Nostr notes by BTC Map

September blog is out! 234 net new merchants, a talk in Helsinki ...

2026-10-05T13:32:37Z

September blog is out!

234 net new merchants, a talk in Helsinki and a new Android release. 👀

quoting
naddr1qv…ne2e

Summary 📝

The map finished September with 27,148 merchants, up 234 on the month, and 29,622 places in total including exchanges and ATMs.

Places verified in the last year fell by 286 to 15,957, and the average merchant is now 457 days past its last check, 19 days further out than a month ago. Growth has continued; however, keeping the map accurate has not kept up with it. 😥 Remember, re-verifying a few places near you helps more than adding new ones!

September was a busy one for the apps! The Add Location flow was rebuilt on the web app and Android's data layer was rewritten to work as local/offline first.

We also took the map to BTC HEL in Helsinki this month and showed off some cool new charts. 👀

Key Figures 📈

Last three months

Metric July August September

Merchants 26,575 26,914 27,148

Places 29,061 29,389 29,622

Verified (1y) 16,860 16,243 15,957

Days since check 418 438 457

Merchants boosted 14 12 24

Total boost duration 1,605 935 2,085

Comments 25 26 28

Change

Metric 1 month 3 months 12 months

Merchants +234 (+0.9%) +1,075 (+4.1%) +10,748 (+65.5%)

Places +233 (+0.8%) +1,050 (+3.7%) +11,380 (+62.4%)

Verified (1y) −286 (−1.8%) −1,033 (−6.1%) +6,259 (+64.5%)

Days since check +19 (+4.3%) +55 (+13.7%) +50 (+12.3%)

Merchants boosted +12 (+100.0%) +13 (+118.2%) +12 (+100.0%)

Total boost duration +1,150 (+123.0%) +1,695 (+434.6%) +1,605 (+334.4%)

Comments +2 (+7.7%) −6 (−17.6%) −28 (−50.0%)

Growth

Commentary

Month-end figures, as published; current figures are on the BTC Map dashboard. Merchants are shops and services; places also counts exchanges and ATMs; verified (1y) covers the last twelve months; days since check is the average wait, so higher is worse; boosted and comments are that month's own activity.

The three- and twelve-month changes come from the API's dashboard series, which is revised after publication.

BTC HEL 2026 🇫🇮

Nathan presented The State of Bitcoin Merchant Adoption at BTCHEL 2026, The Nordic Bitcoin Conference, at Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki on 25 September. Thirty minutes including Q&A, covering where the map stands globally, how density and verification differ between countries, and where the gaps are, with a section on the Nordics and Finland.

The slides run to 32 pages, and the session abstract is on the conference site.

Web App 🕸️

107 pull requests were closed on the web app in September, 96 of them merged, nearly all of them one project: Add Location, rebuilt from the ground up.

The form now lives in a side panel on the map rather than on a page of its own. The pin freezes while you fill it in, with a Move pin chip to reposition it, a step indicator tracks progress, and a review step sits in front of submit. Opening hours have a proper editor instead of being typed by hand, and the address is reverse geocoded from the pin.

Smaller changes landed alongside it. Every form now uses one error style: add location, sign-up, comments, add community and the verify flows. Sign-up is self-service, so new users choose their own credentials rather than being handed a throwaway account. A password the user chose is never kept in the browser. Submissions carry the signed-in account and post to the API's new endpoint. A "Know OSM? Edit directly" link routes experienced mappers to the OSM editing path. Join Us is now a native onboarding guide and the third hero call to action on the home page. Community and country pages have an events section.

Icons are now bundled with the app, so Iconify rate limits can no longer blank out pins. The payment filters read onchain, lightning and unknown as three states, instead of dropping places without the tag.

Android App 🤖

Android shipped v1.2.0 on 30 September, after 268 commits over the month. Most of the month went into the data layer: places, areas, events and comments ship as bundled snapshots, so a fresh install only syncs the delta. Area geometry and chips read from the local cache, map areas can be downloaded for offline use, and a world basemap is bundled for zoomed-out views.

Area names and descriptions, opening hours and the activity feed are translated, and search matches places and areas by their localised names. The activity feed was rebuilt around Local, Following and Saved tabs, with a filter dialog, deleted entries and a preview map. Places can be submitted from the app, with a verify/report screen alongside redesigned add-comment, boost and payment screens, and OpenStreetMap actions on the place screen. Submissions are tagged with the app version.

Accounts and payments survive screen rotation and the app being killed, and stored credentials are redacted. A boost purchase or paid invoice is reported once. Search moved to the v4 API, the verified-within filter works again, and outdated merchants and exchange markers fade. The map's area chips show initials and an events badge.

There is also a new documentation site with getting-started, merchant and verification guides.

Infrastructure ⚙️

The API repo took 32 commits over the month. Place submissions and place reports got REST endpoints, with the submitting user recorded on both. Events joined the v4 search index and gained their own endpoint with an optional date window. Areas and events picked up delta sync, start dates are now required, and timezones are inferred from an event's coordinates.

Areas can be requested in a given language, and the v4 area sync carries those names through. That is what the apps read to show translated areas. Overlapping element syncs are prevented, and the project moved to a self-hosted Overpass instance.

Gitea issues are now a summary plus an OSM tag block, with osm:<tag> fields passed through and titles prefixed by country and community. That makes a submission readable without opening the map. Another batch of missing category icons was drawn.

The Gitea server was upgraded, LND was upgraded and reboot-tested, SSH access was hardened, and the fleet gained an lnbits/nostr host.

Communities and Contributors 🫂

Three communities joined in September: Bitcoin Ekiti in Nigeria, Satoshi Team - Cundinamarca and Mi Tierra Digital - San Vicente del Caguán in Colombia. The map now has 689 communities.

