The thing about the OP_RETURN limit that is causing it to change that isn’t being articulated clearly: It has for the longest time been consensus that there’s rarely ever a reason to store much more than a 40-byte hash onchain for any L2 protocol that runs ontop of Bitcoin, hence the relay limit was 80 bytes While true that it has always been the case that metaprotocols always benefitted from storing more data inside Bitcoin itself, these use cases have been largely ignored because they’re not monetary use cases of the BTC asset: Generally metaprotocols like this leverage the Bitcoin *blockchain*, but their rules/logic cannot interact with the BTC asset directly. So they’re not ”important” to accommodate for the Bitcoin blockchain This changed with the BitVM work 2 years ago. Now, for the first time, it is possible to build L2 protocols that interact with the bitcoin asset directly while leveraging more exotic techniques (like ZK proofs and DA) This is why Citrea’s use case was able to get an audience with Core. If Citrea was just building an Ethereum sidechain which interacts with unrelated assets to bitcoin, it would never have had influence in how Core sets its default relay limits But because BitVM exists, and ZK proofs and DA therefore have a direct impact on the rules by which actual bitcoins travel through the logic of the blockchain, this class of L2 is now for the first time being considered when Core reviews their relay limits, instead of just catering to Lightning After 9 year of custodial trends dominating Lightning, can you really blame them for making sure that channel-free L2s are being cared for in the relay defaults equation? Extra homework: It’s not even about ”caring for Citrea”, Citrea can already embed the data they need into Bitcoin using unspendable outputs, it costs Citrea basically nothing to do this, Core is just adapting so that *Bitcoin* is not harmed via unnecessary UTXO-bloat by the growth of Citrea-like protocols ontop of Bitcoin, at the end of the day it’s caring for *Bitcoin*, but I’ve seen people try to explain this to Knots people a million times with no success so I’m offering an alternative angle