This week’s newsletter describes experimentation by developers working on silent payments and includes our regular sections with summaries of new releases and release candidates plus notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.

News

• ● Experimentation with silent payments: as described in Newsletter #194, silent payments make it possible to pay a public identifier (“address”) without creating a public record of that address being paid. This week, developer w0xlt posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a tutorial for creating silent payments for the default signet using a proof-of-concept implementation for Bitcoin Core. Several other developers, including authors of popular wallets, have been discussing other details of the proposal, including creating an address format for it.

Releases and release candidates

New releases and release candidates for popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. Please consider upgrading to new releases or helping to test release candidates.

• ● HWI 2.1.1 fixes two minor bugs affecting Ledger and Trezor devices and adds support for the Ledger Nano S Plus.

• ● LND 0.15.0-beta.rc3 is a release candidate for the next major version of this popular LN node.

Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, Core Lightning, Eclair, LDK, LND, libsecp256k1, Hardware Wallet Interface (HWI), Rust Bitcoin, BTCPay Server, BDK, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.

• ● BTCPay Server #3772 allows users to turn on experimental features for live-testing before release.

• ● BTCPay Server #3744 adds a feature to export the wallet’s transactions either in CSV or JSON format.

• ● BOLTs #968 adds default TCP ports for nodes using Bitcoin testnet and signet.