Could you eli5 covenants?
Discussion
Among the most simple soft forks, but with debate about how simple or how detailed to do it.
Covenants allow bitcoins to be restricted by the sender with certain conditions before being re-respent, which can help with vault storage and also can help with making new scaling L2s.
*restricted by recipient
We have two covenants already, CSV and CLTV. they're time locks to control when a tx can be spent. The next basic covenant is CTV, a "UTXO lock", this constrains the TXID so that the transaction is *guaranteed*. This will help us scale via solutions like Ark and Timeout-Trees. My personal favorite is NIC's (Non-interactive Channels), this let's you commit to a lightning channel simply by knowing its Txid + hash. To explain how this would work, I need to withdrawal from my exchange on Friday, I go ahead and commit to making a LN channel with Bob inside my PubKey, and the exchange pays me in their batched tx. Now that I have the commitment, I can at any time, contact Bob to "establish" the channel, with no need of a second transaction.
As for Lyn's comment on how the dev community is split. CTV can be upgraded either to Txhash or Template Key and a lot of devs want to skip step 1 and go straight to the advanced covenant proposals. They've even gone as far as to say that they fear CTV would delay txhash. I want txhash too! But it needs years of more bikeshedding before it's even close to ready. CTV is ready, it's been ready for 4 years.
Knowing so very little about what you just said. I am a proponent of the solutions who have been in the public square for years. Those are the ones that I would give survivorship bias to. If they were faulty, there will be long and detailed information on their trade offs.