Global Metrics 🌍️#
- Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 24,146 -> 25,181 (+1,035 +4.3%)
- Recently verified (1y): 13,470 -> 14,319 (+849 +6.3%)
- Avg. days since last verification: 396 -> 399 (+3 +0.8%)
- Merchants boosted: 41 -> 16 (-25 -61.0%)
- Total boost duration: 4,920 -> 1,270 (-3,650 -74.2%) days
- Comments posted: 29 -> 32 (+3 +10.3%)
Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.
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 | 555 | 435 | 93 | 27 | 0 |
| 🇿🇲 Zambia | 51 | 0 | 46 | 5 | 0 |
| 🇿🇦 South Africa | 45 | 0 | 42 | 3 | 0 |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 31 | 7 | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | 30 | 5 | 21 | 4 | 1 |
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | 26 | 1 | 24 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇦🇹 Austria | 26 | 2 | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇨🇿 Czechia | 23 | 0 | 19 | 4 | 0 |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | 22 | 1 | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 21 | 6 | 14 | 1 | 0 |
Community Activity 📈#
Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.
| Name | Total | Created | Updated | Deleted | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇿🇲 Bitcoin Victoria Falls | 51 | 0 | 46 | 5 | 0 |
| 🇿🇦 Bitcoin Ekasi | 34 | 0 | 33 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base | 30 | 6 | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇿🇦 Bitcoin Plett | 29 | 0 | 28 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles | 20 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners | 18 | 14 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇺🇸 Bitcoin Charlotte | 16 | 11 | 1 | 4 | 0 |
New Communities 🫂#
We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:
- 🇳🇱 Bitcoin Bergen
- 🇧🇬 Bitcoin Club
- 🇦🇹 Einundzwanzig Außerfern
- 🇩🇪 Rothenburg ob der Tauber
- 🇬🇧 Purbeck Bitcoin
- 🇳🇱 Bitcoin Leiden
- 🇺🇸 Bitcoin Party KC
- 🇧🇷 Bitcoin Padawans
- 🇲🇿 Lwandi Bitcoin
- 🇺🇸 California Bitcoin Education Lab
We now have 650+ 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 608 edits
- 🥈 RoseBTCmap with 511 edits
- 🥉 Comino with 216 edits
| Name | Total Edits | Created | Updated | Deleted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rockedf | 608 | 526 | 67 | 15 |
| RoseBTCmap | 511 | 464 | 47 | 0 |
| Comino | 216 | 42 | 160 | 14 |
| descubrebitcoin | 80 | 3 | 64 | 13 |
| VisibleSouth | 49 | 0 | 44 | 5 |
| Bitcoinplett | 49 | 2 | 43 | 4 |
| BTCMAP-TBB | 31 | 7 | 24 | 0 |
| Luthando12 | 30 | 0 | 29 | 1 |
| Eliseomejia | 25 | 0 | 25 | 0 |
| Kartibu | 21 | 0 | 21 | 0 |
| Igor Bubelov | 19 | 0 | 18 | 1 |
| BitcoinDua | 16 | 13 | 3 | 0 |
| TokioBTC | 16 | 15 | 1 | 0 |
| confusedbuffalo | 13 | 0 | 13 | 0 |
Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.
Merchant Adoption News 🗞️#
Square began auto-enabling Bitcoin payments across it's US customer base of 4M merchants 👀. Merchants still need to opt-in to appear on the maps on CashApp and BTC Map, but this is a huge step forward in Bitcoin's adoption arc. Wen rest of world?!
Qerko locations (mainly in the Czech Republic) no longer accept Bitcoin, apparently due to EU regulations. We're told there may be a way back, but in the meantime we'll be removing all 642 locations. 😢
Web App 🕸️#
March was another huge month for the Web App with 60+ PRs merged, focusing on an overhauled merchant drawer, continued i18n expansion, and performance improvements.
- New map drawer UX with compact merchant details (#859), payment method pills (#850), drawer header visual hierarchy (#849), phone and website quick info (#853), and merchant comments displayed directly in the drawer (#845).
- Share merchant to clipboard (#851) and consistent boost badge styling (#860).
- Localized merchant names now lazy-loaded and displayed when available (#794, #817).
- New language support: Russian (#793), Dutch (#812), German (#799), French (#869), and Spanish (#870), plus a new language switcher modal (#798).
- Dashboard area stats added (#789) and leaderboard generation moved server-side for performance (#846, #813).
- Merchant view performance improvements (#790, #834).
- Infrastructure: Node 20 to 22 LTS upgrade (#840), Vitest v2 to v3 (#839), CI health report rewrite (#822), and Zapstore added as an app source (#848).
Android App 🤖#
BTC Map Android v1.1.0 is officially released! This is a major milestone after months of work since November 2025. Key highlights:
- New Carto Dark Matter map style added.
- Nearby communities now displayed on the map, helping users discover local Bitcoin communities.
- Map rotation re-enabled with the improved clustering approach.
- Localized place names and opening hours now displayed, with LLM-translated hours for supported regions.
- Localization in 30+ languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (BR), Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Chinese.
- Adaptive color scheme now opt-in, defaulting to website-aligned colors for better readability.
- Improved payment flow and boosted markers brought back.
- Architecture overhaul: clean DB layer abstraction, consolidated sync and API mappings, improved testability with new database and sync tests.
- Bookmarks feature added for saving favorite places.
If you're an Android user, update and leave your feedback!
Admin App 🛠️#
The Admin App saw significant work in March:
- Nostr authentication fully implemented with parallel Nostr and BTC Map login flows, identity linking, and NIP-98 HTTP Auth (#22).
- Circular icon preview with cropper overlay for better area icon centering (#38).
- SVG icon support fixed for area display (#36).
Infrastructure ⚙️#
The API saw major expansion in March with 49 commits:
- New REST v4 endpoints: activity, top communities, top countries, top editors, and users endpoints.
- Localization support: localized name field, localized opening hours, and humanize_working_hours RPC.
- Area improvements: area type filter, area stats, area reverse geocoding, optimized bbox generation.
- Sync logging: all OSM sync attempts now logged with failed_at and fail_reason tracking.
- Request logging exposed via RPC, plus a new daily infra report RPC.
- Major refactoring: relocated mappings for areas, elements, events, comments, users, reports, invoices, bans, and configuration into cleaner module structure.
- Feed links fixed and localized name support added for search endpoint.
For a technical contributor view, see Igor's March recap.
Analytics 📊#
Our March 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 - major web app contributions across drawer UX, i18n, and infrastructure
- Igor Bubelov - major API, Android, and web app contributions
- Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - admin app, web app, blog, and data contributions
- Sync / S7NC - Dutch locale support for web app
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.
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