Last Week in Bitcoin (Feb 16 - 22)
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:
v0.15.0 of CDK is out bringing wallet sagas for better error management and updates to comply with the latest NUT specifications.
During the weekly call, on Wednesday 18th, CDK developers announced the release of v0.15.0 of the Cashu implementation. Another minor version, v0.15.1 was released the day after to fix two small issues.
The new version implements Wallet Sagas, an architectural improvement used to manage complex, multi-step tasks that involve different parts of a system. This has been applied to all the wallet operations for robust error recovery and crash resilience.
v0.15.0 also gets CDK up-to-date with the latest NUT specifications. In particular, it now defaults to Keyset v2 for new keysets, and implements bech32m encoding according to NUT26 for better QR code compatibility.
v0.1.0 of fedimintd-mobile is out, bringing Fedimint guardian nodes to the mobile world.
During the weekly call, on Monday 26th, Fedimint contributor m1sterc001guy presented his latest work on fedimintd-mobile. He then announced the release of v0.1.0 on X on Thursday 19th.
Fedimintd-mobile is a Fedimint guardian node that can run directly on an Android mobile phone, thanks to Fedimint’s integration with Iroh. The app comes with simple setup, and built-in backup and recovery options. According to Fedimint developers, the test signet Federation, Mobimint, has been running for more than a week without any major issue.
What is cool about the tech: Thanks to this application, users can now launch and manage their own federation on very cheap and old phones, without the need to acquire expensive hardware. This lowers the barrier to self-host Bitcoin software, improving decentralization.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
PR1236 and PR1289 in BOLTs repository have been finally merged: These PRs deal with changes to BOLT2, the peer protocol for channel management. In particular, PR1236 allows both channel parties to send
tx_init_rbfin v2 channel establishment, while PR1289 makes it mandatory for nodes to retransmit signatures in case peers disconnect in the middle of the signing step of an interactive transaction. As previously discussed, these two PRs were the last fundamental step before being able to merge the splicing specification.An update on the TEMPLATEHASH-CSFS-IK bundle proposal: Antoine Poinsot provided an update on the BIP446 proposal, which aims to expand Bitcoin scripting capabilities by adding a bundle of new opcodes,
OP_TEMPLATEHASH,OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK, andOP_INTERNALKEY. In particular, Poinsot’s work focused on providing extensions to standard toolings, such as PSBTs and Miniscript. A first proof-of-concept, built on top of the BIP446 implementation, is already available on Bitcoin Inquisition.FIBRE is back: Localhost Research announced on X that their team had resurrected the FIBRE (Fast Internet Bitcoin Relay Engine**)** project with the help of developers Matt Corallo and Gregory Maxwell. FIBRE is a specialized patchset on Bitcoin Core that enables a high-speed, low-latency network of nodes to relay blocks across the Bitcoin network. The project aims to reduce stale races, which provide an asymmetric advantage to large miners. Check Localhost Research blog post to know more.
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.