Good Morning, Bitcoin - Monday, October 28th, 2024

GM. It's a new week, so it's time for new updates, new tools, and new stories. Have a good one!

What's happening

• OpenSats issued the eight wave of Bitcoin grants. The latest grantees include Citadel-Tech, Lampo, Cashu Nutshell, and PickhardtPayments Plugin. Read more about these projects here.
• Spiral has renewed its grant to VLS project. The Validating Lightning Singer (VLS) is being used by Breez SDK to secure LN keys for 14 bitcoin products, said Spiral.
• UI Charitable has issued a grant for Base58. University Impact has distributed the first grant from a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF). This grant came at the recommendation made through partnerships with Sound Advisory and Unchained. According to Unchained, the grant will provide support to five people going through the basics of Bitcoin engineering.

"Base58 is thrilled to be the recipient of the world’s first donor-advised fund bitcoin grant! This grant will be used this Fall as a scholarship fund for five software engineers who want to learn the basics of programming bitcoin. We’re grateful to University Impact and Unchained for creating charitable products that leverage bitcoin," said Lisa Neigut, Founder of Base58.

• Lightspark introduces Spark. The company announced the launch of an alpha version of Spark, a statechain-inspired, trust-minimized solution designed to scale Bitcoin and extend the Lightning Network. The firm also introduced UMA Request, UMA Auth, and Lightspark Extend, stating that Spark will be used to launch wallet-as-a-service and stablecoin issuance products by the end of the year.
• Synonym introduces Pubky. It is an open protocol for per-public-key backends for censorship resistant web applications. It comes with a flexible, open-source toolkit and makes use of PKARR (Public Key Addressable Resource Records) and Mainline DHT used by BitTorrent clients.
  • Demo's of the project include:
    • PKDNS: a DNS server for self-sovereign and censorship-resistant domain names.
    • Pubky Explorer for decentralized file exploring tied directly to your public key.
    • Pubky Notes - a simple note-taking app for a personal home server.
  • Read more about Pubky and explore the protocol's documentation here.

• Coracle may have exposed nsecs of users logged in with they private key. Coracle developer Hodlbod disclosed that Coracle has been sending user session objects to BugSnag when reporting errors. Affected users include those who triggered an error in Coracle while signed in directly with their private key, since December 5th, 2023. This does not affect users who logged into Coracle with browser extensions such as Alby or Nos2x.

"In practical terms, your keys should still be secure, since they were sent over TLS, and have been deleted. But there is no guarantee I can offer that they are in fact gone," added the developer.

• Tether slams WSJ for irresponsible reporting. The company has published a blog post stating that "it is wildly irresponsible for WSJ to write articles with reckless allegations with such certainty when no authorities have gone on the record to confirm these rumors, and no sources are named."
  • The post came out in response to the WSJ's story published on Friday, claiming that federal investigators are probing the company for alleged anti-money laundering and sanctions violations.
  • At the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, Switzerland, Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino also provided details about Tether’s current financial reserves, revealing that the company holds 82,452 BTC, 48. 3 tons of gold, as well as approximately $100 billion worth of US Treasuries.
• Peter Todd not really hiding. The Bitcoin contributor told Decrypt he is certainly not in hiding, nor has he been, as a recent Wired story suggested. "I have taken some security measures. But it’s not a good idea to say exactly what I’ve done publicly. Best to keep the bad guys guessing," said the developer.
• Disappearing Satoshi Nakamoto statue unveiled in Lugano. The statue, unveiled at Lugano's Plan ₿ conference, captured some attention with its invisible design. When viewed directly from the front, the statue vanishes completely, symbolizing Satoshi's anonymity.

Use the tools

• Bitcoin Keeper v1.2.17 delivers an overhauled TapSigner experience, key/signer and wallet data management improvements, and bug fixes with UI updates.
• StashPay build (13) is now available on TestFlight. It updates Liquid SDK to v0.5.0-rc1 and packages several UI fixes.
• BitBanana v0.8.7 brings a more flexible fiat currency setup.
• Andreas Griffin released Bitcoin-Safe v1.0.0 beta. It is a Bitcoin wallet "for the entire family" and comes with an easy step-by-step wizard for setting up multisig wallets, full support for COLDCARD devices, BitBox02, Blockstream Jade, and Specter DIY, multi-language support, label syncing, encrypted cloud label backups, mempool view, and a money flow diagram.
  • Available on Mac , Linux, and Windows. It is still in beta, so use it with caution.

• Nostrmo v2.9.3, a Flutter Nostr client for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Web, and Linux, comes with NIP-55 content-resolver and cache relay support, among other features.
• Fedimint v0.4.4 has been released.
• OpenLibrarian v0.1.0 is an initial MVP release for Nostr-based website dedicated to books. Check it out here.
• Amber v2.0.8 delivers a fix for signing private zaps.
• Citrine v0.5.4 fixes the notification icon size, loading screen, and updates dependencies.
• fiatjaf released v0.7.8 of Nak, a command-line tool for doing all things Nostr.
• NostrDVM v0.9.7 brings additional tutorials and minor bug fixes related to nutzaps and reannouncing mints.
• Cashu.me wallet and progressive web app (PWA) now supports restoring ecash from a seed phrase.

• lnwCash now supports the ability to redeem Cashu tokens and store them on ecash relays with NIP-60.
• bullishNuts v0.2.7 adds icons from Bitcoin.Design, along with other fixes and styling tweaks.
• Lightning Terminal v0.13.5-alpha includes updates to the integrated version Loop (v0.28.8-beta), adds a new litcli bakesupermacaroon helper command, and a few other things.
• Pokey v0.0.3-alpha brings improved relay protocol recovery after system startup, an Amber button, the ability to tap on notifications and open them in a preferred client, and improvements to notification settings that allow users to disable certain kinds of events.
• Keychat app v1.20.2 is a bug fix release for a chat app built with Bitcoin ecash, Nostr protocol, and Signal protocol.
• Fully Noded - Server v0.0.0.1-alpha is now available for testing. It is a one-click Bitcoin Core, Core Lightning, and Join Market server to connect to Fully Noded apps.

Other stuff

• The Bitcoin Policy Institute published a new report making the case for bitcoin as a reserve asset. Get it here.
• 1440000bytes added steps for testing Joinstr app on Android.

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