Most of the month's editing was in the United States, with 431 changes, over half of them new places. Thailand's 169 changes were almost all updates to places already on the map, and El Salvador's 158 came with four additions. Among communities, Bitcoin Berlín SV led with 149 changes, followed by Satoshi Team - Antioquia on 68 and BitPlebs Los Angeles on 50, mostly new places.

Country totals at the end of the month: the United States has 10,570 places with 89% verified in the last year, South Africa 2,755 at 59%, Brazil 2,220 at 26%. Among communities, Proof of Bitcoin has 933 places, Mi Primer Bitcoin 435, and BitPlebs Los Angeles 431 at 93% verified.

Comino led September with 184 edits, Rockedf followed with 175 (151 of them new places) and Genesisvaleria with 144. Thanks to them, and to everyone else in the tables below.

Detailed Tables 📊

The month's figures in full.

Country Activity 📈

Countries ranked by merchant data edited during the month.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 431 251 141 39 7

🇹🇭 Thailand 169 4 157 8 1

🇸🇻 El Salvador 158 4 125 29 0

🇨🇴 Colombia 101 7 93 1 0

🇨🇭 Switzerland 58 2 49 7 2

🇧🇷 Brazil 38 13 24 1 0

🇫🇷 France 35 2 25 8 0

🇵🇹 Portugal 34 1 30 3 1

🇻🇪 Venezuela 33 0 33 0 0

🇨🇿 Czechia 27 3 24 0 6

Community Activity 📈

The same, by community.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Berlín SV 149 1 119 29 0

🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Antioquia 68 7 60 1 0

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 50 30 20 0 0

🇨🇴 Cafeteros Bitcoiners 47 6 40 1 0

🇻🇪 Satoshi en Venezuela 32 0 32 0 0

🇹🇭 BOB Space 28 0 27 1 1

🇵🇹 FREE Madeira 25 1 22 2 0

🇹🇭 Huai Phueng Project 25 0 25 0 0

🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Bogotá 21 0 21 0 0

🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners 20 14 6 0 0

Country Leaderboard 📊

Where countries stood when the month closed, ranked by how many places they have. The up-to-date column is the share verified within the last year. BTC Map's country leaderboard shows the same numbers ordered by its verification-weighted score.

Name Places Verified (1y) Up-To-Date

🇺🇸 United States of America 10,570 9,376 89%

🇿🇦 South Africa 2,755 1,631 59%

🇧🇷 Brazil 2,220 565 26%

🇸🇻 El Salvador 1,307 323 25%

🇮🇹 Italy 1,063 170 16%

🇨🇭 Switzerland 751 318 42%

🇨🇦 Canada 728 318 44%

🇩🇪 Germany 620 175 28%

🇲🇽 Mexico 562 56 10%

🇹🇭 Thailand 495 324 66%

Community Leaderboard 📊

The same for communities, frozen at the close of the month. The community leaderboard is the live version.

Name Places Verified (1y) Up-To-Date

🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin 933 579 62%

🇸🇻 Mi Primer Bitcoin 435 26 6%

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 431 399 93%

🇿🇦 Bitshack 391 271 69%

🇿🇦 Bitcoin Cape Town 377 189 50%

🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin 297 274 92%

🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners 291 275 94%

🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B 262 79 30%

🇬🇪 Bitcoin Movement Georgia 224 48 21%

🇧🇷 Bitcoin é aqui! 222 139 63%

Active Taggers 🏆

September's most active contributors, by edits made.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 Comino with 184 edits

🥈 Rockedf with 175 edits

🥉 Genesisvaleria with 144 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

Comino 184 18 142 24

Rockedf 175 151 20 4

Genesisvaleria 144 0 120 24

RoseBTCmap 131 84 30 17

Mind09 106 1 97 8

whammo 97 0 97 0

ArancioneMilano 33 33 0 0

pantufla 32 0 32 0

BTCGVA 30 2 24 4

Senihtu 24 0 24 0

empty_child 22 2 15 5

Hans Jürgen von Lengerke 20 1 12 7

Liongrass 16 2 8 6

Dimitar155 16 0 16 0

descubrebitcoin 14 0 13 1

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

New Communities 🫂

🇳🇬 Bitcoin Ekiti

🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Cundinamarca

🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - San Vicente del Caguán

The map now has 689 communities.

Analytics 📊

Our September website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat -- the Add Location rebuild (map side panel, pin freeze, review step, structured opening hours, reverse geocoded address), inline validation across every form, self-service signup, the native Join Us guide, events on area pages, the offline icon bundling fix, and API type maintenance.

Igor Bubelov -- the API's place submission and report endpoints, the events work and delta sync, localized area names, Gitea issue syncing, the Android 1.2.0 release (offline-first data bundling, localisation, and hardened auth and payment flows), the CLI event commands, Event Admin timezone handling, and the Gitea/LND fleet maintenance.

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki -- formatting Gitea issue bodies as a human summary plus an OSM tag block, with osm:<tag> fields passed through.

Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR -- Dutch translations.

Comino, Rockedf, Genesisvaleria, and all the active taggers listed above.

