept is to create a general toolkit that can be combined in various ways, reducing the need for new soft forks. Soft forks are backward-compatible changes to Bitcoin's rules that require broad coordination across miners, node operators, and developers.

Back emphasized the importance of formal semantics and mathematical proofs in hardening Bitcoin Script. He believes that these tools can help verify that contracts behave as intended before anyone puts real money behind them.

Covenant opcodes are a type of rule attached to coins that restricts how they can be spent in the future. They would allow scripts to influence where those coins go next, going beyond simply checking whether someone has the right to spend them.