The update illustrates that the Bitcoin builder community surrounding Spiral is hard at work.
Spiral, the Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Block, has released its quarterly update. The projects Spiral has launched have released new updates and features for various products, including Lightning Development Kit (LDK), Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK), Bitcoin Design Community and Bitcoin Product Community.
The update described how the Lightning Development Kit’s LDK Node implementation aims to simplify the full suite of LDK APIs, allowing for an easier payment experience for users. Conor Okus, one of LDK Node’s creators, shared a sneak peek of the technology during the Advancing Bitcoin 2023 conference in London. At the end of the workshop, all 30 attendees built a Lightning Wallet from scratch and made a successful payment.
On the other hand, the Bitcoin Development Kit saw a big milestone with the tagging of its 1.0 alpha release. This release included the new 1.0 framework and integration testing while APIs and internals are still under active development. This quarter, Kotlin, Swift, and Python language bindings can now broadcast raw transactions, create descriptors for BIP44/49/84 templates, access blockchain fee estimation and see more transaction and address info.
The Bitcoin Design Community has adopted Nostr Nets for community calls, and they also recently switched from Slack to Discord, though their Slack is still active. The community has also started a new series called Merchant Product Review, which analyzes bitcoin products and tools for merchants. They went deep on Tiankii, a merchant platform for El Salvadorians, along with the POS terminal functional on Breez.
Lastly, the Bitcoin Product Community was launched this quarter to encourage product managers to shepherd bitcoin projects from inception to completion. They held a Twitter Space to announce the community’s formation and what to expect from it.
Developers Alekos Filini and Daniela Brozzoni announced their new hack.bs hacker space in Brescia, Italy. They teamed up with BitGeneration to bring bitcoin education to Italian high school students via talks and the BDK-based training wallet Padawan. Speaking of, this quarter, Thunderbiscuit listed Padawan on the Google Play store. Rajarshi Maitra hosted a “Mastering Bitcoin” cohort through his Bitshala initiative, and Vlad Kwasi published an article in Forbes about using bitcoin in Africa without Internet access.
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