In this week update by @tuma, we feature two specification improvements to the Lightning Network, with the merging of BOLT12 payer proofs, and @Cashu, with the possibility to mint and melt ecash tokens through custom payment methods. We also cover the recent COLDCARD incident. Due to a bug in the entropy generation firmware, users saw their funds drained from their wallets. We finally discuss the new BIP460 for Cross-Input Signature Aggregation (CISA), the Indian government against India, and some other interesting news. View article →

In this week update form @tuma, we feature the most interesting things happened during Bitcoin++ Consensus Edition in Toronto (@btcplusplus), where devs met to discuss new consensus proposals and what are the best way forward for Bitcoin. We also cover some other interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Notably, a PR was opened in Bitcoin Core to bring BIP54 (Consensus Cleanup) into the protocol, Lightning Labs launched a third Ark implementation, and silent payments being integrated in libsecp256k1. View article →

In this week update by @tuma we feature the ongoing effort to migrate LDK from GitHub to a self-hosted instance, after the company banned the Lightning implementation from running CI. We also cover a new BIP being published, BIP95, which defines a new testnet to replace testnet4, and six new BIPs being assigned a number. In particular, BIP453, provides common terminology for transaction components, BIPs 455, 456, and 457 compose the specifications for the SwiftSync protocol for faster IBD, and BIPs 458 and 459 describe half and full signatureaggregation, an important building block towards CISA. Finally, we cover some interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. In particular, we present some interviews from Nairobi, mempool(.)space (@mempool) joining the SV2 working group, and some useful information about how to protect yourself during the upcoming forks. View article →

Second partners with Tando, Mavapay, JunubBTC to bring Ark-powered Bitcoin settlement to Africa at @btcplusplus open source edition in Kenya, Nairobi last week. Read the full article for more

Second partners with Tando, Mavapay, JunubBTC to bring Ark-powered Bitcoin settlement to Africa

Ark ships mobile-money systems across five African countries

In this week update we feature PR2049 in CDK (@Cashu), which aims to integrate Payjoin in the Cashu implementation. We also cover Century Metadata (@Century Metadata), the new venture by former Core-lightning developer Rusty Russell (@Rusty Russell), which promises long term reliable storage and retrieval for small amounts of private data. We finally present other news from the ecosystem. Notably, Bitcoin++ (@btcplusplus) held its first-ever African conference, LDK banned by GitHub, and a guest book review on the Insider Edtion. View article →

"There are five or six books that every serious cypherpunk ends up reading. A Lodging of Wayfaring Men is one of them." Check out Max Hillebrand ( @Max ) review of Paul Rosenberg's book for the Insider! View article →

In this week update by @tuma we feature the latest release of the Cashu Development Kit (CDK) (@Cashu), which introduced a new BDK on-chain payment backend based on NUT-30. We also cover the effort from the Marmot protocol (@marmot) to draft a new set of specifications to improve the reliability of the system. We finally present some interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Notably, Bark by Second (@Second) available on mainnet, a new vulnerability found in Bitcoin Core, improvements on splicing, and a draft BIP for a new testnet. View article →

In this week update by @tuma, we feature the most interesting things happened during @btcplusplus Economic Edition in Vienna, where devs met to discuss how economic incentives can shape the future of Bitcoin. We also cover some other interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Notably, @Cashu going on-chain, two vulnerabilities found in Joinmarket-ng, and a new proposal for a novel L2 on top of Bitcoin are discussed. View article →

What happened last week in Bitcoin? In this week update by @tuma, we discuss Numo, the first tap-2-pay point-of-sale solution for Bitcoin, @Alby Sandbox, an update on the latest @Cashu NUT specifications, the first BIP54 compatible block, and more. Find the full post here👇🏻 View article →

This week in Bitcoin Core: bitcoin-core contributor @npub1y5hq...9myy reports on merged PRs from - Vasil Dimov (tx broadcast privacy improvements circa feb 2024); - David Gumberg (wallet tests); - Sjors Provoost (improvements on coinbase construction) ...notes from six working groups and more! Read the full take 👇

This week in Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core contributor kevkevin covers some of the latest updates...

New privacy tools are coming to bitcoin, but fitting them into existing wallets is cumbersome and clunky. In today’s @btc_insider_edition guest writer npub1yashrajtj3ddn9u2ypzalp4qew4f9u8wls0tpf5kuvqarenqwckql8adnu breaks down how Silent Payments and Payjoin break traditional wallet paradigms. Full article on our substack 📄

Shoehorning new features into existing on-chain UX (sucks)

