February 2026 Update

1.1k new merchants, 5 new communities, major internationalization progress, and big Android & API upgrades

Global Metrics 🌍️#

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 23,063 -> 24,146 (+1,083 +4.7%)
Recently verified (1y): 12,727 -> 13,470 (+743 +5.8%)
Avg. days since last verification: 393 -> 396 (+3 +0.8%)
Merchants boosted: 20 -> 41 (+21 +105.0%)
Total boost duration: 2,240 -> 4,920 (+2,680 +119.6%) days
Comments posted: 39 -> 29 (-10 -25.6%)

Graph showing merchant adoption over the last month

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	1106	913	160	33	6
🇮🇹 Italy	69	8	58	3	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	65	29	31	5	1
🇳🇱 Netherlands	59	4	50	5	4
🇸🇻 El Salvador	55	12	42	1	4
🇰🇷 South Korea	47	0	47	0	0
🇹🇭 Thailand	45	18	26	1	2
🇩🇪 Germany	39	5	28	6	0
🇯🇵 Japan	38	1	37	0	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	37	0	35	2	0

Community Activity 📈#

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

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇰🇷 Sea of Corea	52	0	52	0	0
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	50	40	9	1	0
🇧🇯 Bitcoin Benin	35	7	26	2	0
🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base	32	1	31	0	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	25	20	4	1	1
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	25	21	3	1	0

New Communities 🫂#

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

We now have 638 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 602 edits
🥈 RoseBTCmap with 432 edits
🥉 Comino with 337 edits

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	602	537	65	0
RoseBTCmap	432	422	10	0
Comino	337	28	293	16
descubrebitcoin	136	13	89	34
Beinardus	33	23	10	0
Dimitar155	25	0	25	0
Bitcoin Amantikir	19	1	18	0
wildmaps	18	0	18	0
BTCMAP-TBB	17	1	16	0
Mind09	16	7	8	1
skquinn	16	0	16	0
Carlos404	13	3	9	1
samuelzammit	13	0	13	0
BigKev97	13	0	13	0
emiliomorles	12	4	7	1

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Web App 🕸️#

February was a very active month for the Web App, with a strong focus on localization, UX polish, and performance.

Major internationalization 'i18n' rollout across map controls, merchant pages, area views, leaderboards, dashboard, tickets, onboarding, support pages, and errors. Thanks to new contributor Nackoo2000 for assisting Hannes here!
New language support expanded, including Bulgarian and broader translation coverage.
Community and tagging UX updates including Verify Community forms and translated onboarding flows.
Map UX improvements from PR #695 (search list design updates) and PR #694 (nearby list real-distance display).
Performance improvements on merchant pages and non-map pages (sync bottleneck reductions and sync progress indicators).
Community contact support expanded with Satlantis, Geyser and improved social/contact rendering.
Merchant page performance improved by orders of magnitude for cold clients by removing full-sync bottlenecks and relying on targeted API endpoints.

Android App 🤖#

Android saw major progress in February, with a large app refactor and several UX improvements landing ahead of the next release.

Improved clustering now feels stable after significant map refactoring and testing.
Map rotation is back, enabled by the new clustering approach.
Website-aligned default colors now improve readability across map styles in both light and dark modes.
Customization remains strong with optional Material-based theming still available in settings.

Preview builds are available at: btcmap-android preview releases.

Admin App 🛠️#

Admin App work in February included validation and maintenance improvements:

Added support for 'Login with Nostr'.
Added additional new social contact fields to validation rules.
Updated JS module dependencies and Bootstrap.
Added contributor setup guidance and repo hygiene updates.

Infrastructure ⚙️#

Infrastructure and platform work was significant in February:

API/Backend: large refactor and migration work across DB layers, schema handling, request logging, v4 endpoint improvements, and reliability updates
Lightning stack: continued LND-related work and associated backend improvements
Data portability and resilience: DB structure evolved around focused files (main.db, images.db, log.db) to improve portability and backup workflows
Request logging and OG caching: faster logging with richer diagnostics (including user-agent) plus OpenGraph image caching to reduce tile-server load
New API capabilities: endpoint additions for place areas and place activity

For a technical contributor view, see Igor's February recap.

Analytics 📊#

Our February 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 and admin contributions
Nackoo2000 - major i18n rollout across web pages and flows
5atoshiNakamoto - web locale wording fix
Igor Bubelov - major API and Android contributions
Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - blog, data, and admin contributions
kanishka0411 - web app contributions

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.