• Spiral, the Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Block, has released its quarterly update on various products.
• Lightning Development Kit (LDK) Node implementation simplifies payment experience and Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK) sees 1.0 alpha release.
• The community also launched Bitcoin Design Community, Bitcoin Product Community and hack.bs hacker space in Brescia, Italy to bring bitcoin education to Italian high school students.
Spiral’s Quarterly Update
Spiral, the Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Block, has released its quarterly update for various products including Lightning Development Kit (LDK), Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK), Bitcoin Design Community and Bitcoin Product Community.
Lightning Development Kit (LDK)
The LDK Node implementation was showcased by Conor Okus during the Advancing Bitcoin 2023 conference in London which allowed all 30 attendees to build a Lightning Wallet from scratch and make successful payments with it.
Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK)
The BDK saw a big milestone with the tagging of its 1.0 alpha release this quarter which included new 1.0 framework and integration testing while APIs and internals are still under active development. It now supports Kotlin, Swift, and Python language bindings that can broadcast raw transactions, create descriptors for BIP44/49/84 templates etcetera as well as access blockchain fee estimation and more transaction and address info.
Bitcoin Design & Product Communities
The Bitcoin Design Community has adopted Nostr Nets for community calls as well as switched from Slack to Discord while their Slack is still active; they have also started a series called Merchant Product Review that assesses bitcoin products & tools for merchants such as Tiankii & Breez POS terminal functionalities in El Salvadorians markets. The newly launched Bitcoin Product Community encourages product managers to shepherd bitcoin projects from inception to completion through Twitter Spaces & other events like Mastering Bitcoin cohort hosted through Bitshalla initiative or articles published by Vlad Kwasi on Forbes about using bitcoin without Internet access in Africa etcetera.
hackBS Hacker Space
Developers Alekos Filini & Daniela Brozzoni announced their new hackBS hacker space in Brescia, Italy where they collaborated with BitGeneration to bring bitcoin education at high school level via talks & training wallets such as Padawan which is already listed on Google Play store this quarter itself .