April 2026

Perth BitDevs

Interactive topic explainers

NOTE The topic summaries for this month were generated with the assistance of AI and may contain errors.

Consensus & Protocol

BIP-54Soft Fork

BIP-54 Consensus Cleanup — Draft Soft Fork & Deployment Debate

Timewarp fix, validation time limits, Merkle tree hardening, duplicate tx prevention, and the open question of how a cleanup soft fork would actually be deployed.

BIP-110 Update — Sybil Nodes, Crawler Data & More

Lopp's "Spot the Sybil" chart, willcl_ark's crawler data, 3 signaling blocks in the current period (all Ocean solo miners), and the ProductionReady alternative client announcement.

Cryptography

Post-QuantumHD Wallets

PQ Signature Advances — Lattice-Based HD Wallets

HD wallet key derivation using lattice-based cryptography. Bringing BIP-32-style hierarchical deterministic wallets to a post-quantum world.

Post-QuantumSignatures

SHRIMPS — Multi-Device Stateful PQ Signatures

Jonas Nick announces SHRIMPS: 2.5KB hash-based post-quantum signatures that work across multiple devices from the same seed. Successor to single-device SHRINCS, 3x smaller than SLH-DSA.

Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin CorePerformance

IBD Optimizations — Speeding Up Initial Block Download

From l0rinc's ~16% combined speedup to Ruben Somsen's SwiftSync (5× faster IBD), a wave of optimizations is transforming how fast new nodes sync. LevelDB tuning, parallel input fetching, and more.

Bitcoin CoreTooling

Bitcoin TUI — Terminal Interface for Bitcoin Core

A terminal user interface for interacting with Bitcoin Core. Browse blocks, transactions, and node status from the command line.

Bitcoin CoreTesting

Fuzzor Dashboard — Bitcoin Core Fuzzing Activity

Niklas Gögge's live dashboard tracking fuzzing coverage and activity across Bitcoin Core. Visualising the automated bug-hunting that helps keep the codebase safe.

Lightning

Channel Splicing BOLT Merged

After 8 years from concept to spec, channel splicing is officially part of the Lightning protocol. Resize channels without closing them, "death to all swaps," and one-balance wallets.

Network & Governance

Rare 2-Block Reorg at Height 941,881

A rare two-block mainnet reorganization with only a small handful of confirmed examples in public datasets. What happened, what it means, and historical context.

Privacy

Silent Payments — Static Addresses Without Reuse

Craig Raw calls it "the first serious contender to improve address derivation since HD wallets." 10+ wallets shipping, a BIP-392 descriptor draft, and a path to pay-to-email UX.