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. Projects that Spiral has released have released new updates and features for various products, including the Lightning Development Kit (LDK), the Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK), the Bitcoin Design Community, and the Bitcoin Product Community.
He update described how the Lightning Development Kit’s LDK node implementation is intended to simplify the entire set of LDK APIs, allowing for a simpler checkout experience for users. Conor Okus, one of the creators of LDK Node, shared a sneak peek of the technology during the Advancing Bitcoin 2023 conference in London. At the end of the workshop, all 30 attendees created 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 alpha version 1.0. This release included the new 1.0 framework and integration testing, while the APIs and internal components are still under active development. This quarter, Kotlin, Swift, and Python language bindings can now stream raw transactions, create descriptors for BIP44/49/84 templates, access blockchain fee estimation, and view more transaction and address information.
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 live. The community has also started a new series called Merchant Product Review, which looks at bitcoin products and tools for merchants. They delved into Tiankii, a business platform for Salvadorans, along with the functional POS terminal at Breez.
Lastly, the Bitcoin Product Community was launched this quarter to encourage product managers to guide Bitcoin projects from inception to completion. They made a Twitter space to announce the formation of the community and what to expect from it.
Developers Alekos Filini and Daniela Brozzoni announced their new hacker space hack.bs in Brescia, Italy. They partnered with BitGeneration to provide bitcoin education to Italian high school students through talks and the BDK-based training wallet, Padawan. Speaking of which, this quarter Thunderbiscuit listed Padawan on the Google Play store. Rajarshi Maitra organized a “Mastering Bitcoin” cohort through his Bitshala initiative, and Vlad Kwasi published an article in Forbes about using bitcoin in Africa without internet access.
