The Bitcoin Developer Ecosystem | Bitcoin 2026

Cool. Hey everyone. Good morning. Good morning, Las Vegas. Um, I'm Nifty Nai. I've got 15 minutes. I want to use it to tell you about what's happening in Bitcoin development the last few months, really the last year, maybe. Um, but before we get into it, I want to get a good idea of who's here today, this morning. How many of you are developers or maybe like developer vibe coders? All right, pretty much everyone. That's great. Um, and of those, how many of you would identify as Bitcoin developers specifically? Almost everyone, too. All right, great. So, um, I spent a lot of time with Bitcoin developers. Uh, 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. Um, we're now kind of a global presence. I spent a good part of my year traveling the globe talking to developers who love or love to hate Bitcoin like yourselves. Um uh in the last year alone, so just 2025, uh we had 160 speaking spots across seven events, uh with only 15% of repeat speakers. So we're showcasing a really diverse crowd of builders and developers across the Bitcoin ecosystem and the globe. Um, these speakers themselves are very prolific contributors to a host of open source projects across the Bitcoin space. Here's a small kind of heat map of the projects that they contributed to last year alone. Oh, can you guys see slides? Okay, great. Sorry. Okay, cool. Um, so in addition to conferences, we also launched a more media focused thing called Insider Edition. We put out in-depth um, explainers, first-person reporting from events around the space, weekly newsletters. Um, so what I'm hoping to give you today is kind of the first insider edition field report on what's happening in Bitcoin development. Um, so here's just kind of five highlights or talking points, a sort of summary of things that I kind of would like to roll up and have people thinking about or paying attention to um, from last year, so the last maybe 16 months of what's happening in Bitcoin. First up, obviously the protocol. Um, I think this won't come as surprise to anyone, but as you may or may not be aware, no changes were officially made to the Bitcoin protocol itself last year. Um, so while consensus itself didn't move forward, um, an enormous amount of work is happening elsewhere around the Bitcoin protocol. Um, we had a lot of talks around fuzzing infrastructure. Uh, there's some new new news coming out about the fiber fiber relay network that's been revived. Um, there's a ton of work in core around policy and mempole relay. So transaction ordering work um cluster mele just shipped in 31 which is very exciting. Uh silent payments which is a way of transacting um using repeated payment codes to some extent um has been rolling out in every direction with BIPS adding it to descriptors um PSPs uh additional projects etc. Um multipprocess communication on the kernel 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. And speaking of consensus, um conversations around what to change haven't stopped. Um the BIPS repository has been more active than ever with new proposals getting numbers as well as drafts being merged into the repository. Um Covenant proposals have evolved. The great great consensus cleanup ran a showcase of attacks the last few months. Um and we've renamed some proposals. So GSR um now has a new name which I forget exactly what it is. This is an op code proposal. Um one thing that I have noticed though is other protocols so outside of Bitcoin are easier to change which means that more developers tend to be working there and you tend to see more development happening um there. Some examples of this would be Noster Cashew um Lightning Network who have their own specification and protocols. They're independent of the Bitcoin protocol. um a lot of developers find places to contribute um in those ecosystems which are kind of adjacent or on top of Bitcoin protocol itself. Um 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 are a diversity of clients. Rest bitcoin is active. It's been up for a number of years. There's a lot of contributors that contribute both to Bitcoin core and rest of rest bitcoin. BTCZ, a goat implementation, it's been around forever and is used. Lip Bitcoin is another C++ implementation. Um, there's 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. Um, this is the MPC or multi-process communication protocols that they've been working on rolling out. Stratum v2 is a really good example of a project that's now using this and using Bitcoin core as like a platform for um new applications and projects. Um the Bitcoin kernel is kind of the name of that effort to take that consensus core and make it a more programmable platform that other developers can build on top of. So I'm really excited about that. Um there's also energy for diversity. A new institution launched to fund or maybe got announced to fund developers called production ready. Um and then there have been other I think more vibecoded enabled projects like the Hornet um node implementation that um I think Jameson Lop has been posting about recently. Um it's basically reimagining Bitcoin in C++. Um cool. Uh okay. Next up, cryptography. That uh oh, Bitcoin cryptography is cool again. Um, so I'm seeing renewed interest in Bitcoin from more academic cryptographers because there's new and interesting cryptography that is um, finding a new home in Bitcoin in general. Um, some examples of this are witness encryption, garbled circuits. Both of these are novel things in cryptography that for a long time have been research projects um, and places that cryptographers spent a lot of time