Bitcoin Network's OP_CAT Upgrade and Its Impact on Developer Innovation

The Bitcoin network's OP_CAT upgrade has sparked new interest in building apps on Bitcoin, as it may reintroduce functionality that Satoshi Nakamoto removed in 2010. At the Bitcoin2024 event, Bioniq CEO Bob Bodily said hundreds of developers are “shouting from the rooftops” about the potential benefits. Bioniq is a marketplace for Ordinals — Bitcoin non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — that do not incur gas fees. Bioniq began development in February 2023, a month after the introduction of Ordinals. “I've seen more interest in the last, I don't know, 18-19 months on Bitcoin than the last five years before that,” Bodily told Cointelegraph. That uptick in attention corresponds to the introduction of Ordinals, a layer-2 application on the Bitcoin network. “I don't know what it was about Ordinals. Maybe it was that people could buy cat pictures on Bitcoin,” Bodily said. Now, however, “we've seen L-2s and other things try to inherit the security of Bitcoin while improving […] user experience challenges,” such as wallets, seed phrases and private keys, as well as unpredictable block times and network fees. Related: Bitcoin mainnet receives first-ever verified ZK-proof Bodily is bullish on Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 420, which may restore Operation Concatenation (OP_CAT) to the network in 2025. OP_CAT would introduce smart contract functionality to the Bitcoin network. OP_CAT is currently available on the Bitcoin Signet testnet. Bodily is not alone in this enthusiasm for OP_CAT and Bitcoin layer 2: “I've seen lots of large venture capital firms put money into Bitcoin for people building meta protocols, for people building interesting new scaling solutions, for people building zkRollups. Even spider chains, state chains, state channel-based systems.” OP_CAT would enable covenants , which would in turn enable technical advances like shared unspent transaction output (UTXO) , which would enable greater scalability on the Lightning Network , for example. While there is a conservative “ossifier camp” and concerns about unforeseen impacts such as new attack vectors, Bodily said the risks of leaving the Bitcoin network as it is are greater. “We need covenants on Bitcoin,” he said. “We need to make Bitcoin a little bit more expressible and I think there's a very, very low-risk attack vector, [and a] low profile way to do it. And I think it's going to happen.”