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Metric	July	August	September
Merchants	26,575	26,914	27,148
Places	29,061	29,389	29,622
Verified (1y)	16,860	16,243	15,957
Days since check	418	438	457
Merchants boosted	14	12	24
Total boost duration	1,605	935	2,085
Comments	25	26	28

Metric	1 month	3 months	12 months
Merchants	+234 (+0.9%)	+1,075 (+4.1%)	+10,748 (+65.5%)
Places	+233 (+0.8%)	+1,050 (+3.7%)	+11,380 (+62.4%)
Verified (1y)	−286 (−1.8%)	−1,033 (−6.1%)	+6,259 (+64.5%)
Days since check	+19 (+4.3%)	+55 (+13.7%)	+50 (+12.3%)
Merchants boosted	+12 (+100.0%)	+13 (+118.2%)	+12 (+100.0%)
Total boost duration	+1,150 (+123.0%)	+1,695 (+434.6%)	+1,605 (+334.4%)
Comments	+2 (+7.7%)	−6 (−17.6%)	−28 (−50.0%)

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	431	251	141	39	7
🇹🇭 Thailand	169	4	157	8	1
🇸🇻 El Salvador	158	4	125	29	0
🇨🇴 Colombia	101	7	93	1	0
🇨🇭 Switzerland	58	2	49	7	2
🇧🇷 Brazil	38	13	24	1	0
🇫🇷 France	35	2	25	8	0
🇵🇹 Portugal	34	1	30	3	1
🇻🇪 Venezuela	33	0	33	0	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	27	3	24	0	6

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Berlín SV	149	1	119	29	0
🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Antioquia	68	7	60	1	0
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	50	30	20	0	0
🇨🇴 Cafeteros Bitcoiners	47	6	40	1	0
🇻🇪 Satoshi en Venezuela	32	0	32	0	0
🇹🇭 BOB Space	28	0	27	1	1
🇵🇹 FREE Madeira	25	1	22	2	0
🇹🇭 Huai Phueng Project	25	0	25	0	0
🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Bogotá	21	0	21	0	0
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	20	14	6	0	0

Name	Places	Verified (1y)	Up-To-Date
🇺🇸 United States of America	10,570	9,376	89%
🇿🇦 South Africa	2,755	1,631	59%
🇧🇷 Brazil	2,220	565	26%
🇸🇻 El Salvador	1,307	323	25%
🇮🇹 Italy	1,063	170	16%
🇨🇭 Switzerland	751	318	42%
🇨🇦 Canada	728	318	44%
🇩🇪 Germany	620	175	28%
🇲🇽 Mexico	562	56	10%
🇹🇭 Thailand	495	324	66%

Name	Places	Verified (1y)	Up-To-Date
🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin	933	579	62%
🇸🇻 Mi Primer Bitcoin	435	26	6%
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	431	399	93%
🇿🇦 Bitshack	391	271	69%
🇿🇦 Bitcoin Cape Town	377	189	50%
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	297	274	92%
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	291	275	94%
🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B	262	79	30%
🇬🇪 Bitcoin Movement Georgia	224	48	21%
🇧🇷 Bitcoin é aqui!	222	139	63%

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Comino	184	18	142	24
Rockedf	175	151	20	4
Genesisvaleria	144	0	120	24
RoseBTCmap	131	84	30	17
Mind09	106	1	97	8
whammo	97	0	97	0
ArancioneMilano	33	33	0	0
pantufla	32	0	32	0
BTCGVA	30	2	24	4
Senihtu	24	0	24	0
empty_child	22	2	15	5
Hans Jürgen von Lengerke	20	1	12	7
Liongrass	16	2	8	6
Dimitar155	16	0	16	0
descubrebitcoin	14	0	13	1

https://jumble.social/notes/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq04ty37x8we4m73cup72zqhkmg5t4xuag6r3ja6rhh369vwcpthdqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kytcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtcqpe38gcmdv9cz6v3sxgmz6vpeqmlzh8

Can you provide more details please?

2026-09-28T20:04:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…94cu
_________________________

Can you provide more details please?

Love to skate? #nevent1q…ase5

2026-09-06T10:23:31Z

Love to skate?

quoting
nevent1q…ase5
Find a spot.

Skate it. Coach it. Event it. Barber it. Film it. Snap it.

Grab food.

Stack sats.

SkateSpots is now powered by BTC Map (npub1864…t2tq)

https://zapstore.dev/apps/org.skatespots.app

@nprofile…w2rs joins the club! #nevent1q…vjlt

2026-09-06T10:15:11Z

SkateSpots (nprofile…w2rs) joins the club!

quoting
nevent1q…vjlt
Cheers to btcmap (nprofile…h3zv) for powering one of Skate Spots core features.

https://btcmap.org/apps

#Spedn ✊🫵

Check out the monthly leaderboards!

2026-09-06T10:14:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…x99f
_________________________

Check out the monthly leaderboards!

August blog is out! 322 net new merchants, @npub13lj…cfhw and ...

2026-09-03T12:10:32Z

August blog is out!

322 net new merchants, Blink Wallet (npub13lj…cfhw) and BullBitcoin (npub18ul…dcl9) join the party, and the 'Add location' redesign ships.

quoting
naddr1qv…44zg

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 26,592 → 26,914 (+322 +1.2%)

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 29,054 → 29,389 (+335 +1.2%)

Recently verified (1y): 16,920 → 16,243 (-677 -4.0%)

Avg. days since last verification: 418 → 438 (+20 +4.8%)

Merchants boosted: 14 → 12 (-2 -14.3%)

Total boost duration: 1,605 → 935 (-670 -41.7%) days

Comments posted: 25 → 26 (+1 +4.0%)

Find current stats over at the BTC Map Dashboard.

Note: the charts above track merchant growth only. The total places metric includes merchants plus exchanges/ATMs.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 714 408 165 141 3

🇨🇭 Switzerland 68 7 41 20 1

🇧🇷 Brazil 68 8 53 7 0

🇸🇻 El Salvador 51 12 37 2 1

🇿🇦 South Africa 45 3 40 2 0

🇫🇷 France 44 3 32 9 2

🇨🇴 Colombia 41 36 5 0 0

🇬🇪 Georgia 40 0 38 2 0

🇩🇪 Germany 36 4 27 5 2

🇳🇱 Netherlands 33 4 22 7 2

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 47 24 23 0 0

🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin 35 29 6 0 0

🇵🇭 Bitcoin Island Philippines 24 1 18 5 0

🇸🇻 Mi Primer Bitcoin 24 3 20 1 0

🇬🇪 Bitcoin Movement Georgia 24 0 23 1 0

🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B 22 1 16 5 0

🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Antioquia 19 19 0 0 0

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month.

