Last week in bitcoin (Sep 8 - 14)
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent last week at Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition. The event brought together developers and researchers that are currently working to scale Bitcoin. Here is what caught my eye:
The E-Cash App by Fedimint has been released and is another application bringing federated e-cash to Bitcoin users.
On Friday, September 12th, Fedimint developers released v0.1.0 of the E-Cash App, a Bitcoin wallet powered by the Fedimint protocol. This is the first official release from the Fedimint team, and it is already available on Zapstore.
After joining a federation, the E-Cash App allows a user to make on-chain, Lightning Network and Chaumian e-cash payments, all in one wallet. The app, built with Flutter and Rust, leverages the Nostr protocol for federation discovery and back-up.
What’s cool about the tech: Fedimint is a module-based system that allows to build federated applications. The aim of the protocol is to easily deploy and manage community custody solutions . The E-Cash App could be a way to help Bitcoin beginners to start their journey with a community-based custody approach.
PR932 in Cashu Development Kit (CDK) introduces FFI bindings, enabling cross-language interoperability for wallet functionalities.
During the weekly CDK call, on Wednesday 10th, developers announced the merging of PR932. This pull request introduces FFI bindings for the CDK wallet using UniFFI. This framework is currently being used by many open-source projects in the Bitcoin space to allow Rust code to be use in other programming languages.
As of today, CDK wallet bindings currently support Python, Swift and Kotlin. This can make things easier for developers who would like to leverage this Cashu implementation to create native wallets on iOS and Android. Possible example wallets are currently being considered to showcase bindings usage.
What’s cool about the tech: Bindings allow for CDK to be used easily in native iOS and Android applications, bringing the Cashu protocol to more people.
bdk-cli v2.0.0 has been released, bringing bdk_wallet v2.1.0, Taproot descriptor support, and more.
During the weekly developer call, on Tuesday 9th, BDK developer tvpeter announced that the new version of bdk-cli was ready to be released. This new version upgrades bdk_wallet to v2.1.0, adds Taproot descriptor support and adds support for redb as an alternative database option.
bdk-cli is a command-line Bitcoin wallet application, written in pure Rust. It leverages the latest BDK Wallet APIs to provide a powerful generic descriptor based command line wallet tool. This tool is highly indicated for developers who would like to start experimenting with BDK, providing a playground for testing all the available features.