What are covenants on Kaspa L1?

Covenants on Kaspa L1 are a way to attach rules and state directly to an asset output, controlling exactly how it can be spent now and in the future. In a standard blockchain transaction, an output is simply "spent" or "unspent" — it holds no memory of what came before or what must come next. Kaspa covenants change this: a protected output can carry state, define what the next valid state must look like, and validate the outputs that follow it. Each protected output also maintains a non-forgeable lineage through Covenant IDs (KIP20), meaning every step in the asset's history is cryptographically linked and tamper-proof. For a beginner, this means Kaspa can enforce smart contract-like rules about how an asset behaves across many transactions, all directly on L1 without a separate execution layer.