🇺🇸 OLY BTC

🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital

🇫🇷 BIP-21

🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - Amazonas

🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - Caribe

🇨🇴 Mi Tierra Digital - Boyacá - Central

We now have 692+ Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 Rockedf with 190 edits

🥈 RoseBTCmap with 168 edits

🥉 Comino with 140 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

Rockedf 190 175 12 3

RoseBTCmap 168 134 33 1

Comino 140 23 88 29

descubrebitcoin 123 7 11 105

SherbetS 84 84 0 0

fgouget 50 0 50 0

Satoshi Team 36 33 3 0

BTCGVA 35 5 13 17

Evgeniya_rocketdata 28 0 28 0

Stephanievanr 23 0 23 0

Hans Jürgen von Lengerke 23 1 17 5

LambdaComplex 18 2 15 1

confusedbuffalo 13 0 13 0

EcoBitz Circular Economy & Bitcoin Hub 13 6 4 3

ArancioneMilano 13 13 0 0

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Integrations 🔌

We added two new wallet integrations this month, making it easier to discover Bitcoin-accepting merchants directly from your wallet of choice.

Blink — A long time in the making, but it's finally here! Blink users can now browse BTC Map merchants natively within the Blink app using the project's API for a deep, on-brand integration. v1 delivers merchant viewing, future versions will enable users to see nearby communities and also submit new places directly within the app.

Bull Bitcoin Wallet — Bringing BTC Map merchant discovery to Bull Bitcoin users through inclusion of our Web App directly in the wallet. The benefit of this approach (over native) means Bull users will get all the juicy updates as we release them.

Web App 🕸️

August was another monster month on the web app with 83 merged PRs. The headlines are a complete redesign of the Add Location flow and the migration to Svelte 5. Here are the highlights

Add-location redesign -- the entire flow was rebuilt from the ground up. You now pick a spot on the map in a dedicated placement mode, land on an arrival screen that confirms the pinned location, drop into a slim details form with a category picker (and hidden coords for accuracy), and submit through the API's submit_place pipeline. Before any of that happens, a duplicate-place check warns you if the spot is already mapped.

Merchant drawer -- a new copy button makes sharing the merchant address one tap.

Comment permalinks -- comment dates now link to per-comment anchors so you can share and bookmark specific feedback.

Issue worklist -- the ?issues filter got category sub-filters, colored pins, and drawer fix actions so maintainers can triage problems directly from the map.

Embed fixes -- the ?onchain, ?lightning, and ?nfc embed payment filters are back, and the embed contract is now pinned so third-party sites won't break on future updates.

MapLibre GL v6 -- the map engine jumped two major versions.

Performance -- area pages now render from the SSR bundle (no more 5.7 MB world crawl), with bbox-prefiltered and chunked containment for places-in-area queries.

Android App 🤖

Android work around build infrastructure:

Build pipeline -- AGP bumped to 9.3.2, Gradle wrapper to 9.5.0. A release signing config and a new beta build type were added, with a matching app deploy command in a new devtools helper script.

OSM attribution -- a small "© OpenStreetMap contributors" overlay was added to the map fragment, toggleable in settings.

Fixes -- a ConcurrentModificationException in ViewportCache was resolved; the Material Symbols font was updated to the 2026-08-28 snapshot with new icons.

Dev tools -- a devtools script at the repo root wraps common emulator and app commands.

Infrastructure ⚙️

The API absorbed the bulk of the infrastructure effort with a focus on access control and decentralizing admin work.

Geofences -- a new geofence column on users constrains area_manager and event_manager callers to the areas they are actually responsible for. A set_user_geofence RPC sets or clears the whitelist, while admins and roots remain unrestricted.

Area Manager role -- the new Role::AreaManager unlocks add_area, get_area, set_area_tag, set_area_image, remove_area_tag, remove_area, and search.

Place Reports -- a new report_place RPC lets trusted external sources record typed reports (verified, refused_sats, out_of_business, …) against existing places. A public GET /v4/place-submissions endpoint exposes open, non-revoked submissions.

Auth & logging -- resolved user IDs now appear in the request log table so every RPC call is attributable.

Electrum -- a new ping_electrum_servers RPC probes all configured servers in parallel and reports per-server latency.

Area bbox sync -- add_area and set_area_tag now derive and update the bounding box in the same transaction, so bboxes are never stale.

New icons -- swimming pool, rage room, and a batch of additional icons were added.

RPC refactor -- area RPCs moved to dedicated src/rpc/area/ and src/rpc/event/ submodules; docs split into per-method files.

CLI Updates -- The btcmap-cli picked up wrappers for the new API surface: place report, electrum-server ping, area add, area generate-bboxes, and renamed element generate-icons / area generate-element-mapping to match the new RPC signatures.

Analytics 📊

Our August website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat -- add-location redesign, Svelte 5 migration, Vite 8 upgrade, MapLibre GL v6, TypeScript bindings from the API, issue worklist filters, area page performance improvements, place cache and map refactors, duplicate-place detection, merchant drawer copy button, comment permalinks, and icon/i18n fixes.

Igor Bubelov -- geofences and area_manager role, place reports API, RPC refactor to submodules, auth & logging improvements, Electrum server pinging, area bbox sync, Android build infrastructure, devtools script, OSM attribution, dashboard improvements, Event Admin editing, CLI updates, and API maintenance.

