I [requested][0] the economic nodes to review different soft fork proposals and share their opinion on 5 March 2025. Four entries were added to the [wiki][1] and nobody has any objections to the proposals. Some organizations do not want to publicly participate in this process to avoid politics and drama.
A [letter][2] was signed on 9 June 2025 by bitcoin developers to get more core contributors involved in the review process. It was followed by a [proposal][3] that makes a few changes to CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY and combines it with CHECKSIGFROMSTACK. Personally, I don't like that TEMPLATEHASH is restricted to taproot and don't see anything wrong with CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY. However, other developers may disagree with me and have different opinion. I have created an IRC channel for workshops, meetings, activation, etc.
We can finalize a meeting schedule so we can use the IRC channel to move closer to covenants activation on bitcoin.
I think BIP 8 would be a better option for the next soft fork. [Previously][4], some suggestions were [rejected][5] because knots was not used by a large number of users. However, things have changed since then and [~15%][6] of nodes use knots for bitcoin.