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Kaspa Q&A What's the difference between transaction payload and OP_RETURN data?

In Bitcoin, OP_RETURN is essentially a hack for publishing data on-chain without bloating the UTXO set: OP_RETURN is a Bitcoin opcode that makes the script fail instantly. Therefore, an output wit...

posted 3d ago by someone235‭

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#1: Initial revision by user avatar someone235‭ · 2025-09-30T08:50:28Z (3 days ago) 
In Bitcoin, OP_RETURN is essentially a hack for publishing data on-chain without bloating the UTXO set:

`OP_RETURN` is a Bitcoin opcode that makes the script fail instantly. Therefore, an output with scriptPubKey of `OP_RETURN <SOME ARBITRARY DATA>` is provably unspendable and therefore Bitcoin Core v0.9 introduced a policy of excluding it from the UTXO set.

Kaspa chose to avoid such hacks, and instead dedicated a transaction field, called payload, for storing data. Since this field is not part of the output, it won't be stored in the UTXO set in the first place.