Nathanael -- geofence testing and taking charge of Switzerland.

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki -- Blink and Bull Bitcoin Wallet promotions on the apps page, and embed payment filter fixes.

Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR -- Dutch translations, and new icons (swimming pool, rage room, and batch updates).

tomatotomata -- area page performance optimization.

Rockedf, RoseBTCmap, Comino, and all the active taggers listed above.

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	714	408	165	141	3
🇨🇭 Switzerland	68	7	41	20	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	68	8	53	7	0
🇸🇻 El Salvador	51	12	37	2	1
🇿🇦 South Africa	45	3	40	2	0
🇫🇷 France	44	3	32	9	2
🇨🇴 Colombia	41	36	5	0	0
🇬🇪 Georgia	40	0	38	2	0
🇩🇪 Germany	36	4	27	5	2
🇳🇱 Netherlands	33	4	22	7	2

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	47	24	23	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	35	29	6	0
🇵🇭 Bitcoin Island Philippines	24	1	18	5
🇸🇻 Mi Primer Bitcoin	24	3	20	1
🇬🇪 Bitcoin Movement Georgia	24	0	23	1
🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B	22	1	16	5
🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Antioquia	19	19	0	0

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	190	175	12	3
RoseBTCmap	168	134	33	1
Comino	140	23	88	29
descubrebitcoin	123	7	11	105
SherbetS	84	84	0	0
fgouget	50	0	50	0
Satoshi Team	36	33	3	0
BTCGVA	35	5	13	17
Evgeniya_rocketdata	28	0	28	0
Stephanievanr	23	0	23	0
Hans Jürgen von Lengerke	23	1	17	5
LambdaComplex	18	2	15	1
confusedbuffalo	13	0	13	0
EcoBitz Circular Economy & Bitcoin Hub	13	6	4	3
ArancioneMilano	13	13	0	0

Aaaand another one! 🫂 #nevent1q…43fr

2026-08-24T20:30:02Z

Aaaand another one! 🫂

quoting
nevent1q…43fr
𝗦𝗪𝗔𝗣𝗦 𝗔𝗥𝗘 𝗕𝗔𝗖𝗞.

BULL Wallet v6.13.0 just dropped on iOS & Android!

Following the suspension of Boltz services, BULL has restored Lightning sends and receives, along with manual and automatic Liquid-to-Bitcoin transfers.

This release also includes:
- 𝗠𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗮𝘆𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝗽𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲
Our Payjoin v2 integration now delivers a smoother and more reliable experience, with clear feedback when a Payjoin succeeds, fails, or expires, and safe recovery after an interruption or restart.

- 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗽𝘆
Advanced users now have the option to enter BIP39 words generated independently using dice, coins, or cards, with BULL automatically suggesting checksum-valid final words.

- 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Perfect for small-amount DCA, BULL automatically detects excess Liquid UTXOs and guides you through consolidating them before they become a problem.

- BTC Map (nprofile…9yc5)
Find nearby businesses that accept Bitcoin directly from the settings. BULL does not request access to your device’s location.

- 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆
Bitcoin Red Team put BULL through an in-depth security review and found no critical vulnerabilities. The review uncovered a few lower-severity issues, mostly related to third-party dependencies, which have since been fixed.

A huge thank you to Bitcoin Red Team for helping us make BULL stronger.

Full release notes: https://github.com/SatoshiPortal/bullbitcoin-mobile/releases/tag/v6.13.0

Important for legacy Android users: If you installed BULL before version 5 and see a protected backup screen, save every recovery phrase and passphrase before reinstalling. Do not uninstall the app until your backup is complete.

Thx for the 💜 #nevent1q…9g8q

2026-08-19T17:29:11Z

Thx for the 💜

quoting
nevent1q…9g8q
Gm!

What are your favourite free bitcoin tools?

For me it’s BTCMap, blue wallet, wasabi’s coin join (not technically free but basically), BitKit, stacker news and here

btcmap.org/add-location

2026-08-05T22:28:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…xjhd
_________________________

btcmap.org/add-location

btcmap.org/add-location

2026-08-05T22:27:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…xjhd
_________________________

btcmap.org/add-location

https://primal.net/btcmap/btc-map-july-2026-update

2026-08-05T20:31:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…xvd6
_________________________

https://primal.net/btcmap/btc-map-july-2026-update

July blog post just dropped! 502 net new merchants, omnisearch, a ...

2026-08-05T20:31:14Z

July blog post just dropped!

502 net new merchants, omnisearch, a leaner Android map, and a new Event Admin tool

nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq04ty37x8we4m73cup72zqhkmg5t4xuag6r3ja6rhh369vwcpthdqqvxyarr94kkzupddf6kc7fdxgcryd3dw4cxgct5v5nq68r7

Damn, @npub1v9r…msnm go there first! Awaiting email response ...

2026-07-11T13:27:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…cx3j
_________________________

Damn, comino (npub1v9r…msnm) go there first!

Awaiting email response ...

https://gitea.btcmap.org/teambtcmap/btcmap-data/issues/22665

Slick new merchant pane anyone? 😍 ...

2026-07-06T15:27:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…8f0s
_________________________

Slick new merchant pane anyone? 😍

Heatmap anyone? 😍 ...

2026-07-06T15:26:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…8f0s
_________________________

Heatmap anyone? 😍

Our update for June just dropped! 89 net new places, a merchant ...

2026-07-06T15:26:05Z

Our update for June just dropped!

89 net new places, a merchant heatmap, Nostr auth and the redesign of the merchant details pane.

