Inside Bitcoin's OP_CTV Covenant and BIP 119

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, or OP_CTV, is a Bitcoin covenant proposed by developer Jeremy Rubin in BIP 119 on January 6, 2020. It would impose advance restrictions on how funds may next be spent. The design could support decentralized vaults, payment batching and congestion control while reducing risks associated with pre-signed transactions and private-key storage.

A recent technical analysis explains that OP_CTV would redefine the existing OP_NOP4 and use a transaction-template hash to commit to fields including the version, lock time, outputs, sequence numbers and input index. A transaction would be rejected if validation failed. BIP 119 remains a draft, with no activation date for the Bitcoin mainnet, and does not involve any specified investment amount. Its adoption would still require community consensus and implementation through a soft fork.