The price has risen nearly a hundredfold, why has Bitcoin's "small upgrade" attracted funding attention?

Author: Golem

The sleeping lion is about to awaken? This is the feeling of some deep players in the Bitcoin ecosystem recently.

A developer statement on May 6 indicated that the next version of Bitcoin Core may abolish the restriction that OP_RETURN outputs must not exceed 80 bytes. The statement noted that the 80-byte limit for OP_RETURN is no longer suitable for current needs, as it is easy to bypass—certain private mining accelerators do not enforce these limitations at all. Additionally, it creates distorted incentive mechanisms, where some projects incentivize certain private services to bypass the restrictions. The statement also mentioned that the abolition of the 80-byte limit for OP_RETURN has received widespread support.

Currently, a token deployment format called OP-20 that breaks the 80-byte limit of OP_RETURN has appeared in the market. The off-market trading price of the token with the same name, op_return, has risen to 400 USD per piece (one piece being 1000 tokens), while the cost is only 5-6 USD per piece.

Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce what OP_RETURN is in this article, what advantages and disadvantages it may bring to the Bitcoin network after a successful upgrade, and what prospects there are for issuing OP-20 using this mechanism.

The debate around OP_RETURN

In the Bitcoin network, OP_RETURN is a script opcode specifically used to carry arbitrary data in transactions. Data carried using OP_RETURN outputs will not be referenced by subsequent transactions and will not occupy UTXO space on the nodes.

In the early days, Bitcoin nodes had to permanently retain all unspent outputs (UTXO), and malicious or unrestrained data writing could cause storage pressure on the nodes. Therefore, in 2013, the community proposed the idea of “lightening” data storage by introducing a script for immediate invalidation. Subsequently, in 2014, Bitcoin Core version 0.9.0 officially included OP_RETURN output as a “standard output” type, setting the data limit to 40 bytes, which was later gradually increased to 80 bytes to balance the demand for data writing with the protection of network resources.

OP_RETURN limits are no longer suitable for the development needs of the Bitcoin ecosystem

Therefore, the initial purpose of Bitcoin developers designing OP_RETURN was to prevent nodes from excessively bloating storage due to processing scripts containing large chunks of data, using it as a “lightweight record” function for the blockchain. However, with the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, various asset protocols, projects, L2, and cross-chain bridges have required more and more data to be recorded on-chain, making the 80-byte limitation of OP_RETURN increasingly restrictive.

To meet project requirements, various project parties have had to bypass this restriction through various operations, including providing high rewards to miners. Therefore, Bitcoin Core core contributor Greg Sanders issued a statement on GitHub, proposing to remove the 80-byte limit in the next version of Bitcoin Core, allowing for an arbitrary number and length of OP_RETURN outputs.

According to him, the removal of the 80-byte cap has at least two tangible benefits:

• A cleaner UTXO set. Data can now be stored in an unspendable output that can be proven, rather than being disguised in spendable scripts or scattered across multiple transactions.
• Consistency of behavior. Nodes can relay the transactions that miners want to see, making fee estimation and compact block relaying more reliable.

Opposition voices remain strong

However, in reality, Bitcoin Core has not yet announced a specific date for the next upgrade. At the same time, there are still many opposing voices under the GitHub statement regarding the upgrade.

Community member wizkid057 stated that this is far more than just a minor technical change; it is a fundamental alteration of the very nature of the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network will become an arbitrary data storage system, rather than evolving as a decentralized currency. At the same time, it will also lead to a proliferation of more data-intensive protocols (such as inscriptions, NFTs) and “garbage” data.

Upgrade not completed, issuing coins first

However, although there is still no conclusion on the update to abolish the 80-byte limit of OP_RETURN in the next version of Bitcoin Core, a token deployment standard that breaks this limitation, OP-20, has quietly gone live, and the first token of this protocol, op_return, is suspected to have been fully minted, with the current off-market transaction price reaching $400 per piece (one piece contains 1000 tokens), while the initial cost was only $5-6 per piece, achieving a hundredfold “floating profit.”

The op_return is suspected to have been deployed by the address bc1p…4w5pq6 on the evening of May 6, with a total of 2.1 million, for a total of 2100 tokens. As shown in the image pushed by the Bot, its token deployment format is essentially no different from BRC-20, except that there is an additional address in the json text (which may also be the reason why OP-20 exceeds the 80-byte limit).

Therefore, the format of casting op_return is as follows:

{ “p”: “op-20”, “op”: “mint”, “tick”: “op_return”, “amt”: “1000”, “add”: “This is your Bitcoin address” }

Users paste this text information onto the OP_RETURN Bot website and then pay with the Lightning Network to create an OP_RETURN output, completing the minting operation. Currently, the community speculates that op_return has been fully minted, but there has been no official index or transaction transfer tool released, and only over-the-counter double pledges can be conducted.

Regarding the indexing rules (which determine the rules for whether you have played or not), community players have outlined two situations: one is an index that does not allow batch minting (i.e., multiple plays in one transaction), and the other is an index that allows batch minting.

At the same time, some community players compare OP-20 with BRC-20, believing that OP-20 does not have concerns about block size inflation and UTXO pollution, making it clearly superior to BRC-20. However, it should be noted that Bitcoin Core has not yet abolished the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN, so in principle, OP-20 cannot be packaged on-chain. Users can only wait for mining pools like MARA and f2pool, which may have lifted the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN, to process transactions on-chain.

In fact, although attention has waned, the Bitcoin ecosystem still has a group of dedicated community developers and players who are actively involved. Innovations like Odin.Fun and the Alkanes protocol have emerged recently, but ultimately they have not escaped the fate of being more noise than substance. So, returning to the age-old topic, with the expectation of upgrades to the Bitcoin Core version, can OP-20 lead the Bitcoin ecosystem to rise again? We shall wait and see.