This week’s newsletter announces a new minor version release of LND, notes downtime on the development mailing lists, describes some recent updates to Bitcoin services and clients, and summarizes recent changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

• ● Upgrade to LND 0.8.1-beta: this release fixes several minor bugs and adds compatibility for the upcoming Bitcoin Core 0.19 release.

News

• ● Mailing list downtime: the Bitcoin-Dev and Lightning-Dev mailing lists both experienced downtime last week due to an unannounced server migration. Both lists are functional again as of this writing.

Changes to services and client software

In this monthly feature, we highlight interesting updates to Bitcoin wallets and services.

• ● Bitfinex bech32 send support: In a recent blog post, Bitfinex has announced support on their exchange for sending to native bech32 addresses. While Bitfinex users could previously use P2SH-wrapped segwit addresses, they can now withdraw from the exchange to native segwit addresses.

• ● Wasabi includes Bitcoin Core node: As part of an ongoing effort to integrate Bitcoin Core, Wasabi has merged one click support for running a Bitcoin Core node within the Wasabi interface. The Bitcoin Core binaries are bundled with the Wasabi download and PGP verified by the Wasabi maintainers.

Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, Eclair, LND, libsecp256k1, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.

• ● Bitcoin Core #17437 updates the gettransaction, listtransactions, and listsinceblock RPCs to include the height of the block containing each returned transaction.

• ● C-Lightning #3223 updates the listpeers RPC to display the address that will be paid if the channel is closed.

• ● C-Lightning #3186 adds a new utility named hsmtool that will be built alongside C-Lightning’s other binaries. The tool can encrypt or decrypt your C-Lightning wallet as well as print private information about your commitment transactions.

• ● Eclair #1209 adds support for creating and decrypting the draft trampoline payment onion format. This is in preparation for later PRs that will add support for actually routing trampoline payments.

• ● Eclair #1153 adds experimental support for multipath payments that allow a payment to be split into two or more parts that can be sent over different routes, allowing a user with multiple open channels to spend funds from each of those channels. It’s expected that this code may need to be tweaked as other LN software also finish their own multipath payment implementations and as real-world data is acquired on the performance of the splitting and routing algorithms.