Last week in Bitcoin
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent 10+ hours in open-source developer calls in the Bitcoin ecosystem last week. Here is what caught my eye:
Pubky roadmap for H2 2025 has been presented by Synonym CEO John Carvalho, highlighting the next steps to build the Atomic Economy, a parallel free-market society powered by Bitcoin.
Pubky is an ecosystem that aims to provide tools for communication, identity, and social coordination. It is based on three main concepts: 1) PKARR (Public Key Addressable Resource Records), which allows self-issued public keys to function as sovereign, publicly addressable domains, 2) Mainline DHT, the oldest and most distributed network on the internet that allows users to locate and connect with each other without relying on a centralized server, and 3) Semantic Social Graphs, which enable peers to determine trustworthiness and reputation in the p2p economy.
During the Pubky Dev Call, on Friday 15th, Synonym CEO John Carvalho presented the roadmap for the Pubky ecosystem for the second half of the year. Most notably, Synonym’s developers are working on a brand-new application to completely replace the current pubky.app. They’re also working on 1-click deploy solutions for the Pubky Homeserver, the ecosystem’s independent data servers, and on laying the foundations for new products, like Paykit, a p2p settlement layer between wallets and applications, and Atomicity, a p2p experimental mutual credit system to be used as a mean of payment.
What’s cool about the tech: Pubkey is working to simplify the creation of a free-market society by providing the tools needed. A more user-friendly application, easy self-hosting solutions and better tools for enabling payments and revenues on the platform are fundamental for an open, distributed, censorship-resistance future.
sv2-uniffi repository is now online, and allows adopters of the Bitcoin mining protocol to leverage its characteristics in Python projects.
During the project’s weekly call, developer plebhash announced that he had created the first examples to guide early protocol adopters to leverage Stratum V2 using the newly developed Uniffi bindings for the Python programming language.
As of today, the Python bindings integrate all the interfaces for the Extended and Standard Channels. These are dedicated communication pathways, which allow for secure and encrypted data transmission between the miner and the pool, and are one of the core features of the new mining protocol.
What’s cool about the tech: Creating bindings for using the Stratum protocol with more programming languages can incentivize adoption and can lead to an higher degree of decentralization in Bitcoin mining.
PR2011 was opened in BDK to correct a bug in bdk_electrum crate. This issues prevents a wallet to update correctly in case of a chain reorg.
During the BDK standup call, developer LagginTimes announced the opening of a new PR to address an issue found in the bdk_electrum, a Rust crate that manages the connection to an Electrum Server. This is used as a blockchain backend to allow for wallet synching and incoming transaction monitoring.
The bug prevents the Electrum client in BDK to update the anchor hash during a chain reorg, leading to a "stale" state. The term “anchor” refers to specific blockchain checkpoints used to anchor the wallet's view of the chain during synching. In case the anchor is not updated properly to a valid block during a reorg, the wallet enters a stale state synching issues or potential security risks.
What’s cool about the tech: The proposed fix ensures that a chain reorg is correctly detected, leading to the refresh of the anchor to the new chain tip. This allows to avoid stale states and potential issues.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to join us in Istanbul this Sept 3-5 to talk all things scaling bitcoin (Ark, metaprotocols, BitVM, garbled circuits, rollups, and more). Ticket prices go up August 28th; get yours before they’re gone! Use code INSIDER for 21% off a ticket when bought with bitcoin before Aug 21st.