September 2025 Update

Global Metrics 🌍️#

Here are the top stats from the last period (01-09-2025 → 30-09-2025):

Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 17,931 → 18,242 (+311 +1.7%)
Recently verified (1y): 9,409 → 9,698 (+289 +3%)
Avg. days since last verification: 400 → 407 (+7 +1.8%)
Merchants boosted: 12 → 16 (+4 +33%)
Total boost duration: 1,530 → 2169 days (+639 +42%)
Comments posted: 40 → 56 (+16 +40%)

Graph showing merchant adoption over the last quarter

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:

Country Name	Created	Updated	Deleted
🇹🇭 Thailand	47	184	16
🇵🇹 Portugal	21	173	12
🇸🇻 El Salvador	51	126	10
🇸🇰 Slovakia	42	122	1
🇿🇦 South Africa	12	104	2
🇨🇿 Czechia	3	90	6
🇳🇱 Netherlands	12	55	22
🇨🇦 Canada	10	79	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	28	45	5
🇬🇧 United Kingdom	15	54	2

Community Activity 📈#

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

Community Name	Created	Updated	Deleted
Bitcoin Coast	57	178	12
FREE Madeira	16	160	7
Vancouver Bitcoiners	7	80	1
Bitcoin Beach	11	63	3
21 Bratislava	11	43	1
BOB Space	3	34	6
Proof of Bitcoin	0	40	0

New Communities 🫂#

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

We now have 573 Communities from all across the planet.

MoneyBadger Adds 31,000 Merchants 🤯#

Through an integration with Zapper - a QR payment network in South Africa 🇿🇦 - our friends at MoneyBadger have paved the way for Bitcoiners to access up to 31,000 additional locations!

This is a similar approach to Pick 'n Pay in that a custom QR is generated and their companion app is required to generate the ⚡️ invoice, but that line is becoming a little more blurred as leading wallets (Blink, Aqua, Strike, WoS, Bitz, Zeus) now support scanning the MoneyBadger QR naively.

Given the huge number of merchants and the companion app requirements, we're working closely with the MoneyBadger team to work out how we most appropriately show these locations on BTC Map.

Data Clean-up on Aisle El Salvador 🇸🇻#

Two brand new projects - BitMap Adoption & Bitcoin Coast - have popped-up and are working in parallel to ensure the map in Bitcoin Country is as good as it can be ... as can already can be seen in the countries table above and they only just got started!

Other Adoption News 📰#

DFX Swiss added a further 22 SPAR locations in Switzerland 🇨🇭. This brings the total to 134!

Web App Diet 🚀#

Some of you have noticed an order of magnitude improvement in the performance of our Web App!

Well, that's because last month saw a lot of effort focused on a long overdue performance overhaul and migration to v4 of our API. Massive thanks to Hannes and Igor who did most of the heavy lifting here. 🙏

The main changes we made were:

We switched from a 'full-sync' model to a 'lightweight incremental sync and fetch on-demand' model so that users, particularly those on low-end devices with limited data services, can get what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.
We introduced a global CDN for initial map pin sync so that pins load as fast as possible from servers local to users.
We now only draw pins for the current map view. The performance improvement on mobile is particularly noticeable.
Search has returned to the Web App and now uses our new Search API. We can now focus on improving the search to the benefit of all clients that use it.

As with all engineering, compromises have been made and these changes have come at a cost in terms of full offline capability, but we have the native apps for that.

Credits#

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to the project this period:

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.
Consider a zapping this note or making a donation to the to the project here.