Final week, alarm bells rang over a proposal to chill out information storage limitations through an operation code of Bitcoin script.
It was a deceptively minor change to the coverage of full node software program that make clear the company pursuits encroaching on Bitcoin’s technical improvement.
As a substitute of rubber-stamping the thought, technical Bitcoiners sprang into motion, whipping up assist for his or her facet of the controversy. Critics revealed the business pursuits of firms like Citrea and an assortment of zero-knowledge (ZK) and Bitcoin digital machine (BitVM) firms which can be pushing builders to lift information storage skills.
In a sly request to tweak the world’s hottest full node software program, Bitcoin Core, a number of builders appeared to consider that lifting OP_RETURN’s datacarrier output restrict from 83 to lots of of hundreds of bytes would obtain fast consensus and earn practically quick approval from Bitcoin Core maintainers.
Though refined customers have all the time been capable of privately broadcast massive OP_RETURN transactions to miners through Libre Relay or MARA Slipstream, Bitcoin Core’s standardness guidelines for queueing transactions throughout its default mempool denied OP_RETURN outputs exceeding 83 bytes.
Lifting its datacarrier cap would have modified an essential standardness rule for transactions and allowed massive portions of non-financial information to propagate throughout the mempools of tens of hundreds of Bitcoin Core nodes as operators progressively up to date their software program.
Pull request 32359: Re-introducing a failed 28130
Normally a conservative developer, a self-empowered Peter Todd opened pull request (PR) 32359 on the request of Chaincode Labs’ Antoine Poinsot.
The GitHub remark part went viral, and inside hours, moderators began muting and censoring participation as fiery posts blamed builders and their company backers.
One critic chimed in, “The PR seems to anticipate some company’s mere intent. Are we now shapeshifting Bitcoin to whatever people publish they might be doing? Bitcoin has a purpose and it’s not appeasement.”
Moderators’ rarely-exercised energy of censorship on GitHub solely attracted extra consideration to the controversy. Observers even blamed Todd for utilizing PR 32359 to quietly re-introduce his PR 28130 that failed to realize consensus in 2023.
He used beneficiant language for his request, together with “uncap datacarrier by default” or “remove arbitrary restrictions on OP_RETURN by default.” In actuality, the proposal’s actual intent was to cease filtering massive portions of non-financial information — essential context that appeared obscured by the technical description.
Many Bitcoin builders are against insurance policies that encourage the usage of its restricted storage capabilities for non-financial data like footage, video games, enterprise information, or different types of media unrelated to BTC transactions.
A failed proposal, once more, with even much less configurability
Particularly, critics blamed Todd for re-introducing an much more beneficiant model of his 2023 code by withholding a config possibility.
Slightly than leaving the OP_RETURN datacarrier restrict as a configurable piece of code — akin to elevating the quantity from 83 to a number of lots of of hundreds of bytes, and leaving the digits obtainable for self-configuration — Todd merely eliminated the config code fully to be able to forestall customers from setting any customized quantity.
In different phrases, critics blamed Todd for making an attempt to slip a change via with a little bit of moist glue that might cement its dominance as soon as carried out — stopping customers from modifying the quantity themselves on their very own node.
In brief, it was disrespectful to Bitcoin Core’s ethos of consensus-based software program improvement.
In line with Todd’s code, the change could be drastic: lifting the OP_RETURN datacarrier restrict from 83 bytes as much as slightly below the complete, 1MB restrict of a single block, much less different information — and disallowing Bitcoin Code node operators from having the choice to regulate that restrict manually.
This was notably offensive to the self-sovereign ethos of Bitcoin, which values the flexibility of node operators to decide on their very own mempool and transaction relay insurance policies.
The extra I look into it the more severe if will get.
Once more this is not a technical debate. It is simply unhealthy actors pushing malicious adjustments into Bitcoin mendacity in regards to the results it’ll have.
Citrea *want* your mempool to tolerate their junk, and Core are decided to assist them with that by…
— Mechanic #FixTheFilters #300kb (@GrassFedBitcoin) Might 4, 2025
As tensions swirled, many individuals additionally blamed the company pursuits of the main spokesman for PR 32359, Jameson Lopp. One in all his firms, Citrea, has raised thousands and thousands of {dollars} from enterprise capitalists and may gain advantage from publishing larger-than-83 byte portions of information through Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN datacarrier.
Citrea helps a set of third-party purposes and companies, together with altcoin token exchanges, DAOs, oracles, and yield-bearing stablecoins.
Extra company pursuits in bitcoin improvement
There are, after all, different companies desirous about tweaking Bitcoin Core to raised swimsuit their pursuits.
For instance, Stacks Basis introduced a $500,000 Stacks Working Group meant to enhance BitVM’s safety. If the initiative labored, BitVM would offer computing assist for Bitcoin Layer 2 apps like Stacks (STX) itself, information roll-ups, trust-minimized bridges, and different initiatives.
One critic summarized the unstated motivation for PR 32359: “On the OP_RETURN drama, what actually triggered this is the BitVM folks about to launch a protocol that needs to commit ~100 bytes of data and the current OP_RETURN limit being too restricted for that. So they ‘fixed’ that.”
A number of critics even blamed Taproot Wizards for the incident, which raised $30 million to re-enable an operation code, OP_CAT, and publish varied varieties of non-financial information into Bitcoin blocks.
OP_CAT is an unique operation code developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, who later turned it off as a result of issues about errors. Efforts to convey it again embrace BIP 347, which introduces OP_CAT alongside Tapscript.
Generally, Taproot Wizards have been a well-funded group arguing for faster, experimental adjustments to Bitcoin Core. Nevertheless, executives at Taproot Wizards clarified that neither of their NFT-like inscription collections, Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats, used OP_RETURN to retailer image information.
As a substitute, these collections inscribed information utilizing separate, witness information.
Onchain exercise is lifeless. Appears like we’ll have to truly work to make fascinating use circumstances individuals wish to use as an alternative of counting on crypto slop to replenish blocks. pic.twitter.com/1VAnseiBqD
— grubles (@notgrubles) Might 4, 2025
Storing “crypto slop” information on Bitcoin.
Ultimately, it’s probably that PR 32359 won’t acquire consensus and can expire in rivalry. However, its shock introduction with secret motivations has raised consciousness in regards to the company curiosity in search of to affect Bitcoin Core builders.
Going ahead, the neighborhood may ask deeper questions on who stands to profit essentially the most from an in any other case technical PR. One strategy to uncover these motivations is to comply with the cash.
