The people building bitcoin are building. Price is price. Core 31.0rc1 is in testing. OP_TEMPLATEHASH is moving through the covenant research track. Taproot-native rebindable transactions got a writeup. None of this shows up on CNBC because it doesn't have a price attached.

Covenants are the thing worth watching. OP_TEMPLATEHASH is one of several proposals (CTV, VAULT, CSFS) all trying to answer the same question: how do you let a script define what a future transaction can do? Practically, it enables non-custodial vaults, better Lightning channel factories, time-locked inheritance, and trustless coinjoins without round-trip coordination.

The rebindable taproot transactions work is adjacent. Today a taproot script path is committed at construction time. Rebindable means you could update it, which opens a class of applications that look a lot like "smart contracts" without a new chain or token.

None of this ships tomorrow. Core 31.0rc1 is a release candidate, not a deployment. Covenant proposals are still research. But the pace of spec work in 2026 is noticeably faster than 2023–2024.

The people building bitcoin are building. Price is price. The Optech newsletter this week is quietly doing more for bitcoin than every macro take you read in March.

Source: Bitcoin Optech #397 (bitcoinops.org/en/podcast/2026/03/24) — Core 31.0rc1 testing, OP_TEMPLATEHASH discussion, Taproot-native rebindable transactions.