Let’s Make Some (White) Noise — Last Week in Bitcoin (Mar 02 - 08)
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:
v2026.3.5 of White Noise was recently released, bringing a smoother experience to the Nostr-based messaging application.
During the monthly call, on Tuesday 3rd, Marmot protocol developers announced that a new version of the messaging application was ready to be released. The latest update builds on top of v0.3.0, released a week earlier, which incorporated all the rework done through the Sloth project. v2026.3.5 was then officially released on Thursday, March 5th.
This release integrates a breaking change that was recently applied to the Marmot specifications. Specifically, Marmot dropped support for NIP-44 encryption and replaced it with ****ChaCha20-Poly1305 due to compatibility issues between the TypeScript implementation and the Rust-based one. Developers noted that group chats created with v0.3.0 will continue to work as long as any member upgrades to the latest version.
On a side note, White Noise is no longer the only messaging application based on the Marmot protocol. Other clients, such as Vector and Pika, are currently integrating the new standard, providing more choice to users. Interestingly, cross-compatibility was demoed during the call, showing a group chat with four different clients seamlessly exchanging messages.
IS946 in bdk-ffi is keeping track of the ongoing effort to bring BDK to the Go language.
During the biweekly call, on Tuesday 3rd, bdk-ffi developers discussed IS946, which keeps track of the work being done to bring BDK to the Go ecosystem. At the moment, some problems are being addressed by BDK developers.
The main issue is related to the difference in the uniffi-rs version supported. In fact, developers are leveraging uniffi-bindgen-go, the uniffi bindings generator for Go, which uses uniffi-rs v0.29.5, while BDK is working on v0.30.0, making the two libraries incompatible. Thus, LDK developer Elias Rohrer is working on upgrading the uniffi-bindgen-go generator to the same version, in order for it to be compatible with bdk-ffi.
In the meantime, developer Matthew Ramsden is testing Rohrer’s work. While the bindings generation succeedes, he is encountering issues in the compilation. The problem seems to be linked to an intrinsic limitation in the Go language, with developers discussing possible solutions.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
Decentralizing Swaps: Electrum recently reported that there are now 9 providers supplying liquidity for submarine swaps through their wallet. This feature was introduced around 6 months ago in v4.6.0 to boost decentralization in swap services, with the goal to allow anyone to become a swap provider by advertising their fees and liquidity over Nostr.
Bindings for the win: Recently, Steven Roose reported that Bark, the implementation of the Ark protocol by Second, was available in multiple programing languages. While the main codebase is written in Rust, the Second team was able to generate bindings in different languages, specifically Go, React Native, Dart, Swift and Kotlin, by leveraging uniffi-rs, the bindings generator for Rust, which is now becoming the gold standard in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Benchmarking fee estimates: Abubakar Sadiq Ismail posted on X about his latest project, a full-stack application for monitoring and validating Bitcoin Core transaction fee estimates against actual block data. The project compares fee rates estimated by Bitcoin Core with actual data from the blockchain, to verify the accuracy of the predicted data. A nice UI is already available to visualize data in a simple manner.