XBOW closes $35M Series C extension, customers now investors
Autonomous penetration-testing startup XBOW raised $35M from six strategic investors who are also customers, pushing total funding above $270M and signaling a shift in how enterprises adopt AI-driven security.
Fedi ships direct payments from Stable Balance, sidestepping regulatory walls
Fedi v26.1.0 eliminates a friction point for non-technical users: direct payments from ecash without converting to Bitcoin first, positioning federated custody as the post-MiCA alternative to vanishing custodial wallets.
Core Lightning Hotfix Patches Protocol Bug Days After Release
Core Lightning v26.04.1 shipped April 25 to fix protocol correctness bugs in negative routing fees discovered within days of v26.04, forcing node operators to upgrade immediately to restore correct network behavior.
LND v0.21 Forces Lightning Wallet Developers to Rewrite Payment Code
Lightning Labs released LND v0.21.0-beta.rc1, a major version that removes four legacy RPC endpoints and completes a SQL database migration — breaking any wallet still using deprecated payment APIs.
Fedimint v0.11.0 Ships Gateway Recovery via Mnemonic
Fedimint released v0.11.0 on April 17, 2026, with gateway recovery from seed phrases and NAT-transparent networking — removing the last major operational barrier to running community Bitcoin banking infrastructure.
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 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.
D-Robotics raises $270M Series B as chip layer consolidates
D-Robotics closed a $150M Series B2 round in 20 days, bringing total Series B to $270M. The speed and investor composition signal capital is securing foundational robotics silicon before the market consolidates.
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.
Anvil Robotics Closes $5.5M Seed as Physical AI Hits the Assembly Line
Anvil Robotics, an eight-month-old startup selling modular robot dev-kits, closed a $5.5M seed round with Nvidia's GEAR lab as a paying customer and seven-figure revenue already in the bank—signaling that physical AI infrastructure, not just models, is now the competitive moat.
Core Lightning v26.04 RC2: Splicing Graduates to Production
Core Lightning v26.04 RC2 promotes splicing from experimental to stable user-facing commands, enabling channel resizing without downtime. This moves Lightning toward true 'one-balance' wallets and cuts transaction costs in half.
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.
Core Lightning v26.04rc1 Ships splicein, spliceout, and BIP-39 Recovery
Core Lightning v26.04rc1, tagged March 26 2026, delivers purpose-built splice commands and BIP-39 seed phrases — closing the operational gaps that have kept self-sovereign Lightning node operation cumbersome.
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.
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.
Core Lightning v26.04rc1 Debuts splicein and spliceout Commands
Core Lightning v26.04rc1, tagged March 26 2026, introduces high-level splicein and spliceout commands that abstract years of low-level splicing complexity into operator-ready RPC calls, marking a structural maturation of Lightning channel management.
BIP446 and BIP448 Draft BIPs Target LN-Symmetry via OP_TEMPLATEHASH
Bitcoin's BIP repository merged BIP446 and BIP448 as Draft BIPs, introducing OP_TEMPLATEHASH and a Taproot-native covenant bundle that could replace Lightning's penalty-based channel model with LN-Symmetry.