This week’s newsletter includes our regular sections describing changes to services and client software, announcing new releases and release candidates, and summarizing recent changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.

News

No significant news this week was found in any of our sources.

Changes to services and client software

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

  • ● Cake Wallet adds Lightning support: Cake Wallet announced Lightning Network support using the Breez SDK and a Spark integration, including Lightning addresses.

  • ● Sparrow 2.4.0 and 2.4.2 released: Sparrow 2.4.0 adds BIP375 PSBT fields for silent payment hardware wallet support and adds a Codex32 importer. Sparrow 2.4.2 adds v3 transaction support.

  • ● Blockstream Jade adds Lightning via Liquid: Blockstream announced that Jade hardware wallet (via Green app 5.2.0) can now interact with Lightning using submarine swaps that convert Lightning payments to Liquid Bitcoin (L-BTC), keeping keys offline.

  • ● Lightning Labs releases agent tools: Lightning Labs released an open-source toolkit enabling AI agents to operate on Lightning without human intervention or API keys using the L402 protocol.

  • ● Tether launches MiningOS: Tether launched MiningOS, an open-source operating system for managing Bitcoin mining operations. The Apache 2.0 licensed software is hardware-agnostic with a modular, P2P architecture.

  • ● FIBRE network relaunched: Localhost Research announced the relaunch of FIBRE (Fast Internet Bitcoin Relay Engine), previously shut down in 2017. The reboot includes a Bitcoin Core v30 rebase and monitoring suite, with six public nodes deployed globally. FIBRE complements compact block relay for low-latency block propagation.

  • ● TUI for Bitcoin Core released: Bitcoin-tui, a terminal interface for Bitcoin Core, connects via JSON-RPC to display blockchain and network data, featuring mempool monitoring, transaction search and broadcasting, and peer management.

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.

  • ● Bitcoin Core 31.0rc1 is a release candidate for the next major version of the predominant full node implementation. A testing guide is available.

  • ● BTCPay Server 2.3.6 is a minor release of this self-hosted payment solution that adds label filtering in the wallet search bar, includes payment method data in the invoices API endpoint, and allows plugins to define custom permission policies. It also includes several bug fixes.

Notable code and documentation changes

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

  • ● Bitcoin Core #31560 extends the dumptxoutset RPC (see Newsletter #72), enabling the UTXO set snapshot to be written to a named pipe. This allows the output to be streamed directly to another process, bypassing the need to write the full dump to disk. This combines well with the utxo_to_sqlite.py tool (see Newsletter #342), allowing a SQLite database of the UTXO set to be created on the fly.

  • ● Bitcoin Core #31774 starts protecting the AES-256 encryption key material used for wallet encryption with secure_allocator to prevent it from being swapped to disk by the operating system when running low on memory, and zeroes it from memory when no longer used. When a user encrypts or unlocks their wallet, the passphrase is used to derive an AES key that encrypts or decrypts the wallet’s private keys. Previously, this key material was allocated using the standard allocator, meaning it could be swapped to disk or linger in memory.

  • ● Core Lightning #8817 fixes several splice interoperability issues with Eclair that were discovered during cross-implementation testing (see Newsletters #331 and #355 for previous interop work). CLN now handles channel_ready messages that Eclair may send during splice reestablishment before resuming negotiation, fixes RPC error handling that could cause a crash, and implements announcement signature retransmission via new channel_reestablish TLVs.

  • ● Eclair #3265 and LDK #4324 start rejecting BOLT12 offers where offer_amount is set to zero, to align with the latest changes in the BOLT specification (see Newsletter #396).

  • ● LDK #4427 adds support for RBF fee bumping of splice funding transactions that have been negotiated but not yet locked, by re-entering the quiescence state. When both peers attempt to RBF simultaneously, the quiescence tie-breaker loser can contribute as the acceptor. Prior contributions are automatically reused when the counterparty initiates an RBF, preventing the fee bump from silently removing a peer’s splice funds. See Newsletter #396 for the base splice acceptor contribution support that this builds on.

  • ● LDK #4484 raises the maximum accepted channel dust limit to 10,000 satoshis for anchor channels with zero-fee HTLCs, including zero-conf channels. This implements the recommendation from BOLTs #1301 (see Newsletter #395).

  • ● BIPs #1974 publishes BIP446 and BIP448 as Draft BIPs. BIP446 specifies OP_TEMPLATEHASH, a new tapscript opcode that pushes a hash of the spending transaction onto the stack (see Newsletter #365 for the initial proposal). BIP448 groups OP_TEMPLATEHASH with OP_INTERNALKEY and OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK to propose “Taproot-native (Re)bindable Transactions”. This covenant bundle would enable LN-Symmetry as well as reduce interactivity in and simplify other second layer protocols.

Want more?

For more discussion about the topics mentioned in this newsletter, join us for the weekly Bitcoin Optech Recap on Riverside.fm at 16:30 UTC on March 24. The discussion is also recorded and will be available from our podcasts page.