Oh, and an integration with cluborange (npub1ve8…9ka6) 🍊

quoting
naddr1qv…7ffz

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 25,684 -> 26,073 (+389 +1.5%)

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 27,900 -> 28,572 (+672 +2.4%)

Recently verified (1y): 16,551 -> 16,990 (+439 +2.7%)

Avg. days since last verification: 393 -> 402 (+9 +2.3%)

Merchants boosted: 12 -> 11 (-1 -8.3%)

Total boost duration: 600 -> 390 (-210 -35.0%) days

Comments posted: 30 -> 34 (+4 +13.3%)

Find current stats over at the BTC Map Dashboard.

Note: the charts above track merchant growth only. The total places metric includes merchants plus exchanges/ATMs.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇧🇷 Brazil 601 2 597 2 0

🇺🇸 United States of America 484 221 238 25 2

🇨🇭 Switzerland 97 7 75 15 3

🇸🇻 El Salvador 44 5 35 4 0

🇨🇿 Czechia 32 6 13 13 1

🇿🇦 South Africa 28 0 25 3 0

🇮🇹 Italy 24 2 20 2 0

🇲🇿 Mozambique 23 2 21 0 0

🇬🇪 Georgia 21 3 17 1 0

🇦🇷 Argentina 19 0 19 0 0

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇧🇷 Bitcoin é aqui! 210 0 210 0 0

🇧🇷 Porto Alegre - Go BTC 39 0 39 0 0

🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin 22 19 3 0 1

🇧🇷 Horizonte Bitcoin 22 0 22 0 0

🇸🇻 Bitcoin La Laguna 21 0 20 1 0

🇲🇿 Bitcoin Famba 21 1 20 0 0

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 Comino with 370 edits

🥈 Rockedf with 332 edits

🥉 RoseBTCmap with 301 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

Comino 370 27 295 48

Rockedf 332 313 16 3

RoseBTCmap 301 274 26 1

BTCGVA 153 13 106 34

SherbetS 94 94 0 0

confusedbuffalo 84 0 81 3

btccuracao 51 0 51 0

Bronrolonw 39 0 34 5

Satoshi Team 26 25 1 0

canfe 25 11 0 14

BoatingAccident 25 0 5 20

BitcoinLarry 22 15 7 0

Genesisvaleria 21 1 17 3

btcitnet 16 3 0 13

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

BTC Prague 🇨🇿

The team exhibited at BTC Prague 2026, the largest Bitcoin conference in Europe. It was great to have more than two of us together in one place for the first time in a while — we met users face-to-face, heard their stories, and received a ton of thanks and feedback that will help shape the next few months.

Club Orange 🍊

Club Orange has joined the BTC Map ecosystem as a new sponsor, integrating with us to auto-list every merchant that signs up on their platform. New Club Orange merchants now get dual-listed on both Club Orange and BTC Map from a single signup.

Sign-up as a Club Orange merchant here!

Web App 🕸️

June was a big month for the Web App with 41 merged PRs. The headline features are the merchant detail redesign and the new merchant heatmap layer.

Merchant detail redesign -- the merchant panel was overhauled with a cleaner layout, better sectioning, Lightning tip support, redesigned boost card copy, circular badge counts, and improved mobile width.

<img src="![image](https://blog.btcmap.org/posts/2026-06/merchant-detail-redesign.png)" alt="Screenshot of the redesigned merchant detail panel" width="50%">

Merchant heatmap -- a new heatmap overlay shows concentration of bitcoin-friendly merchants, making it easy to spot adoption hotspots at a glance.

- Nostr auth -- full account authentication via Nostr, including a Nostr profile avatar in the UserMenu. - Verified filter -- filter the map to show only recently verified merchants. - Search simplification -- the search UX was streamlined with fewer clicks to get to results. - Nearby list -- the nearby panel now loads earlier and reveals the list more intuitively. - Menu & layers -- top-right controls were consolidated into a single Menu with layers and filters modals. - Boost fixes -- clearer error handling for failed invoice generation, retry button guarded against double-fire. - Apps page -- Club Orange and Zapstore were added as new app listings. - RPC-free at last -- the tagging-issues and leaderboard pages were migrated from deprecated RPC endpoints to the public REST API, and stale RPC naming was cleaned up throughout the codebase. - Form location input -- coordinates can now be entered manually on the add-location form. - Deep link fixes -- map deep links now correctly select the target merchant. - Mobile improvements -- iOS Safari zoom clipping fixed, safe-area bottom clearance, tooltips replaced with static helper text, and many other layout fixes. - Community contributions -- MateoGrifsha fixed mobile form tooltips, b0rgbart3 fixed activity page IDs and comment line breaks, LighthouseFR contributed Dutch translations.

Infrastructure ⚙️

It was a big month on the API too, with over 50 commits. Here are the highlights:

Dashboard RPC -- a new internal dashboard RPC method powers the BTC Map Dashboard, returning total merchants, log volume, storage stats, LND stats, and top-10 busiest REST endpoints.

Area images -- a dedicated image.db table and /v4/area-image REST endpoint with type and dimension hints replaced the scattered image handling.

Place import stats -- import origins were moved from hardcoded constants to a DB table, with per-origin success/failure stats exposed on the dashboard.

Auth RPC redesign -- new signup/signin/signout flow, scoped tokens, session management (get_api_keys, revoke_api_key), and whoami endpoint. Anonymous access is now limited to signin/signup only.

Nostr identity endpoints -- users can link, view, and unlink a Nostr npub to their BTC Map account via PUT/GET/DELETE /v4/users/me/nostr.

Native CORS handling added, removing reliance on the reverse proxy.

Security -- HTTP/1 requests with ambiguous Content-Length/Transfer-Encoding framing are now rejected to prevent request smuggling.

DB renames -- btcmap.db and images.db renamed to main.db and image.db.

Deps bumped -- geojson bumped to 1.0.0, Rust toolchain unpinned, TLS configs updated.

