BTC Before Light: Issue 42 ☀️
Strategy sells $2.5 million BTC, Bitcoin Core off-site recap, and a new Bitcoin L2 contender called Cube
Good morning,
Today, I’m discussing three main topics: Strategy’s first bitcoin sale since 2022, key takeaways from a recent Bitcoin Core developer offsite in Barcelona, and a new Layer 2 protocol called Cube that aims to bring trust-minimized smart contracts to Bitcoin.
Let’s get into it.
Yours truly,
Christine D. Kim
⏱️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: 19
Closed issues: 31
Milestone progress: 62%
Last week’s snapshot showed 18 open issues, 29 closed, and a 63% milestone progress.
🖊️ Meeting Log
An overview of the Bitcoin Core developers meeting that took place last Thursday, May 28, 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
Bitcoin/bitcoin, PR #35295—validation: fetch block input prevouts in parallel during ConnectBlock
Bitcoin/bitcoin, PR #35182—Replace libevent with our own HTTP and socket-handling implementation
Bitcoin/bitcoin, PR #35319—net: use the proxy if overriden when doing v2->v1 reconnections
Ready for review
Bitcoin/bitcoin, PR #32427—kernel: Replace leveldb-based BlockTreeDB with flat-file based store
Bitcoin/bitcoin, PR #35301—Silent Payments: Implement bip352 (take 2)
Bitcoin/bitcoin, PR #35302—Silent Payments: Sending (take 2)
Discussion Topics
Kernel Working Group (WG) Update: “sedited” shared a new branch that separates mempool/policy code from validation and, thus, from the kernel library. Though there are organizational benefits to separating this part of the Bitcoin Core software, developers discussed how there doesn’t appear to be much use for the separation beyond this.
Benchmarking WG Update: Developers discussed the design of an “automated compaction PR” that would help reduce storage usage in a Bitcoin node after an Initial Block Download (IBD). They discussed how much storage could be saved and how frequently these compactions should occur.
🌟 PR Spotlight
PR #35295
Category: Bitcoin/bitcoin, Bitcoin Core client software used to connect to Bitcoin, the network, validate blocks and transactions, and transact on-chain.
Title: “validation: fetch block input prevouts in parallel during ConnectBlock”
Author: “andrewtoth”
Status: Work in progress
Date opened: May 14, 2026
Most recent update: May 31, 2026
What it does: PR #35295 continues earlier work from PR #31132 to speed up one of the most time-consuming parts of Bitcoin block validation. When a Bitcoin node receives a new block, it must verify that every transaction in that block spends valid coins. To do this, the node repeatedly looks up information about previously created transaction outputs, known as “prevouts.”
Today, Bitcoin Core performs many of these lookups sequentially. PR #35295 and PR #31132 propose fetching this data in parallel, allowing the software to utilize multiple CPU cores more effectively during block validation.
Importantly, this does not change Bitcoin’s consensus rules or validation logic. It simply helps Bitcoin Core make better use of modern multi-core processors.
Why it matters: The performance gains from the PR are expected to be significant. Benchmarking cited in the PR shows Initial Block Download speedups ranging from 1.18x to more than 3x faster, depending on hardware, operating system, database cache size, storage type, and thread count. Worst-case block connection time on network-attached storage was also measured at more than 2x faster.
☁️ 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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