One year after Core v30: why we think it cost bitcoin its “only money” premium
A year ago this week, Bitcoin Core shipped version 30, which let far more data into bitcoin transactions by default. Bitcoin hasn't made a new high since. A price chart can't prove why. But we think v30 chipped away at the one thing that gives bitcoin its premium: being money and nothing else.
What v30 changed
- June 2025: Core developers merged pull request #32406, lifting the default limit on OP_RETURN data. The old default was 80 bytes; the new one is effectively the block itself. CoinDesk.
- October 2025: Bitcoin Core 30 shipped with the change. By then about 21% of reachable nodes were running Knots, which kept the old limit. Cointelegraph.
- 2026: the pushback became BIP-110. When that failed, a grassroots node movement split off on Aug 8, 2026 with a new proof of work. That chain is XBT.
What price did
Bitcoin set its all-time high of about $126,000 on Oct 6, 2025, days before v30 shipped. On Oct 10 the US announced new tariffs on China, and the largest liquidation in crypto history took bitcoin from about $122,000 to under $110,000. Today it trades around $83,000, roughly 34% below that high, and the high still stands a year later.
To be clear: the October crash was the tariff news and leverage, not a software release. Macro, ETF flows and a dozen other things moved the price this year. Nobody can pin a number on v30.
Why we still think it mattered
We argued in money is worth most when it's only money that gold's side jobs, jewelry and industry, make it weaker money. Its value gets split between being money and being a material. Bitcoin was the first money with no side job. That purity is a big part of why people were willing to pay a monetary premium for it.
v30 sent the opposite signal. Bitcoin's most-used software now treated large-scale data storage as a normal use of the chain. Whatever comes of it, data markets, inscriptions or uses nobody has thought of yet, bitcoin is now partly a storage network, and every block shares space and attention between money and everything else.
Monetary premium is a belief. When the people stewarding the reference software stop protecting "money only," some holders stop believing it too. We think that's part of why bitcoin's story has felt weaker for a year, even while the price held up far better than past bear markets.
Where XBT fits
XBT is the chain that kept the old answer: block space is for money. It still has to earn a premium of its own, with a small market, thin books and most of its transactions still copies of bitcoin's. But it's the clearest test of the idea we have.
If we're right, the market will eventually pay more for money that is only money. If we're wrong, the price will tell us that too.
Opinion. Price figures approximate; sources linked. Not financial advice.