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In a landmark decision that could significantly reshape the Bitcoin ecosystem, core developers have announced plans to remove the OP_RETURN operation in the next major Bitcoin Core release. This change has sparked widespread debate across the crypto community, highlighting the delicate balance between technical purity and functional flexibility.
OP_RETURN is a Bitcoin script opcode introduced in 2014 that allows users to attach small amounts of data (up to 80 bytes) to transactions. While it renders the output unspendable, it has been widely used for embedding metadata, creating digital notary services, linking off-chain assets (like NFTs), and more recently, powering projects such as Ordinals and Bitcoin-based tokens.
By leveraging OP_RETURN, developers and innovators have turned the Bitcoin blockchain into a foundation for a wide variety of decentralized applications (dApps), some of which diverge from Bitcoin's original purpose as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
According to Bitcoin Core contributors, the removal of OP_RETURN is rooted in concerns over blockchain bloat and mission creep. Critics argue that storing arbitrary data on the blockchain undermines scalability, increases storage requirements for full nodes, and deviates from Bitcoin's intended monetary use case.
Lead maintainer Gloria Zhao commented, “While OP_RETURN opened up creative uses of Bitcoin, it also encouraged patterns that compromise the network’s long-term sustainability. Our focus must remain on making Bitcoin as robust, decentralized, and efficient as possible.”
The proposal, which is already included in the testnet version of Bitcoin Core v27, suggests that future transactions using OP_RETURN will be considered non-standard, and eventually invalid at the consensus level in subsequent hard forks.
