It’s time for a sequel.
On April 11 and 12, we’re hosting the second OPNEXT, a technical bitcoin conference focused on scaling solutions and improvements to Bitcoin’s tech stack. To fit it into two days we’ve had to schedule a pretty tight agenda. If you’re not a dev or even a dev who hasn’t kept up with the latest topics, we’ve put together a cheat sheet to give you a jump start on each talk.
We’ll also be livestreaming the conference on a few locations, including X and YouTube!
We’ve included a few links to videos, technical documentation, and discussion on the topics. We also have tried to structure the conference so that some talks build on previous ones. The more familiar you are with some of the foundational material, the better time you’ll have!
P.S. there’s only 30 tickets left to the event, so be sure to get them before prices go up on April 1!
Day 1
Jeremy Rubin: CTV + CSFS
Jeremy Rubin is a prominent Bitcoin developer known for the CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) soft fork proposal, which introduces covenants to enhance Bitcoin’s scripting functionality. Recently Jeremy has publicly supported the CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY and CHECKSIGFROMSTACK combined proposal for consideration as the next upgrade to Bitcoin. If you want to know how CTV works and what it does, head to https://utxos.org/.
Antoine Poinsot: The Great Consensus Cleanup
The Great Consensus Cleanup, originally coined and proposed in 2019 by Matt Corallo, is kind of like doing basic cleanup on Bitcoin, and it includes things like mproving some known vulnerabilities such as worst-case validation times. It hadn’t received much attention until it was revisited by Poinsot in 2024. His post on Delving Bitcoin is well worth reading prior to the conference.
Sean Ryan: Scaling Base Layer Security With Vaults
A protocol engineer at Anchorage, Sean gave a great talk on OP_VAULT at our last OPNEXT conference. Vaults basically improve the custodial experience. We recently wrote a slightly more user-friendly explanation of vaults.
Panel: How Should Custodians Think About Bitcoin?
OG Bitcoin journalist Pete Rizzo will be hosting a titanous panel with representatives from Coinbase, Bitwise, and AnchorWatch. Bitcoin custodians hold more BTC than ever, and Coinbase notably custodians for 8 out of 11 ETFs. In the age of the bitcoin treasury, it’s more important than ever to follow who’s holding the BTC.
Jesus: Intro to Bitcoin Script
SetDev founder Jesus gives a crash course on how Bitcoin script works. To prep for this one, we recommend beginners head to learnmeabitcoin and more advanced bitcoiners to check out the semi-technical tutorials on the Bitscript website.
PortlandHODL: How to Break Bitcoin
The title speaks for itself. The best way to prep for this is to have reviewed Antoine Poinsot’s Great Consensus Cleanup and Jesus’s Intro to Bitcoin Script. We also recommend spending some time reading through the transaction explanations on learnmeabitcoin.
Hunter Beast: BIP-360, Making Bitcoin Quantum Resistant
Hunter’s been leading the discussion on quantum resistant Bitcoi, and we’ve covered most of the high points of his work to-date. We’ve featured a Quantum Bitcoin for Dummies breakdown, 2 episodes of Bitcoin Season 2, and Hunter’s presentation at the last OPNEXT. We also recommend you go read the BIP itself and mailing list discussion, as there are many different perspectives.
Ekrem Bal: Practical & Economical Considerations for BitVM
Citrea cofounder Ekrem Bal has been leading one of the best BitVM research teams. There’s been multiple updates to Citrea’s Clementine bridge, most recently in February. But BitVM has some challenges with liquidity requirements. As the BitVM builders improve their design, some considerations mustweigh the practical with the economically optimal.
Day 2
Jameson Lopp: Goldiblocks
While Jameson hasn’t totally revealed his talk, it clearly has something to do with block weight. Visit River for the most basic info on block weight and learnmeabitcoin for a more detailed transaction weight breakdown. It might also be helpful to look at the soft fork that introduced block weight as a concept, SegWit.
ReardenCode: Capabilities, Opcodes & Magical Thinking
Rearden has been a leading developer advocate for covenant soft fork proposals, notably LNHANCE. By the time we get to Rearden, you will probably have a good foundational understanding of what certain opcodes do, but he’ll pull back and help us with a framework of how we should think about Bitcoin capabilities generally. We recommend reading through Rearden’s previous long form writing to get a sense of how he thinks through issues of Bitcoin scaling, opcodes, and proposals
James O’Beirne: Modeling Bitcoin’s Blocksize Constraints
Core contributor James has recently been critical of what he sees as a social problem limiting Bitcoin scaling. He’ll be presenting some modeling and discussion on the current limitations of bitcoin and what bottlenecks might hinder an increase in Bitcoin’s blocksize. To appropriately prep for this, you should probably study all of Bitcoin’s development history, but it might be useful to read Jonathan Bier’s book (published online in full), The Blocksize War.
Jon Atack: Re-imagining the BIPs Process
With newish BIP editors at the helm, the overall BIPs process is being revisited. Jon Atack and others (notably, Murch) have been discussing updating BIP 2, which describes the de-facto process for tracking and discussing proposed changes to Bitcoin. We recommend reading BIPs 1, 2 & 3 as well as BIPs 8 & 9 here for a crash course.
Steven Roose: State of the Ark: Do We Need CTV?
Ark is one of the more promising ways to scale Bitcoin without consensus changes. There are some great articles on Bitcoin Magazine explaining what Ark is and the different things it can do (scale Lightning, Bitcoin assets, etc). We also recommend checking out Bitcoin Optech for some developer discussion to-date.
Misha Komorov: PIPEs v2
PIPEs can emulate covenants on Bitcoin without a soft fork using Polynomial Inner-Product Encryption Schemes. This one can be pretty dense for beginners and non-cryptography researchers. We recommend checking out Bitcoin Season 2’s interview w/ Misha and also their more in-depth presentation at our last OPNEXT.
Kevin Hurley: L2 But Make it Better: Introducing Spark
From the team at Lightspark, Spark is a new L2 that combines a number of existing technical innovations, including statechains and the Lightning Network. We recommend reading up on Statechains, in particular the original blog by Ruben Somsen. Then go and poke through spark.info for some supportive explainers.
