Sparrow Wallet ships Silent Payments with hardware signer support
Sparrow Wallet 2.5.0 adds Silent Payments receiving for desktop users with airgapped hardware wallet signing, ending the privacy-vs-security tradeoff.
Bitcoin Core's First Memory Safety Bug Exposes 43% of Live Nodes
Bitcoin Core disclosed CVE-2024-52911, a memory safety vulnerability affecting versions 0.14.0-28.x; roughly 5,900 nodes remain unpatched despite the fix shipping in v29.0.
Bitcoin Core 31.0 Ships Private Transaction Broadcasting
Bitcoin Core 31.0, released April 20, 2026, adds a toggle for routing all transaction broadcasts through Tor or I2P, severing the IP-address-to-transaction link that chain analysis firms have relied on for years.
Core Lightning Ships Negative Fees, Rewires Channel Economics
Core Lightning v26.04 graduated negative routing fees to production today, allowing nodes to pay senders to route through specific channels—automating liquidity rebalancing and reshaping how the Lightning Network manages scarcity.
Bitcoin Core v31.0 Ships Mandatory Tor Privacy by Default
Bitcoin Core v31.0 released April 15, 2026, makes Tor/I2P broadcast mandatory by default for node operators, the most significant privacy default change in years, while shipping a redesigned cluster mempool and embedded ASMap data.
HRF Distributes 1.5B Satoshis Across 26 Freedom Tech Projects
Human Rights Foundation's largest Bitcoin Development Fund round ever — 1.5 billion satoshis to 26 grantees — funds privacy infrastructure, remittance bridges, and activist networks across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Bitcoin Knots Captures 22.6% of Network as Core Schism Deepens
Bitcoin Knots adoption surged to 5,599 nodes (22.6% of the network) after Core's OP_RETURN expansion, exposing a fundamental divide over whether Bitcoin should remain a lean monetary system or accommodate arbitrary data.
Bitcoin's Emergency Brake Could Lock You Out—Until Now
Olaoluwa Osuntokun shipped a working prototype quantum-resistant wallet rescue tool on April 8, solving a critical gap in Bitcoin's emergency defense plan that could otherwise strand 1.7 million BTC in users' own wallets.
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc4 ships: legacy fee APIs gone for good
Bitcoin Core released v31.0rc4 on April 8, completing the removal of deprecated fee-setting commands that affected every wallet and node operator worldwide. The break is intentional, clean, and final.
Core Lightning v26.04 RC2 Ships Message Padding, Closes Privacy Gap
Core Lightning v26.04 RC2 (April 2, 2026) adds peer message padding to resist traffic analysis — the first Lightning implementation to ship uniform-length padding by default — plus user-facing splice commands and 20% smaller binaries.
HRF Deploys 1.5B Satoshis Across 26 Freedom Tech Projects
Human Rights Foundation's Q1 2026 Bitcoin Development Fund grants support 26 projects across Bitcoin Core privacy, Lightning payments, and grassroots education in authoritarian regimes — the largest single cohort to date.
HRF Grants 1.5B Satoshis to 26 Freedom Tech Projects
Human Rights Foundation's Bitcoin Development Fund awarded 1.5 billion satoshis across 26 projects in Q1 2026—a 50% scale-up from the prior quarter—funding Bitcoin Core privacy, Lightning payments, and grassroots adoption in authoritarian regimes.
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc2 Tagged as P2P Privacy Fix Targets Final Release
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc2 was tagged on March 25, 2026, with a final release targeting early April — and an OpenSats grant is driving a live fingerprinting-attack mitigation into the same codebase.
BIP446 and BIP448 Enter Draft Status, Targeting LN-Symmetry
BIP446 (OP_TEMPLATEHASH) and BIP448 (Taproot-native Re-bindable Transactions), co-authored by Greg Sanders, Antoine Poinsot, and Steven Roose, formally entered Draft BIP status via GitHub PR #1974, the first complete Taproot-native covenant bundle to reach the official Bitcoin standards track.
Nunchuk Ships BIP352 Silent Payments, First Major Multisig Wallet to Adopt Standard
Nunchuk has shipped BIP352 Silent Payment send support, becoming the first production-grade multisig wallet to adopt the standard as BIP392 formalises the sp() descriptor for wallet interoperability.
LND Merges Onion Message Forwarding, Closing BOLT12 Gap with Core Lightning
Lightning Labs merged onion message forwarding into LND via PR #10089, the prerequisite capability for BOLT12 offers support and a direct challenge to Core Lightning's year-long lead on the protocol.
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc2 Tagged, Final Release Weeks Away
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc2 was tagged on March 25, 2026, marking the final quality-lock phase before the next major reference implementation release, targeting early April.
Tails 7.6 Ships Automatic Tor Bridge Detection for Censored Users
Tails 7.6, released March 26, 2026, adds automatic Tor bridge detection via the Moat API, eliminating manual configuration for users in censored network environments — a structural upgrade for Bitcoin self-custody practitioners under surveillance.
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc2 Tagged, Bringing Cluster Mempool to Final Testing
Bitcoin Core v31.0rc2 was tagged on GitHub on 2026-03-25, entering final community testing ahead of an early April release carrying cluster mempool and a 5.28x IBD speedup.
zk-X509 Proposes Zero-Knowledge Identity Layer From 4 Billion X.509 Certs
Researcher Yeongju Bak published a preprint on March 26 proposing zk-X509, a system that converts existing X.509 PKI certificates into privacy-preserving on-chain identity proofs without revealing credentials.