The Frontier

Waxwing designed Lichen as a Bitcoin-enforced second layer with individual two-of-two outputs, validity proofs, and unilateral exits. Unlike pooled BitVM designs, users can withdraw the exact balance they hold, in increments down to 1,000 sats.

Waxwing says Lichen users could stay offline for most of a long contract, then return before expiry to withdraw; the hub must remain online and fund inbound liquidity. Waxwing estimates one hub could support 10 to 50,000 concurrent users, with a typical dispute taking about one day.

Jao Noctus proposed a descriptor marker for secret hash preimages, which wallets cannot currently distinguish from public digests by size alone. The change would let wallets manage preimages alongside private keys while avoiding accidental display of the secret.

IBIS Wallet 5.0 beta added Bark-based ARK support, unilateral exits from the Spark state chain, and silent-payment receiving; 5.1 beta fixed an important bug. Brandon describes IBIS as an Android-only, agentically engineered wallet that has made substantial progress on security and features.

Vincent built Landfall to simplify linking a miner’s on-chain payout address to a Lightning offer, a process that can involve multiple wallets and BIP322 message signing. The app guides Ocean miners through setup, but Vincent said its future maintenance depends on Ocean or sustained user demand.

Vincent argues miners should consider Lightning for privacy, not only small payouts: Bolt12 can obscure payment details, while publishing an on-chain mining address links payouts to that address. He says Bolt11 still leaks some information, whereas Bolt12 can keep a miner’s activity less visible.

Brandon built OurBitcoin as a Rust full node with a from-scratch consensus implementation, checked against Bitcoin Core through automation. Its Explorer-style API returns the response block hash and accepts an as-of block hash, giving wallets a stable chain view across reorgs.

Eclair 0.14.4 included fixes for HTLC settlement, splicing, on-the-fly funding, and browser-origin API requests; 0.14.5 added trampoline-routing, splice, and HMAC fixes. Gustavo said both were security releases and noted Eclair 0.14.6 appeared during the discussion.

Eclair fixed two fund-theft paths: relaxed trampoline routing limits could permit excessive HTLC expiry deltas, and unverified splice inputs could make Eclair accept an invalid channel state. Both could leave an outgoing HTLC claimable after the corresponding incoming HTLC expired.

BDK Chain 0.23.4 fixed Electrum transaction-ID checks, OP_RETURN confirmation detection, reorg tracking, and Bitcoin Core RPC synchronization. Separate BDK changes now propagate Electrum timeouts and prevent zero-sized scan settings from silently returning successful but incomplete syncs.

LND 0.21.5 and 0.20.6 release candidates include fee-update, commitment-fee, memory-allocation, and database-deadlock fixes. The 0.21.5 candidate also checks auxiliary HTLC signatures before signing, preventing missing signatures from blocking on-chain resolution of affected assets.

LND’s HTLC accountability implementation scores outgoing channels using forwarding outcomes, resolution times, and expected versus earned fees. The system currently collects and logs reputation data without changing forwarding decisions, and its scores reset when LND restarts.

BTCPay Server fixed a payout-state bug that could lead an operator to pay twice when a slow Lightning payment lookup returned no result. It also fixed API-key privilege escalation, where restricted keys could exercise broader permissions or create keys with more authority than their own.

A Lightning invoice with multiple payment hashes enabled the LNP2P bot exploit: separate parts of the software selected different hashes, allowing a payment to appear unpaid and be paid again. BOLT now requires readers to reject invoices containing more than one payment hash.

BOLT’s simple Taproot channel specification was corrected to match the behavior of existing implementations and related BIPs. The review identified underspecified MuSig nonce generation and SIGHASH_SINGLE transaction construction, gaps that could otherwise produce insecure or unsignable transactions.