Over the past 90 days, OP_RETURN registrations and transactions have remained prominent on the Bitcoin network.
As the mempool.space developer known on X as Orangesurf stated on September 30, these operations represent "40% of total transactions."
During the same period, Orangesurf specified that these types of transactions contributed "10% of the fees paid on the network and that their weight is equivalent to 28% of the total processed in Bitcoin."
OP_RETURN in Bitcoin is an opcode (operation code) that allows arbitrary data to be included in a transaction, such as messages, text, or images.
As CriptoNoticias reported, the current representativeness of OP_RETURN transactions in Bitcoin has been maintained since at least April of this year, when almost half of all transactions were non-monetary.
Other reports, from June and July, reflected that this trend continued.
Bitcoin Technical Debate on Enrollments
The weight of transactions that include data via OP_RETURN or enrolments, as reflected by the data described above, has reignited technical discussions within the Bitcoin community.
Several developers believe that these uses increase pressure on block space and can affect both costs and network performance.
In this context, on September 22, developer Mike Schmidt, who is also the CEO of Brink, a nonprofit organization that funds Bitcoin Core, reported on X:
"I've opened a pull request (PR) in Bitcoin Core to remove the deprecation of the datacarrier and datacarriersize options. I realize this is a sensitive topic for Bitcoin Core users…"
Mike Schmidt, Bitcoin developer.
The expression "opening a PR" means proposing changes to the source code for other contributors to review and eventually integrate.
In this case, Schmidt submitted his PR to the Bitcoin Core repository to reverse the deprecation (or marking as obsolete) of the "datacarrier" and "datacarriersize" options.
These options allow nodes to decide whether to accept transactions with embedded data and set the maximum size of that data.
The developer explains in the repository that his goal is to eliminate this "obsolescence" status in Core version 30, to avoid confusion among users, after the OP_RETURN limit in that client was increased to 100,000 bytes, thus increasing the amount of non-monetary information that can be included in each transaction.
For Schmidt, clarifying and keeping these options available would help reduce confusion surrounding the handling of non-monetary transactions, precisely at a time when their volume remains high (as detailed by Orangesurf).
Following the announcement of Schmidt's PR, some developers expressed distrust about the true scope of the proposal. For example, Léo opined:
"This looks like damage control. After that, Core developers can say, "Look, we heard you, and you can still configure datacarrier." Meanwhile, the default is still outrageously high, and -datacarrier is still broken."
Léo, Bitcoin developer.
With this statement, Léo suggests that opening the PR would be merely a maneuver to give the impression that criticism is being addressed, without actually changing the parameters in question.
In the same conversation, Luke Dashjr, lead maintainer of the Knots client, joined the debate by asking, "What do you call it when someone tries to make you believe they changed something, but they actually didn't?"
His comment reinforces the suspicion that Schmidt's proposal would not represent a substantial change.
This exchange reveals that while OP_RETURN entries and data continue to occupy a significant portion of block space, there is still debate about how the parameters governing these uses should be managed.
In this context, the figures shared by Orangesurf reflect that OP_RETURN entries and data are not a marginal phenomenon.
Their persistence, along with discussions about the data carrier, demonstrates that Bitcoin Core's design continues to be the subject of technical reviews and disagreements about how to balance flexibility and efficiency in block usage.
