Good morning,
Bitcoin 2026 kicked off yesterday with a strong lineup of speakers from the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Today, I break down the key takeaways from remarks by leaders of the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission—and why, even if you’re not building on Bitcoin, Bitcoin 2026 is a conference worth paying attention to.
Let’s get into it.
Yours truly,
Christine D. Kim
P.S. I’m hosting my second All Protocol Devs event this Friday. It will be a virtual session to accommodate more protocol developers, researchers, and enthusiasts worldwide.
We’ll be discussing the ongoing fallout and recovery efforts from the KelpDAO/LayerZero exploit.
Background on the exploit from last week’s BTC Before Light issue here.
Details on how to sign up for this Friday’s meetup here.
⏱️Core Release Schedule
First, a quick overview of Bitcoin Core’s software release schedule and the status of the next major release:
Latest Stable Major Release: Bitcoin Core 31.0
Release Date: April 20, 2026
Upcoming Major Release: Bitcoin Core 32.0
Target Release Date: October 10, 2026
Open issues: 16
Closed issues: 22
Milestone progress: 57%
Last week’s snapshot showed 17 open issues, 20 closed, and a milestone progress of 54% toward the next major Bitcoin Core release.
🖊️ Meeting Log
An overview of the Bitcoin Core developers meeting that took place last Thursday, April 23, 2026, sourced from Internet Relay Chat (IRC) logs recorded by Chaincode Labs.
Pull Requests (PRs)
Proposed code changes to Bitcoin Core and their respective statuses:
Work-in-progress
PR #34641 (node: scale default -dbcache with system RAM)
PR #551 (Wallet settings and Mempool information)
PR #34342 (cli: Replace libevent usage with simple HTTP client)
Merged
PR #35025 (refactor: use SpanReader in deserialization benchmarks)
PR #35128 (dbwrapper: avoid copying CDBIterator keys in
GetKey())PR #35124 (bench: fix benchmark fixtures and setup checks)
Discussion Topics
There were no separate discussion topics raised during last Thursday’s Bitcoin Core developers meeting.
🌟 PR Spotlight
PR #34641
Description: Scale default -dbcache with system RAM
Author: “l0rinc”
Status: Open, work-in-progress
Date opened: February 20, 2026
Most recent update: April 26, 2026
What it does: This PR updates how Bitcoin Core sets its default database cache (-dbcache), which determines how much RAM is used to store a working view of the UTXO set, i.e., the list of all spendable bitcoin. Today, that default is a fixed 450 MiB—set nearly a decade ago, regardless of how powerful a user’s computer is.
The proposal replaces that static value with a dynamic, RAM-aware formula. In practice, Bitcoin Core would automatically allocate a portion of available memory, roughly 25% of usable RAM after reserving space for the operating system, with built-in bounds to prevent it from going too low or too high. Users can still manually override the setting if desired.
The PR is still being actively refined, with recent updates focused on implementation details like data types and edge-case handling—small but important changes to ensure the logic behaves safely and consistently across systems.
Why it matters: The size of the database cache directly affects node performance. A larger cache allows more blockchain data to stay in memory, reducing the need to repeatedly read from disk. This cuts down on “flush churn” (frequent writes from memory to disk) and speeds up validation, especially during initial block download (IBD), when a node is syncing the entire chain.
Benchmarks included in the PR show meaningful improvements across a wide range of machines, from Raspberry Pis to high-end desktops, with some setups seeing sync times improve by over 2x with larger caches.
At the same time, the move to a dynamic default reflects an important constraint in Bitcoin Core development: changes must improve performance without raising the barrier to running a node. By scaling memory usage to the hardware, this approach avoids overloading lower-resource systems while still unlocking performance gains on modern ones.
☁️ That’s all for my summary of Bitcoin Core development. Continue reading for my insights. To read the rest of the newsletter, make sure you are signed up for a premium subscription:
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🧭 Insights
The world’s largest annual Bitcoin conference kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas.
Organized by Bitcoin Magazine and BTC Inc., Bitcoin 2026 is one of the most important crypto conferences of the year, due to the high-profile and influential individuals in attendance.
This year’s headliners include senior officials from across the U.S. government, alongside executives from major financial institutions and leading crypto companies.
Representatives from the highest levels of government, finance, and technology are coming together to talk not just about Bitcoin, but the future of digital assets more broadly.
Yesterday’s speakers included:
