Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open-source reporter from the Insider Edition.
In this week’s update we feature the latest releases for the Stratum V2 protocol. Maintainers focused mainly on hardening, refactoring and bug fixing, while also introducing support for BIP323.
We also cover several news from the developer ecosystem. Notably, we discuss a first working proof-of-concept for a post-quantum Lightning implementation, a new scaling protocol to bring self-custody to a huge number of users, and other interesting news.
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Highlights from the Bitcoin developer ecosystem
I spent 10+ hours in open-source developer calls in the Bitcoin ecosystem last week. Here is what caught my eye:
- The Stratum V2 published new releases for the Stratum protocol, the applications, and the new UI.
- During the weekly call, on Tuesday 15th, Stratum V2 developers announced that the new versions for the Stratum V2 libraries were ready to be published. The releases were published on Thursday 17th.
- v.1.12.0 is the new release for the protocol libraries. Developers focused on hardening and refactoring several parts of the protocol, introducing several breaking changes. Moreover, this release introduces BIP323, which reserves 24 bits in the
nVersionfield as extra nonce space for miners. - Releases for
sv2-appsandsv2-uiwere also published.sv2-appsv0.8.0 hardens the applications by fixing several issues found by Loupe — the AI-assisted vulnerability scanner by Spiral —, improves the translation proxy (tProxy) and the Job Declaration Client (JDC), and adds supports for BIP323.sv2-uiv0.7.0 mainly addresses vulnerabilities found by Loupe.
A BIPs Update
In the last days there was some movement in the BIP repository. Specifically, one new BIP has been published by BIP maintainer Murchandamus.
Published BIPs#
A list of recently published BIPs
BIP461: Deterministic ECDSA Signatures#
Published On: Sep 16th, 2026
Layer: Applications
BIP461 defines how to obtain deterministic ECDSA signatures. A signature is now encoded using the Distinguish Encoding Rule (DER), which results in two numbers r and s , treated as big-endian signed integers. Due to the sign, in case a r number has its most significant bit set to 1 , hence treated as negative, a null byte is added to keep it positive. BIP461 describes how to do low r grinding of an ECDSA signature, to avoid adding an additional byte to it. The described process is deterministic, following RFC6979.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
Quantum Lightning: Ahmet Kurt, a researcher from East Texas A&M University, posted to Delving Bitcoin to present a first proof-of-concept for a quantum-secure implementation of the Lightning Network, called PQLN.
- Kurt published a paper, which presents a hybrid post-quantum extension of Lightning that protects all the different layers composing it — gossip, onion routing, invoice, peer services — with the lattice-based standards ML-DSA and ML-KEM. The proposed changes don’t need any modification to the consensus layer of Bitcoin, since they are LN-specific.
- As the author specifies, the huge cost for PQLN is bandwidth. A PQLN node on regtest needs to download 10 times and needs to store around 9 times more data than a legacy node. On the other hand, computation seems not to be the bottleneck, since the most expensive operation — ML-DSA signing — only takes 0.33ms.
- A fork of rust-lightning that implements the new post-quantum approach is already available on GitHub.
Depot: John Law posted to Delving Bitcoin a proposal for a new scaling protocol whose goal is to provide self-custodial Bitcoin to a large number of users. This new protocol is called Depot.
- The proposal builds upon three principles: it has a small, on-chain footprint, it allows user to participate even if they don’t have enough bitcoin to put a transaction on-chain, and it avoids creating more off-chain transactions than can be put on-chain before theft occurs.
- An operator funds one Taproot output that can be used to create probabilistic off-chain Lightning channels for a high number of users. Each user buys channels though a LN payment, which can be used to make payments.
- The security of the protocol depends on expiry management, expected values, and penalties that make griefing economically irrational. To be viable, the proposal would require new opcodes, such as OP_CTV and OP_CSFS.
Swaptopia: Grubles, researcher at Second, launched Swaptopia, a new swap service to move funds between on-chain and Lightning. Swaptopia is built upon Bark — Second’s Ark implementation —, it’s self-custodial, and runs completely in the browser.
- To move funds from on-chain to Lightning, this service boards the Ark Server and send a Lightning payment for the specified amount. On the other hand, to move from Lightning to on-chain the service receives the payment and offboards the Ark Server, moving funds on-chain.
CLN Security Advisory: The Core-lightning team provided a security advisory, suggesting operators running their nodes with experimental features enabled to switch-off that feature immediately. The advisory comes after reports from users of a possible loss of funds, and an investigation is currently ongoing.
More from BTC++ Insider Edition
News Hour#
- BTC++ News Hour: Check out our Friday livestream, where we discuss the most interesting news of the week from the Bitcoin developer ecosystem.
Articles#
Videos#
- Rob Hamilton — BTC++ Insider Interviews: “CEO of Bitcoin” Rob Hamilton gives a shoutout to instagibbs and explains how BIP-448 TEMPLATEHASH would benefit AnchorWatch
- Naiyoma — BTC++ Insider Interviews | Part 1: Developer Naiyoma tells us about Private Broadcast, which she reviewed in Bitcoin Core. It sends transactions over short-lived Tor or I2P connections to hide the origin IP.
- Naiyoma — BTC++ Insider Interviews | Part 2: Developer Naiyoma tells us how fingerprinting attacks can link a Bitcoin node’s clearnet and Tor identities, weakening privacy.
Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Berlin this October 1- 3 to talk about payments in Bitcoin!
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