Last Week in Bitcoin (Dec 08 - 14)
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:
Fedimint Observer underwent a major UI upgrade, increasing the transparency of the ecosystem.
On December 13th, Fedimint developers announced that a new major version of Fedimint Observer had just been released. This tool allows user to review public data from different federations, like total assets, activity and recommendations from the community.
The latest release brings massive improvements in the tool UI, presenting a new React frontend and interactive graphs. The work was performed by open-source contributor Ayush Bansal, a fellow from Bitshala, one of the main Indian Bitcoin communities.
What’s cool about the tech: The renewed tool improves the user experience and the transparency inside the Fedimint ecosystem, while maintaining its privacy properties.
BDK is expanding its bindings libraries, exposing the developer toolkit to more programing languages.
During the recent weekly updates, BDK maintainers have been discussing about the new bindings libraries leveraging the
bdk-fficrate, which are expanding the support for BDK features to more and more programming languages.While support for Swift, Kotlin and JVM has been available for some time, developers recently exposed BDK to Python, react-native, and Dart.
What’s cool about the tech: Exposing BDK to other programming languages allows to open the tool to a broader user pool and allows developers to build more reliable applications without writing the basic components from scratch.
A list of recent releases from projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem:
rust-lightning v0.2.0: Discussed in a previous post, v0.2.0 has been officially released. Notably, this version marks the first support for splicing in LDK.
ldk-node v0.7.0: The latest minor release is based on rust-lightning v0.2.0. It adds support for channel splicing, asynchronous payments, as well as sourcing chain data from a Bitcoin Core REST backend.
CDK v0.14.2: This minor release of the Cashu Development Kit adds support for more functionalities for
cdk-ffibindings and some minor bug fixes.core-lightning v25.12: Discussed in a previous post, v25.12 has been officially released. This version comes with experimental support for LSPS Level 2 specifications, BIP-39 12-word phrase for new nodes, improvement to xpay plugin, and a stricter compliance to the BOLTs splicing specifications.
Fedimint v0.9.1: This minor release for the Fedimint protocol introduces some minor bug fixes.