kind of just investigating because they're very interested in it, but it hasn't had a real world application. There's a couple 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's active research there. There's also seen some TEES which are trusted execution environments where you can do interesting things with novel kinds of Bitcoin script and signatures. Um and finally, I'm sure lots of people have been hearing things about quantum um for better or for worse. This has been an opportunity for cryptographers to spend more time investigating new signature schemes for Bitcoin such as shrinks plus. Um the blockstream research team has done a lot of work with shrimps and shrinks. Uh and then other novel types of mathematics like isogynes or lattice based encryption just sort of like new research and ideas about how we can do different types of cryptography in Bitcoin. A lot of this is in continuing research. Again, we haven't really changed the protocol. Um, speaking of, um, I'm seeing a lot of like permissionless paths. So, a lot of people are exploring pathways of how they can change or improve Bitcoin without having to get consensus first. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual Bits predict where everything is a market. Um 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 months um with Robin Linus' Bino project along with Avy who's um kind of building on top of that to build a quantum safe Bitcoin proposal that require no changes to the underlying protocol. Um uh pipes is of the witness encryption program. And then um what's this other one I've got in here? Uh oh, and then uh a proposal of a softwork. um Paul Schwarz and layer 2 Labs um have decided that they're going to ship a novel side chain or I think a novel fork of Bitcoin that is implementing new um I think it's like implementing BIP 300 so it'll have drive chains so rather than waiting for um permission to or consensus to build they're doing their own thing um which I think is really great uh in addition to that second layer is Kilk building so we've got um Catraa launched Alpen Labs is um looking to launch a rollup or side chain this year. Um, lightning agentic payment stuff is kind of taking off. We've got two different arc implementations which is a second layer for doing payments. Um, new proposals are emphasizing privacy such as shielded CSV which is a client side validation. So there's a lot of work on second layer protocols. Um, 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. Um, something that got my attention, it's quietly compounding and it's happening, I would say, in places that are maybe outside of where Bitcoin developers normally find themselves. My favorite example of this, um, well, so there's AI. So, we're seeing like a lot of work to try and get AIs to use Bitcoin payments. How do we agentic payments? And so, there's work, I think, in protocols in that direction. Um there's also this project that got released recently by um a partnership with Stripe and another new blockchain they're calling MPPP. I forget what that stands for. Um, but what I'm really excited about it is it's an internet engineering task force protocol proposal done by a a um a collection of developers that do payments who aren't normally Bitcoin developers, but they involve the LightSpark team to make sure that there's an extension for Lightning Payments in the independent protocol that they wrote. So, this kind of thing I think is really exciting. It shows the reach of Bitcoin as a payment protocol in the wider developer ecosystem, especially payments and maybe more Tradfi. um development. So that's I think an exciting thing. Um all this is new and exciting. I just wanted to add like a final last thought that there's still lowhanging fruit in Bitcoin in terms of how to contribute, what to develop. So if you're looking for a project or you want to get involved that the landscaped is big, there's a lot of players. There's a lot of places that you can step up and um start contributing. Uh a really good maybe quick example and Bitcoin++ held our 13th event in Brazil. Um, I don't know if you can see that I highlighted the Brazil one. We had an exploits themed hackathon this February. I think we had 20ish teams that were working for about 24 hours and they found Oh, the formatting on this is terrible. I apologize. Um, they found 10 bugs in open source projects that had been around for maybe a decade in the case of one of them. Um, they took new techniques like fuzzing and applied it to old projects. So, um, all this to say, there's definitely room for you to find stuff to work on. Um, if you're looking for an opportunity, 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. Um, and we're all around the globe. So, hopefully that there is one near you that you'll be able to join us at. Um, and 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. Um, Bitcoin wouldn't be the same without your help and your work. So, um, I'm just very excited to be here hanging out with you and hearing about what you're working on. Um, and with that, I'll leave you with a final, um, offer, a free year of Bitcoin Plus+ Insider Edition. Um, for everyone, uh, we'd love for you to keep up with what all is going on in the space. And what better than, um, seeing what we're putting out on Insider Edition. Um, you may note it is normally we'd love for you to subscribe, but it's normally free, too. um but you know free offered for you here at the conference as well. So um I think that's all I have time for. Um 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. Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.