What do KIP-17 and KIP-20 add to Kaspa?

KIP-17 adds covenant opcodes that give transactions the ability to inspect their own contents — a feature called transaction introspection. KIP-20 introduces consensus-tracked covenant IDs, meaning the Kaspa network itself records and tracks the identity of stateful contracts at the protocol level. Transaction introspection lets a script examine fields like outputs or amounts before deciding whether to approve a spend, which is the building block for programmable spending conditions. For a beginner, KIP-17 and KIP-20 together mean Kaspa gains the ability to enforce rules about how coins can be spent and to track contract state natively — foundational steps toward more complex on-chain applications.