I have published The BCH Podcast CHIP endorsements on the Podcast blog. Reproduced below:
The Bitcoin Cash Podcast is adding its support & approval for all 4 of the Jason Dreyzehner proposed CHIPs to lock-in November 15 2025 & go live May 15 2026 as the “Layla” upgrade. I will also be advocating as such regarding my involvement internally in Selene, BLISS & BLAZE and don’t anticipate any difficulties there, but this statement is not on behalf of those entities.
Github commit hash: bd3ebc76bfa2190255fd3b5fcd84ec8910652f4e
Github commit hash: c144f03fe11b6de0e924b2285b355370d0e658b8
Github commit hash: a432a19bcbc597391d0f0a29ae62a902b575d1dd
Github commit hash: 26e22566a18f2f3b542ff46a70d258d5da585cd8
Note: Functions CHIP is the unaltered version, not the “Take 2” or “Take 3” proposals.
As discussed on The Bitcoin Cash Podcast Episode 157, community polling indicates a high appetite for protocol innovation & upgrades - presumably built on the confidence of previous upgrade quality & results. It is very noticeable how the CashTokens upgrade in 2023 is living up to expectations in late 2025. There has been no problems really to speak of & impressive traction/uptake of CashTokens technology. I have a biased favourite project in the BLISS NFT ticket collections, but the success of CashTokens is widespread and compelling. One excellent recent example, congratulations to the Riften Labs team on recently passing $1M USD TVL on Cauldron! The mounting success of the CashTokens ecosystem speaks to the quality of both research & implementation of BCH upgrades and the community’s ability to make powerful investments in those upgrades without expecting instant gratification. The trend is set to continue in 2026.
Loops, Functions & Bitwise operations are all standard issue features of essentially every programming language ever so I’m glad to see the BCH VM catching up to that standard. Loops demonstrates that yet again the BCH community is able to bypass propaganda & misunderstandings (“Bitcoin VM has no loops”) in a way that other cryptocurrency communities severely struggle to. I was also impressed by the community debate that produced the final products (including iterating Functions from OP_EVAL, different function variations & the removal of lowering base-instruction cost). It is critical for the CHIP process & the work produced to be evaluated & critiqued without contention becoming unresolvable.
I would also like to note I see an underrated value in the P2S CHIP specifically - moving P2S from non-standard relay policy to standard. Especially given the current drama in BTC over policy/consensus gap exploitation (aka “Node wars” between “Knots/filters” vs “Core/spammers”), I see a strong opportunity for BCH to once against front-run potential problems by a research effort (& possibly CHIP) to unify policy/consensus where appropriate or document the status/reasoning and reflect on alternative solutions where not. For instance, perhaps an ABLA/DAA style approach - either by consensus or policy - could be used for minimum fee rates? Needs investigation. BitcoinCashAutist (notable CHIP contributor) also mentioned this in his 2026 CHIP endorsement. I encourage readers interested in this initiative to read or contribute to my Bitcoin Cash Research thread about this topic of non-standard transactions.
In any case, the four endorsed CHIPs combined make a very powerful upgrade. I’m thrilled to see BCH making bold strides forward to accelerate our growing momentum & industry-leading presence in UTXO DeFi. I am also glad to be a part of the momentum around endorsements (my own endorsement in 2024 was not published until late October) & developer tooling/education (sign up to BCH BLAZE!).
There is also great stuff on the horizon with the 1 minute blocks proposal continuing to be discussed. I would love to see UTXO Commitments start to be focussed on in more detail & the relay policy ideas mentioned above but that’s simply my wishful thinking - as always, a /someone problem!
Finally, a big thank you to Jason Dreyzehner for his tireless work on these proposals & anyone who has been involved in feedback, review, implementation, testing or assistance of any kind. It’s a team effort and testament to a decentralised community but Jason also deserves specific recognition for his ceaseless effort here. Delivering two enormous upgrades back-to-back is an effort that will resonate through BCH history in perpetuity.
Layla follows CashTokens & Velma in bringing BCH to the forefront of cryptocurrency scriptability and will draw in ever more interested parties as a result. I’m enthused & anticipating activation already!
Jeremy
CHIP-2024-12 P2S: Pay to Script
This CHIP helps align Standardness Rules with Consensus Rules, reducing edge-case complexity in BCH contract development and simplifying certain constructs.
With this proposal, locking bytecode is no longer required to match specific patterns (P2PKH, P2SH20/32, P2PK, etc.). It also makes length requirements consistent across Standardness and Consensus, and increases the Token Commitment length from 40 bytes to 128 bytes.
In my view, these changes are both sane and sensible, and I give this CHIP my full support and endorsement.
CHIP-2025-05 Bitwise: Re-Enable Bitwise Operations
Some of these operations already exist but were disabled in the past due to safety concerns stemming from loose specification.
This CHIP proposes to re-enable them under a tightened and unambiguous specification. Jason has already demonstrated the practical utility of these operations in his Quantum Root Vault proof-of-concept (Quantumroot: Quantum-Secure Vaults for Bitcoin Cash).
I believe this proposal is valuable and robust, and it has my full support and endorsement.
CHIP-2021-05: Loops (Bounded Looping Operations)
Looping is a fundamental programming construct that will significantly simplify many contract systems and provide the BCH VM with powerful new capabilities.
With the activation of the BCH VM Limits CHIP in 2025, we now have the safeguards needed to enable looping safely, preventing issues such as infinite loops or resource abuse.
