Core Lightning v25.12 "Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience" is here! 🎉
New nodes open with BIP-39 12-word recovery phrases. Existing nodes maintain full backward compatibility.
Major performance gains for large nodes and xpay improvements from user feedback. 📊⚡
This release delivers massive performance wins: Postgres reads 30% faster, database latency down 12%, worst-case reduced from 353s to 56.9s.
xpay handles Phoenix payments reliably. New networkevents subsystem tracks peer ping times in real-time.
Since v25.09, Core Lightning has merged 520 commits from 24 authors in 92 days. A warm welcome to 3 first-time contributors helping CLN continue evolving with more stability, usability and developer power. Onward. ⚡
This release delivers massive performance wins: Postgres reads 30% faster, database latency down 12%, worst-case reduced from 353s to 56.9s.
xpay handles Phoenix payments reliably. New networkevents subsystem tracks peer ping times in real-time.
Blockstream
Core Lightning 25.12: "Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience"
We told you 24.08, 25.05 and 25.09 had enhancements, but you haven’t seen anything like this! We know we’re biased, but this release is full of...
Since v25.09, Core Lightning has merged 520 commits from 24 authors in 92 days. A warm welcome to 3 first-time contributors helping CLN continue evolving with more stability, usability and developer power. Onward. ⚡
This integration brings:
🌍 World-class engineering talent
⚡️ Advanced blockchain and smart contracting development
🏗️ Accelerating delivery across platform products
Blockstream remains focused on scaling secure, production-grade Bitcoin infrastructure.
Full details:
Built on Core Lightning and powered by the VLS Project, Greenlight shows how to implement Lightning infrastructure without custody risk:
✅ Professionally managed nodes
✅ Validated signing on user devices
✅ APIs for wallets and services to go self-custodial
Read the full custody-model report:
Tune in Monday at 12pm ET.
What you're seeing: A transaction spending from a Simplicity program.
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To understand why this matters, consider what causes most DeFi hacks:
- Ambiguous conditions
- Unchecked assumptions
- Logical edge cases that humans miss
Audits catch some of these, but not all.
Simplicity eliminates ambiguity at the language level.
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How does it work?
Simplicity is designed to be mathematically rigorous and predictable.
As a low-level functional language, it allows mechanical reasoning about behavior, with proofs verifiable before any on-chain deployment.
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General-purpose languages are great for flexibility, but that flexibility comes at a cost: ambiguity.
A single unchecked assumption in a general-purpose contract can have systemic financial consequences.
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Simplicity was engineered for high-assurance financial programming, where correctness, termination, and behavior can be *proven* before deployment.
Its semantics are clear, and its outcomes deterministic.
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The goal isn’t “more expressive” smart contracts.
It’s contracts that can’t fail silently, because they’ve been verified to work exactly as intended.
That’s the difference between general-purpose code and high-assurance engineering.
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Simplicity was launched on the 