CLI

The btcmap-cli gained new auth API support (signout, signin with api_key field), generate-area-icons and set-area-image commands, an install script, and dashboard wrappers.

Android App 🤖

Wiki URLs were migrated from gitea.btcmap.org to wiki.btcmap.org.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat -- massive web app contributions across merchant redesign, Nostr auth, heatmap, search, modals, and dozens of fixes.

Igor Bubelov -- API dashboard RPC, area images, auth redesign, Nostr identity endpoints, CORS, security, CLI, Android wiki migration, and admin auth migration.

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki -- web app heatmap, apps page, API vendor additions, Android PR.

Bart / b0rgbart3 -- web app activity page fixes, comment preservation, location form input.

Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR -- Dutch translations and web app PRs.

MateoGrifsha -- mobile form tooltip fix.

Comino, Rockedf, RoseBTCmap, and all the active taggers listed above.

Analytics 📊

Our June website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇧🇷 Brazil	601	2	597	2	0
🇺🇸 United States of America	484	221	238	25	2
🇨🇭 Switzerland	97	7	75	15	3
🇸🇻 El Salvador	44	5	35	4	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	32	6	13	13	1
🇿🇦 South Africa	28	0	25	3	0
🇮🇹 Italy	24	2	20	2	0
🇲🇿 Mozambique	23	2	21	0	0
🇬🇪 Georgia	21	3	17	1	0
🇦🇷 Argentina	19	0	19	0	0

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇧🇷 Bitcoin é aqui!	210	0	210	0	0
🇧🇷 Porto Alegre - Go BTC	39	0	39	0	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	22	19	3	0	1
🇧🇷 Horizonte Bitcoin	22	0	22	0	0
🇸🇻 Bitcoin La Laguna	21	0	20	1	0
🇲🇿 Bitcoin Famba	21	1	20	0	0

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Comino	370	27	295	48
Rockedf	332	313	16	3
RoseBTCmap	301	274	26	1
BTCGVA	153	13	106	34
SherbetS	94	94	0	0
confusedbuffalo	84	0	81	3
btccuracao	51	0	51	0
Bronrolonw	39	0	34	5
Satoshi Team	26	25	1	0
canfe	25	11	0	14
BoatingAccident	25	0	5	20
BitcoinLarry	22	15	7	0
Genesisvaleria	21	1	17	3
btcitnet	16	3	0	13

Make no mistakes.

2026-06-22T14:45:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…dmvc
_________________________

Make no mistakes.

"Borrowed maps were always rented." #naddr1qv…7utn

2026-06-17T11:20:24Z

"Borrowed maps were always rented."

quoting
naddr1qv…7utn

When you ask Google for directions, the request leaving your phone carries a timestamped record that pairs your current coordinates with your intended coordinates, attached to an account that already knows your phone number, your home, your work, your contacts, and the pattern of your previous trips. The route itself is the smaller half of the leak. The richer half is the intent: you have just told a third party where you will be and roughly when. Last Tuesday's trip to the clinic, tonight's drive to a lawyer's office, every trip you would prefer to keep out of a permanent index of your life: each one sits in a row of a database you do not own and cannot delete. Multiply that by every trip you take, store it next to every other person's trips for the rest of your life, and you have a panopticon of physical movement that the surveillance states of the twentieth century could only have dreamed of funding.

The economics here are blunt. Google gives away maps as a loss leader for a behavioral product. The map is the bait and the dossier is the catch, paid in continuous disclosure of where you go and why. Once collected, the dossier becomes inventory: sold to advertisers who want to know where buyers go, sold to insurers who price you by how you drive, served on subpoena to law enforcement, and exposed in whatever breach happens to land next. The cost is a long-running, queryable archive of where your body has been, who you went to see, and where you are headed right this minute.

The strange part is that the round-trip is trivially avoidable. Route calculation is graph search over a road network, and the road network itself is a finite, slow-changing dataset. The shortest path from A to B is a function of two coordinates and a graph; it requires neither a remote oracle nor a live connection to a sales pipeline. We accept the round-trip because someone built the convenient app that way, and habit took over.

OpenStreetMap is the obvious starting point for an alternative. It is a community-built, openly licensed dataset of the world's roads, maintained by millions of contributors who survey the places they map. The dataset is free to use and free to fork. It is a public good produced by the people who live on those roads.

Once the dataset is public, the question of where to compute the route becomes a choice the user makes, free of any constraint set by Google. Organic Maps is the application that takes the choice seriously. It is a free and open-source Android and iOS app, built on OSM data, with zero ads, zero tracking, zero account, zero phoning home. You download the countries or regions you care about once, and from then on the app routes, searches, and navigates entirely on the device. The Exodus Privacy project has verified the absence of trackers in the Android build, and the application's permissions list reads as boring as a privacy-respecting app's permissions should read.

The storage cost is small enough that the old "but the world will fill up my phone" excuse has retired. Country files typically run from tens of megabytes for small nations to a few hundred megabytes for large ones, and even sizable countries fit comfortably under a gigabyte. A traveler who downloads their home country plus the places on their itinerary ends up using a tiny fraction of a modern phone's storage, with zero ongoing data transfer. Throw away the SIM card if you want; the navigation works the same.

What you get in return for that small disk cost is a different kind of computation. The route is calculated on the device, by code you can read, over data the world maintains. Every byte of the trip stays on the handset. The logged query that says "this person, at this time, asked for the path from this clinic to this address" never gets written, because there is no server to write it. Your behavioral profile gains no new row. The map is yours in the way a paper map was yours, except that it routes, searches, and updates.

Consider the driver whose auto insurer offers a discount in exchange for installing a "driving behavior" app, and consider the same insurer five years from now, when location histories have been aggregated, brokered, and resold often enough that the discount is no longer optional and the premium is silently priced from your movement pattern whether you installed the app or not. The data does not have to be sold to be used against you; it has to exist. Every Google Maps query you make today is a deposit into that future pricing model. The bank does not need your permission to lend out what you have already given it.