Payjoin exposes this; silent payments fixes it

Yesterday I spent the day at the Arkade Activation Day in the beautiful city of Lugano, one of the most important Bitcoin hubs in Europe, where ArkLabs CEO Marco Argentieri officially launched ArkadeOS on Mainnet. The event featured several announcements from companies integrating Arkade inside their products, such as Boltz with their Ark swaps and LendaSat with non-custodial, Bitcoin-backed loans, panels with some of the most important names in the space, and discussions about Bitcoin capital markets. We all know the limitations of the modern financial system. It is a trust-based environment, centralized with slow settlement and limited innovation. Bitcoin is creating a new paradigm, but the base-layer alone cannot provide the infrastructure for the system of tomorrow. The financial stack of tomorrow will have to achieve instant finality, it must be permissionless and self-custodial, programmable by design, and, of course, Bitcoin-native. This is what ArkLabs is trying to build. Arkade, ArkLabs’ implementation of Ark, will not just be a protocol for payments, but it aims to be the foundation of the financial system of the future, with a whole new ecosystem of applications built on top of it. Ark is a programmable execution layer for Bitcoin, which allow off-chain virtual execution. Since it is based on the same UTXO concept, namely Virtual UTXOs (VTXOs), everything that can be done on Bitcoin can be done on Ark, but with the advantage to decouple from space and time constraints of the base layer. According to Marco Argentieri, these characteristics make it the best possible layer for building the financial infrastructure of tomorrow. However, he was not the only Ark bull in the room. Francis Pouliot, from Bull Bitcoin, Roy Sheinfeld, from Breeze, and Gareth Gobler, from LayerZ Wallet, all agreed that Ark is the best solution for improving the user experience of Bitcoin payments without sacrificing self-custody. Its most important characteristic is unilateral exit, which makes it a better choice with respect to other solutions, such as Liquid. Bitcoin is the best possible saving technology, but there is the need for more financial services that could leverage those savings. There are Trillions in productive Bitcoin capital ready to be deployed, but the financial infrastructure is not ready. There is the need for more financial apps for different use cases, such as lending and trading. Companies such as Lendasat and Hodl Hodl are working actively to integrate Arkade in their applications. To prepare for this, ArkLabs’ team is also working on extending virtualization to other asset types, allowing to create Arkade Assets. This would allow to bring Stablecoins to Bitcoin and use them in these financial apps. Arkade comes with 3 different SDKs, for Rust ,Go and TypeScript for building apps, an enterprise-level wallet, Fulmine, and a mobile wallet, provided as a Progressive Web App (PWA). Integration with BTCPayServer, Lendasat and Boltz are already available. Moreover, a MetaMask snap is available to bring Bitcoin, Lightning and Arkade to the broader crypto ecosystem. After the proof of concept at BHB in August, Arkade is now launching on mainnet. ArkLab’s CEO demoed a payment from their brand new PWA wallet to Coinos, which was confirmed in a blink of an eye. - @tuma - Rust SDK:

GitHub

GitHub - arkade-os/rust-sdk: Rust crates designed to simplify building Bitcoin wallets with seamless support for both on-chain and off-chain transactions via the Ark protocol.

Rust crates designed to simplify building Bitcoin wallets with seamless support for both on-chain and off-chain transactions via the Ark protocol. ...

Go SDK:

GitHub

GitHub - arkade-os/go-sdk: The Arkade SDK is a Go package for building Bitcoin wallets with support for both on-chain and off-chain transactions via the Ark protocol.

The Arkade SDK is a Go package for building Bitcoin wallets with support for both on-chain and off-chain transactions via the Ark protocol. - arkad...

TypeScript SDk:

GitHub

GitHub - arkade-os/ts-sdk: The Arkade SDK is a TypeScript library for building Bitcoin wallets and execute Bitcoin contracts.

The Arkade SDK is a TypeScript library for building Bitcoin wallets and execute Bitcoin contracts. - arkade-os/ts-sdk

Arkade mobile wallet:

Arkade Wallet

Your Bitcoin, supercharged. Send payments, swap assets, and lend without giving up your keys.

Boltz integration:

Boltz x Arkade

Metamask snap:

GitHub

GitHub - arkade-os/packages

Contribute to arkade-os/packages development by creating an account on GitHub.

Behind the #Starknet x #AlpenLabs partnership are individuals who have long been advocating for the use of zero-knowledge proofs to improve bitcoin as peer-to-peer money - some for over a decade. In the days leading up to the announcement, the Insider Edition sat down with John Light to discuss the progress bitcoin rollups have made since the release of his HRF-sponsored report, Validity Rollups on Bitcoin, three years ago. There is nuance when we talk about “ZK on bitcoin”. Many people compare it to other ecosystems. This comparison is unfortunate for two reasons: First, it undermines the efforts of researchers and developers who are trying to achieve what was once thought to be impossible. Bitcoin's recent progress on the ZK front is nothing short of magical. Second, it doesn’t fully articulate the tradeoffs that these systems make to achieve their goal of verifying zero-knowledge proofs. This discussion provides insights into how we should view these novel ZK systems. It also covers the history of rollups on bitcoin and how we should view the road ahead. Link to the full interview here 👇🏻

An interview with John Light

Leading up to the Alpen x Starknet announcement, the Insider Edition caught up with John Light to discuss bitcoin rollups’ progress three years a...

Aaaaaand that's a wrap on this 3-day Lightning conference! Thanks for following me in this journey!

We are ready for the Hackathon Awards! Follow the award ceremony here: View live event →

Panel of the day on Main Stage at @btcplusplus Lightning++ Edition: @niftynei() 🇺🇸💸🧡 of@btcplusplus moderates the panel "Implementing Lightning" with @Matt Corallo of Spiral, Christian Decker of @Blockstream and Nickolas Goline of @OpenSats