BTC Map August 2026 Update

Global Metrics 🌍️#

• Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 26,592 → 26,914 (+322 +1.2%)

• Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 29,054 → 29,389 (+335 +1.2%)

• Recently verified (1y): 16,920 → 16,243 (-677 -4.0%)

• Avg. days since last verification: 418 → 438 (+20 +4.8%)

• Merchants boosted: 14 → 12 (-2 -14.3%)

• Total boost duration: 1,605 → 935 (-670 -41.7%) days

• Comments posted: 25 → 26 (+1 +4.0%)

Find current stats over at the BTC Map Dashboard.

Note: the charts above track merchant growth only. The total places metric includes merchants plus exchanges/ATMs.

Country Activity 📈#

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	714	408	165	141	3
🇨🇭 Switzerland	68	7	41	20	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	68	8	53	7	0
🇸🇻 El Salvador	51	12	37	2	1
🇿🇦 South Africa	45	3	40	2	0
🇫🇷 France	44	3	32	9	2
🇨🇴 Colombia	41	36	5	0	0
🇬🇪 Georgia	40	0	38	2	0
🇩🇪 Germany	36	4	27	5	2
🇳🇱 Netherlands	33	4	22	7	2

Community Activity 📈#

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	47	24	23	0	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	35	29	6	0	0
🇵🇭 Bitcoin Island Philippines	24	1	18	5	0
🇸🇻 Mi Primer Bitcoin	24	3	20	1	0
🇬🇪 Bitcoin Movement Georgia	24	0	23	1	0
🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B	22	1	16	5	0
🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Antioquia	19	19	0	0	0

New Communities 🫂#

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month.

• 🇺🇸 OLY BTC

• 🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital

• 🇫🇷 BIP-21

• 🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - Amazonas

• 🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - Caribe

• 🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - Boyacá - Central

We now have 692+ Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️

Active Taggers 🏆#

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

• 🥇 Rockedf with 190 edits

• 🥈 RoseBTCmap with 168 edits

• 🥉 Comino with 140 edits

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	190	175	12	3
RoseBTCmap	168	134	33	1
Comino	140	23	88	29
descubrebitcoin	123	7	11	105
SherbetS	84	84	0	0
fgouget	50	0	50	0
Satoshi Team	36	33	3	0
BTCGVA	35	5	13	17
Evgeniya_rocketdata	28	0	28	0
Stephanievanr	23	0	23	0
Hans Jürgen von Lengerke	23	1	17	5
LambdaComplex	18	2	15	1
confusedbuffalo	13	0	13	0
EcoBitz Circular Economy & Bitcoin Hub	13	6	4	3
ArancioneMilano	13	13	0	0

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Integrations 🔌#

We added two new wallet integrations this month, making it easier to discover Bitcoin-accepting merchants directly from your wallet of choice.

Blink — A long time in the making, but it's finally here! Blink users can now browse BTC Map merchants natively within the Blink app using the project's API for a deep, on-brand integration. v1 delivers merchant viewing, future versions will enable users to see nearby communities and also submit new places directly within the app.

Bull Bitcoin Wallet — Bringing BTC Map merchant discovery to Bull Bitcoin users through inclusion of our Web App directly in the wallet. The benefit of this approach (over native) means Bull users will get all the juicy updates as we release them.

Web App 🕸️#

August was another monster month on the web app with 83 merged PRs. The headlines are a complete redesign of the Add Location flow and the migration to Svelte 5. Here are the highlights

• Add-location redesign -- the entire flow was rebuilt from the ground up. You now pick a spot on the map in a dedicated placement mode, land on an arrival screen that confirms the pinned location, drop into a slim details form with a category picker (and hidden coords for accuracy), and submit through the API's submit_place pipeline. Before any of that happens, a duplicate-place check warns you if the spot is already mapped.

• Merchant drawer -- a new copy button makes sharing the merchant address one tap.

• Comment permalinks -- comment dates now link to per-comment anchors so you can share and bookmark specific feedback.

• Issue worklist -- the ?issues filter got category sub-filters, colored pins, and drawer fix actions so maintainers can triage problems directly from the map.

• Embed fixes -- the ?onchain, ?lightning, and ?nfc embed payment filters are back, and the embed contract is now pinned so third-party sites won't break on future updates.

• MapLibre GL v6 -- the map engine jumped two major versions.

• Performance -- area pages now render from the SSR bundle (no more 5.7 MB world crawl), with bbox-prefiltered and chunked containment for places-in-area queries.

Android App 🤖#

Android work around build infrastructure:

• Build pipeline -- AGP bumped to 9.3.2, Gradle wrapper to 9.5.0. A release signing config and a new beta build type were added, with a matching app deploy command in a new devtools helper script.

• OSM attribution -- a small "© OpenStreetMap contributors" overlay was added to the map fragment, toggleable in settings.

• Fixes -- a ConcurrentModificationException in ViewportCache was resolved; the Material Symbols font was updated to the 2026-08-28 snapshot with new icons.

• Dev tools -- a devtools script at the repo root wraps common emulator and app commands.

Infrastructure ⚙️#

The API absorbed the bulk of the infrastructure effort with a focus on access control and decentralizing admin work.

• Geofences -- a new geofence column on users constrains area_manager and event_manager callers to the areas they are actually responsible for. A set_user_geofence RPC sets or clears the whitelist, while admins and roots remain unrestricted.

• Area Manager role -- the new Role::AreaManager unlocks add_area, get_area, set_area_tag, set_area_image, remove_area_tag, remove_area, and search.

• Place Reports -- a new report_place RPC lets trusted external sources record typed reports (verified, refused_sats, out_of_business, …) against existing places. A public GET /v4/place-submissions endpoint exposes open, non-revoked submissions.

• Auth & logging -- resolved user IDs now appear in the request log table so every RPC call is attributable.

• Electrum -- a new ping_electrum_servers RPC probes all configured servers in parallel and reports per-server latency.

• Area bbox sync -- add_area and set_area_tag now derive and update the bounding box in the same transaction, so bboxes are never stale.

• New icons -- swimming pool, rage room, and a batch of additional icons were added.

• RPC refactor -- area RPCs moved to dedicated src/rpc/area/ and src/rpc/event/ submodules; docs split into per-method files.

• CLI Updates -- The btcmap-cli picked up wrappers for the new API surface: place report, electrum-server ping, area add, area generate-bboxes, and renamed element generate-icons / area generate-element-mapping to match the new RPC signatures.

Analytics 📊#

Our August website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Credits 🫶#

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

• Hannes / escapedcat -- add-location redesign, Svelte 5 migration, Vite 8 upgrade, MapLibre GL v6, TypeScript bindings from the API, issue worklist filters, area page performance improvements, place cache and map refactors, duplicate-place detection, merchant drawer copy button, comment permalinks, and icon/i18n fixes.

• Igor Bubelov -- geofences and area_manager role, place reports API, RPC refactor to submodules, auth & logging improvements, Electrum server pinging, area bbox sync, Android build infrastructure, devtools script, OSM attribution, dashboard improvements, Event Admin editing, CLI updates, and API maintenance.

• Nathanael -- geofence testing and taking charge of Switzerland.

• Nathan / dadofsambonzuki -- Blink and Bull Bitcoin Wallet promotions on the apps page, and embed payment filter fixes.

• Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR -- Dutch translations, and new icons (swimming pool, rage room, and batch updates).

• tomatotomata -- area page performance optimization.

• Rockedf, RoseBTCmap, Comino, and all the active taggers listed above.

Support Us 🤝#

There are many ways in which you can support us:

• Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

• Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

• Consider donating to the project here.