Last Week in Bitcoin (Feb 09 - 15)

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:

• v2.3.0 of bdk-ffi was released, exporting more BDK functionalities to other languages.

  • During the weekly call, on Tuesday 10th, bdk-ffi maintainer thunderbiscuit announced that v2.3.0 of the BDK bindings crate was ready to be released. The new version was later published on Thursday 12th.

  • This release introduces several new features and expands API coverage for wallet management, transaction building, and blockchain backends, especially Esplora and Electrum. This release also updates key dependencies, including bdk_wallet to version v2.3.0 and UniFFI bindings generator to v0.30.0.

  • Bindings are already available for Swift, Kotlin, and JVM, while Python is still work-in-progress. Moreover, the experimental binding crate for Dart has been upgraded to use the latest version of the bdk-ffi crate.

• PR995 for simple taproot channels is close to be merged.

  • During the monthly call, on Monday 9th, Lightning Network developers discussed PR995, an extension bolt to allow for simple taproot channels. According to developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun, the PR is close to be merged, with just a few updates and test vectors missing.

  • PR995 introduces specifications to enable support for taproot, allowing developers to improve the privacy, security, and flexibility of the system. In particular, the new taproot channels use MuSig2 key aggregation to combine two keys into one, with the multisig output becoming a single P2TR key, and tapscript trees capabilities.

  • The PR also defines the concept of “extension BOLT”, a standalone document that describes how to modify an existing “base” BOLT to avoid littering the main specification, improving readability and making reviewing easier. In particular, this PR extends capabilities for BOLT 2, BOLT 3 and BOLT 5.

• PR8242 in Fedimint has been merged, enabling sending and receiving with BOLT12 in the Gateway UI.

  • During the weekly update, on Monday 9th, Fedimint developers discussed PR8242, which introduces support for BOLT12 in the Gateway UI. This feature is part of the planned improvements tracked in IS7892.

  • The new UI allows Gateway operators to generate BOLT12 offers (both with and without amount), pay BOLT12 offers, and detect whether the provided invoice is a BOLT11 or a BOLT12 one. It also displays more information, such as amount, payee pubkey, hash and expiry, when dealing with a BOLT11 invoice.

  • It is important to note that this new feature is only available on Gateways running LDK as a backend, since LND has not added support for BOLT12 yet.

Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Florianopolis this February 26-28 to talk about exploiting Bitcoin.