This proposal is both practical and well-timed, and it has my full support and endorsement.
CHIP-2025-05 Functions: Function Definition and Invocation Operations
Over the past several years, the Bitcoin Cash Virtual Machine has undergone significant upgrades (such as Introspection and CashTokens), greatly expanding its capabilities. These improvements have enabled the development of advanced smart contract systems - comparable to those on EVM-based platforms - while still preserving the efficiency of Bitcoin’s original UTXO model. True to Bitcoin’s founding vision, this ensures BCH remains both affordable and scalable as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Jason’s Functions CHIP (2025-05) manages to improve this efficiency even further by allowing compression of BCH Contract Systems, thus reducing the transaction costs for many Smart Contract use-cases. At scale, these compression benefits become very beneficial towards BCH’s goal of reaching mass adoption. Just as importantly, the CHIP’s simple, non-constrained, approach also allows for many future discovered/undiscovered use-cases (e.g. Quantum Proof Vaults, MAST-like constructs that also allow code-execution) to be implemented optimally without requiring additional, specialized, changes to the BCH VM itself - or incurring technical-debt that might need to be undone later.
For these reasons, the Functions CHIP (2025-05) has my full support and endorsement.
GP Endorsement for CHIPs published
General Protocols has been convinced that in the space of possible alternatives, including EVAL, modified versions of Functions and doing nothing, define/invoke is the best choice for BCH and endorses CHIP-2025-05 Functions (Commit 26e2256) for 2026 activation.
General Protocols also endorses the following CHIPs for 2026 activation:
I endorse “CHIP-2021-05 Loops: Bounded Looping Operations (bd3ebc76)” for 2026 lock-in.
In my view the Loops CHIP makes the Bitcoin Cash VM “Turing-complete within VM limits” (Linear Bounded Automaton might be the more correct term). This is very important as it greatly increases the number of useful computations that can be conveniently expressed using the VM. Together with the Functions CHIP, Loops really complete the VM. There is some overlap between these two CHIPs, but they also complement each other and should go in together.
Having implemented the Loops CHIP (in albaVm) my view is that the implementation risk is not higher than other CHIPs we have delivered recently.
Metaprogramming has been brought up as a risk (especially in the context of Functions). Loops also enable metaprogramming by making evaluators like TurtleVm more practical. Such evaluators can now be made universal and able to evaluate any size program within VM limits. And as VM limits are relaxed evaluators become more practical. Metaprogramming is evidence of the VM’s growing capability. Turing’s original machine was also capable of hosting Turing machine evaluators, with simulated tapes.
By combining Loops and our existing conditional operators it is possible to implement Functions (in an inefficient & convoluted way). One could even establish TurtleVm as such a function and call out to it from various parts of the contract without having to duplicate the evaluator at every call-site. So with Loops we can have both Functions and OP_EVAL but in an inefficient and hard to audit way. Better to establish an efficient and standard way of doing Functions (the Functions CHIP) and roll out Loops & Functions together. Also note that Loops can be expressed via the recursion provided by the Functions CHIP, but less efficiently.
With Loops and Functions the Bitcoin Cash VM becomes much more capable which opens up for more permissionless innovation. This means that we can have solutions like Quantumroot already in May 2026, instead of having to implement quantum resistance via the CHIP process.
What is the timeline for the lock-in process, and how long will endorsements remain open?
Lock-in happens on November 15th 2025. Activation is May 15th 2026.
For either a positive/negative/neutral endorsement to affect the consensus process, it effectively needs to be published before November 15th, and the earlier the better (gives time to discuss or react if you have any strong, valid objections or doubts).
Let’s go! Since everyone has defined the upcoming upgrades: P2S, Bitwise, Functions, and Bounded Loops. There’s no need to repeat them. I endorse all four CHIPs as well.
Thank you to all contributors and reviewers so far – I’ve frozen the Loops, Functions, P2S, and Bitwise CHIPs for lock-in, and stakeholder statements will be periodically updated through November 1. Final approval requests will go out in early October.
Please feel free to open issues in the repo for further comments, clarifications, or feedback, and please continue to publish and/or send pull requests with stakeholder statements.
These CHIP are integrated and live on the Sept. 15 public test network (tempnet) – please see that topic for details on how to setup a tempnet node and experiment with the upgrade 
I endorse “CHIP-2024-12 P2S: Pay to Script (c144f03f)” for 2026 lock-in.
The P2S CHIP relaxes some transaction standardness rules to align them with consensus. The VM Limits make sure that contracts still stay within compute bounds. It also increases the token commitment length somewhat. The CHIP has the effect of simplifying transaction validation and allowing larger contracts to be more conveniently expressed.
I endorse “CHIP-2025-05 Bitwise: Re-Enable Bitwise Operations (a432a19b)” for
2026 lock-in.
Adding the bitwise operations can be seen as an optimization of commonly occurring use cases. Such general optimization is a good idea as it can help reduce the need for tailor-made opcodes with more narrow use cases.
I haven’t yet implemented this CHIP in albaVm/albaDsl but plan to do so next and will come back if I have additional comments.
On behalf of myself (Kallisti.cash), Selene Wallet (selene.cash), bch.ninja, and xulu.tech, I fully endorse Functions, Loops, Bitwise, and P2S for the BCH 2026 Upgrade Cycle.
On behalf of myself, @zapit_io, @bitcann_org, and OpenCashDAO, I endorse the BCH 2026 Layla upgrade. Endorsement on X
