The announcement was detailed on Thursday in a research paper titled, "ColliderScript: Covenants in Bitcoin via 160-bit hash collisions."
The publication comes as Bitcoin, the oldest and largest blockchain, has attracted hordes of developers trying to add programmability and additional network layers that could lead to not only more applications being built atop the peer-to-peer network but also faster and cheaper venues for transaction execution. The goal is to catch up to what Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain, has achieved -- but with Bitcoin's famously robust security.