The Apple Pay experience comes to Bitcoin — Last Week in Bitcoin (Feb 23 - Mar 01)
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:
Numo was released last week, aiming to level up the user experience for Bitcoin payments.
During the monthly community call, on Thursday 26th, the Cashu team demoed Numo, the first tap-2-pay point-of-sale solution which allows merchants to easily accept Bitcoin. The first version of the Android application, v0.1.0, had been officially launched a couple of days before, on Tuesday 24th.
Numo is a simple, free and open-source, Android application, which enables user to receive ecash payments through the Cashu protocol using tap-2-pay. Merchants can also accept BOLT11 payments through QR codes. Notably, the application also supports automatic withdrawal to self-custody and provides users with management tools for creating item catalogs and baskets, a tipping system, and the possibility to review payment history.
According to Cashu developers, the aim is to improve the user experience for Bitcoin payments, bringing it up to the level of mainstream solutions, such as Apple Pay.
Alby Sandbox is the new educational tool from Alby to test, explore, and understand the Lightning Network.
During the monthly community call, on Thursday 26th, Alby developers showcased on their latest tools, the Alby Sandbox.
The tool provides an interactive sandbox to test and explore the Lightning Network in real world scenarios, from creating a simple invoice, to more complex use-cases such as recurring payments.
What’s cool about the tech: Alby Sandbox provides code snippet, flow diagrams and example prompts to allow users to leverage all Alby’s Lightning and NWC capabilities in the real world.
An update on the latest NUT changes: Pay-to-Blinded-Key (P2BK), prediction markets, and more.
During the monthly community call, on Thursday 26th, Cashu developers presented the latest changes to the NUT specifications.
NUT-28 has finally been merged, officially bringing P2BK payments to the protocol. This NUT leverages ECDH-derived blinding scheme to blind the public key. This allows to enhance privacy in Pay-To-Public-Key (P2PK) payments. Moreover, changes have been applied to NUT-05 to improve asynchronous melting operations, and new error codes for maximum input and outputs in an operation have been added.
New NUTs have also been proposed. Notably, PR337 proposes a technique for encoding prediction markets into Cashu tokens, while PR342 introduces binary search for more efficient wallet recovery.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
The first BIP54 compatible block has been mined: On Thursday 19th, WhitePool mined the first BIP54 compatible block, at height 937404. BIP54, usually referred to as Consensus Cleanup, is a proposed soft fork by Antoine Poinsot and Matt Corallo which aims to fix some small bugs present in Bitcoin consensus. Specifically, it aims to solve the timewarp attack, reduce the worst case block validation time, prevent Merkle tree weaknesses, and avoid duplicate transactions without BIP30 validation. It is possible to recognize a BIP54 compatible block by looking at the coinbase transaction
nLocktimefield, which must be set to block height minus 1.Hackathon project found two bugs in Bitcoin library: During the BTC++ hackathon, Brazilian hacker Lucaslgol05 found two bugs in BitcoinJs, the JavaScript Bitcoin library for Node.js and browsers. His project consisted in applying differential fuzzing between BitcoinJS and rust-bitcoin. Differential fuzzing involves providing the same input to multiple similar programs and comparing their outputs to identify discrepancies, which may indicate bugs. Curious about what happened in Floripa? Streaming will be available from Thursday, March 5th, @ 6pm UTC on BTC++ X profile!