The Bitcoin Developer Ecosystem

Hey everyone. Good morning. Good morning, Las Vegas. I'm nifty, and I've got 15 minutes. I want to use it to tell you about what's been happening in Bitcoin development over the last few months, really over the last year maybe. But before we get into it, I want to get a good idea of who is here today. How many of you are developers, or maybe developer-adjacent vibe coders? Pretty much everyone. That's great. And of those, how many of you would identify as Bitcoin developers specifically? Almost everyone too. Okay, great.

​

I spend a lot of time with Bitcoin developers. The reason for that is Bitcoin++, which is an international conference series that I started with some friends in Houston in 2022. Since 2022, we've run 15 events in eight different countries. We're now kind of a global presence. I spend a good part of my year traveling the globe talking to developers who love, or love to hate, Bitcoin, like yourselves.

​

In the last year alone, just 2025, we had 160 speaking spots across seven events, with only 15% repeat speakers. So we're showcasing a really diverse crowd of builders and developers across the Bitcoin ecosystem and the globe. These speakers are very prolific contributors to a host of open source projects across the Bitcoin space. Here's a small heat map of the projects that they contributed to last year alone.

​

In addition to conferences, we also launched a more media-focused thing called Insider Edition. We put out in-depth explainers, first-person reporting from events around the space, and weekly newsletters. So what I'm hoping to give you today is the first Insider Edition field report on what's happening in Bitcoin development.

​

Here are five highlights, or talking points, as a summary of things that I would like to roll up and have people thinking about or paying attention to from the last year, maybe the last 16 months, of what's happening in Bitcoin.

​

First up, obviously, the protocol. I think this won't come as a surprise to anyone, but as you may or may not be aware, no changes were officially made to the Bitcoin protocol itself last year. So while consensus itself didn't move forward, an enormous amount of work is happening elsewhere around the Bitcoin protocol.

​

We had a lot of talks around fuzzing infrastructure. There's some news coming out about the FIBRE relay network being revived. There's a ton of work in Core around policy and P2P relay. Transaction ordering work, cluster mempool, just shipped, which is very exciting. Silent Payments, which is a way of transacting using reusable payment codes to some extent, has been rolling out in every direction, with support being added across descriptors and additional projects.

​

Multiprocess communication and the Bitcoin kernel effort shipped after seven-plus years of work, which is really exciting. So while the protocol is not necessarily moving forward, the perimeter around it is very much alive.

​

Speaking of consensus, conversations around what to change haven't stopped. The BIPs repository has been more active than ever, with new proposals getting numbers as well as drafts being merged into the repository. Covenant proposals have evolved. The Great Consensus Cleanup ran a showcase of attacks over the last few months, and we've renamed some proposals. GSR now has a new name, which I forget exactly. This is an opcode proposal.

​

One thing that I have noticed is that other protocols outside of Bitcoin are easier to change, which means more developers tend to be working there and you tend to see more development happening. Some examples of this would be Nostr, Cashu, and Lightning Network, which have their own specifications and protocols. They're independent of the Bitcoin protocol. A lot of developers find places to contribute in those ecosystems, which are adjacent to or on top of the Bitcoin protocol itself.

​

Okay, so let's talk about Bitcoin clients. One question that seems to be asked more frequently in the last year is: should Bitcoin Core be the only implementation? I think the reality is there is a diversity of clients. rust-bitcoin is active and has been around for a number of years. There are a lot of contributors who contribute to both Bitcoin Core and rust-bitcoin. The btcd Go implementation has been around forever and is used live. Libbitcoin is another C++ implementation.

​

There are also efforts within the Bitcoin Core codebase that I'm really excited about, where they're trying to turn it into more of a platform for development. This is the multiprocess communication protocol work that they've been rolling out. Stratum V2 is a really good example of a project that's now using this and using Bitcoin Core as a platform for new applications and projects. Bitcoin Kernel is the name of that effort to take the consensus core and make it a more programmable platform that other developers can build on top of. I'm really excited about that.

​

There's also energy for diversity. A new institution launched, or maybe was announced, to fund developers, called Production Ready. And then there have been other, maybe more vibe-coded-enabled projects, like the Hornet node implementation that I think Jameson Lopp has been posting about recently. It's basically reimagining Bitcoin.

