gave a talk in Hong Kong about OP_CAT earlier this month this will give you an intro to: - what we're trying to do - why - why now talk title was "You Can Just Do Things"

I’m gonna try to share OP_CAT updates more regularly. Here’s what happened recently and where we think things are headed: --- last month i went to consensus in hong kong, taking a hiatus from my usual twitter trolling: meeting face to face with protocol & app devs and miners to gauge sentiment on OP_CAT (in some cases requiring Chinese translators in order to conduct the meetings) on the l2 protocol development side: OP_CAT would mean a massive unlock for l2 protocol developers (STARKs is the most talked about example, but every l2 benefits tremendously from a generalized covenant, including bitvm, ark and even lightning) my impression is that l2 developers are extremely thirsty for this capability, and understand what OP_CAT does quite well. this applies to teams both in the east and west on the app side: mostly met & discussed with lending app developers which seems to be the most prevalent on the application side. the discussions i've had suggests demand for borrowing and lending with BTC on the motherchain, not just for retail defi but in b2b contexts aswell from miners: traditionally, miners are not as tuned in to protocol design as other stakeholder groups. but in the asian mining industry, OP_CAT has been well-recognized for some time now due to initiatives like fractal which already amassed 50%+ merge-mining hashrate that's not to say that these groups fully understand what OP_CAT does yet, however they seem surprisingly interested to learn more about what OP_CAT can mean for the baselayer in terms of chain activity it is clear there's an appetite for more educational material here, esp. events that bridge the gap between asia and the west — stay tuned for updates on this topic i really do think 2025 is the year of the covenant, and our best bet to oil the softfork upgrade machinery before we're stuck knee-deep in institutional ossification but this is going to require deeper cross-industry collaboration than what we're normally used to, as core is no longer in the business of driving consensus changes - with much broader community agency