​

Next up, cryptography. Bitcoin cryptography is cool again. I'm seeing renewed interest in Bitcoin from more academic cryptographers because there is new and interesting cryptography finding a new home in Bitcoin. Some examples are witness encryption and garbled circuits. Both of these are novel things in cryptography that for a long time have been research projects, and places where cryptographers spent a lot of time investigating because they're very interested in them, but they haven't had a real-world application.

​

There are a couple of new projects in Bitcoin that have found ways to take these novel cryptographic and more zero-knowledge-proof-type systems and figure out how to do interesting things in Bitcoin using them. Or there is active research there. There are also TEEs, trusted execution environments, where you can do interesting things with novel kinds of Bitcoin script and signatures.

​

And finally, I'm sure lots of people have been hearing things about quantum. For better or for worse, this has been an opportunity for cryptographers to spend more time investigating new signature schemes for Bitcoin. The Blockstream Research team has done a lot of work in this area, and there are other novel types of mathematics, like lattice-based encryption, with new research and ideas about how we can do different types of cryptography in Bitcoin. A lot of this is continuing research. Again, we haven't really changed the protocol.

​

We're also seeing a lot of permissionless paths. A lot of people are exploring pathways for how they can change or improve Bitcoin without having to get consensus first. There's a lot of space for innovation that doesn't require consensus, and I feel like we've seen that in the last couple of months with Robin Linus, BitVM-related work, and other projects building proposals for quantum-safe Bitcoin that require no changes to the underlying protocol. There are also projects using witness encryption.

​

Then there is a proposal for a soft fork. Paul Sztorc and LayerTwo Labs have decided that they're going to ship a novel sidechain, or I think a novel fork of Bitcoin, that is implementing BIP300, so it will have drivechains. Rather than waiting for permission or consensus to build, they're doing their own thing, which I think is really great.

​

In addition to that, second layers are building. We've got Citrea launched. Alpen Labs is looking to launch a rollup or sidechain this year. Lightning payments are kind of taking off. We've got two different Ark implementations, which is a second layer for doing payments. There are new proposals for privacy, such as Shielded CSV, which is client-side validation. So there's a lot of work on second-layer protocols and different ways of transacting with Bitcoin. Again, these don't really need permission to move forward, so we're definitely seeing a lot of work there.

​

Last but not least, I think we're seeing a lot of adoption kind of outside the edges of the protocol. Something that got my attention is quietly compounding, and it's happening in places that are maybe outside of where Bitcoin developers normally find themselves.

​

My favorite example of this is AI. We're seeing a lot of work to try to get AIs to use Bitcoin payments. How do we add payments? There is work in protocols in that direction. There was a project released recently through a partnership with Stripe and another new blockchain. What I'm really excited about is that it's an Internet Engineering Task Force protocol proposal done by a collection of developers who aren't normally Bitcoin developers, but they involved the Lightspark team to make sure that there's an extension for Lightning payments in the independent protocol that they wrote.

​

This kind of thing is really exciting. It shows the reach of Bitcoin as a payment protocol in the wider developer ecosystem, especially payments and maybe more TradFi development.

​

All of this is new and exciting. I just wanted to add a final thought: there is still low-hanging fruit in Bitcoin in terms of how to contribute and what to develop. If you're looking for a project or you want to get involved, the landscape is big. There are a lot of players and a lot of places where you can step up and start contributing.

​

A really good quick example: Bitcoin++ held our 13th event in Brazil, and we had an exploits theme park this February. I think we had about 20 teams that were working for about 24 hours, and they found 10 bugs in open source projects that had been around for maybe a decade in the case of one of them. These took new techniques like fuzzing and applied them to old projects. So all this to say, there's definitely room for you to find stuff to work on.

​

If you're looking for an opportunity and you're trying to meet people who are also interested in Bitcoin development, I'd encourage you to join us for a conference sometime this year. We've got another six, I think, coming up this year, and we're all around the globe. So hopefully there's one near you that you'll be able to join us at.

​

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who's here, who's been contributing, working, and building on your project. Wherever you find yourself in the Bitcoin developer ecosystem, Bitcoin wouldn't be the same without your help and your work. I'm very excited to be here, hanging out with you and hearing about what you're working on.

​

With that, I'll leave you with a final offer: a free year of Bitcoin++ Insider Edition for everyone. We'd love for you to keep up with what else is going on in this space, and what better than seeing what we're putting out on Insider Edition? You may note it is normally free too, but free offer for you here at the conference as well.

​

I think that's all I have time for. Thank you very much for your attention, and I hope to see you all at this conference or at another event later this year. Thank you.