The switching cost is genuinely small. Install Organic Maps from Zapstore, open the app, tap into the download dialog, and pick the country you live in plus any country you are about to travel to. Install GeoShare from Zapstore alongside it; that small companion app intercepts incoming map share links and resolves them into geo: coordinates that go straight to Organic Maps. When the link already contains coordinates in plain form, the resolution happens on your device with no network call at all. When the link is a shortened redirect that hides the destination, GeoShare asks before connecting and, when you allow it, fetches the redirect through a sandboxed web view with cookies disabled or through an upstream open-source relay. Either way, the map service sees an anonymous request for a single URL, detached from your Google identity and stripped of the cookies that tie ordinary traffic to a profile. After that, the typical interaction matches the proprietary app you were using: type a place, get directions, follow the voice. The difference lives in what stops happening. Queries that used to leave the phone now resolve on the device itself, accounts stay uninvolved, and behavioral profiles stop gaining new rows from your travel.

Borrowed maps were always rented. The rent was paid in advance, in a currency the lender chose. Owning your own copy of the world's roads, and routing across that copy on hardware you control, is the cheapest defense against the most invasive form of surveillance the average person experiences. The habit of asking Google for directions is the last thing standing between the average phone and a navigation stack that owes nothing to anyone but its owner.

Praxeology. ✊

2026-06-17T06:36:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…6qyx
_________________________

Praxeology. ✊

May blog just dropped! 204 net new merchants, US leading ...

2026-06-16T17:45:55Z

May blog just dropped!

204 net new merchants, US leading activity, MapLibre switch, and prep for Nostr auth.

Sorry (not sorry) for the delay. 🙃

quoting
naddr1qv…6pwj

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 25,470 -> 25,674 (+204 +0.8%)

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 27,646 -> 27,921 (+275 +1.0%)

Recently verified (1y): 16,401 -> 16,564 (+163 +1.0%)

Avg. days since last verification: 386 -> 393 (+7 +1.8%)

Merchants boosted: 20 -> 12 (-8 -40.0%)

Total boost duration: 1,570 -> 600 (-970 -61.8%) days

Comments posted: 52 -> 30 (-22 -42.3%)

The mid-month dip reflects the removal of the remaining Qerko locations (642 Czech-based merchants that stopped accepting Bitcoin), which continued into May. That cleanup is why pepakriz topped the leaderboard this month 🙃.

Find current stats over at the BTC Map Dashboard.

Note: the charts above track merchant growth only. The total places metric includes merchants plus exchanges/ATMs.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 616 522 77 17 2

🇧🇷 Brazil 37 4 29 4 0

🇸🇻 El Salvador 35 1 22 12 0

🇨🇷 Costa Rica 32 2 29 1 0

🇮🇹 Italy 27 2 21 4 0

🇩🇪 Germany 25 2 18 5 1

🇨🇿 Czechia 24 1 22 1 1

🇳🇿 New Zealand 24 0 21 3 0

🇨🇭 Switzerland 23 5 16 2 0

🇬🇧 United Kingdom 16 1 14 1 3

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast 42 2 28 12 0

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 36 25 11 0 0

🇹🇴 NZBitcoiners.org 32 0 29 3 0

🇨🇷 Bitcoin Jungle 30 1 28 1 0

🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners 16 13 3 0 0

🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin 13 13 0 0 0

🇨🇿 Dvacet Jedna Praha 12 0 11 1 1

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

🇺🇸 Columbia SC Bitcoin

🇧🇷 BotuSats

🇺🇸 Blue Water Bitcoin

🇮🇳 Bitshala

🇦🇷 Bitcoin Comarca Andina

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 pepakriz with 711 edits (removing the last of the Qerko locations 😢)

🥈 Rockedf with 501 edits

🥉 RoseBTCmap with 490 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

pepakriz 711 0 0 711

Rockedf 501 470 27 4

RoseBTCmap 490 445 42 3

Comino 193 29 143 21

SherbetS 116 63 53 0

bitcoincoast_sv 48 2 33 13

confusedbuffalo 34 0 34 0

TheSwavu 26 0 26 0

BTCGVA 20 5 11 4

Mind09 19 5 9 5

Satoshi Team 18 18 0 0

mueschel 13 3 9 1

Bitcoin Amantikir 12 3 6 3

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Web App 🕸️

May brought a quieter but still solid month to the Web App, with the headline being the switch to MapLibre Native for the map layer.

MapLibre Native replaced the Leaflet-based map stack, bringing better performance, smoother rendering, and a path to native-level map experiences in the browser.

Italian translation was contributed by darthmassari, making BTC Map more accessible to the Italian-speaking community.

Blitz Wallet was added to the Apps page.

Merchant OG images now serve correctly when sharing merchant links via ?merchant= URL parameter.

5 legacy basemaps were restored following the map library migration.

Infrastructure ⚙️

The API saw significant work this month, much of it laying groundwork for identity and import improvements.

Nostr auth via NIP-98 was implemented with a new /v4/auth/nostr REST endpoint, npub-scoped user provisioning, and atomic create-or-recover flows.

Place issues REST endpoint added, allowing fetching place issues by ID.

Multi-vendor place imports were enabled with vendor-scoped issue labels and a new BTCPay Server import vendor.

New analytical RPCs were added and existing ones documented, including daily infra reports with top user agents.

Ansible progress was made on formalizing server setup, and API log retention was automated to 30 days for privacy and disk space.

Android App 🤖

Wiki URLs were migrated from gitea to wiki.btcmap.org.

Update checker logic was extracted to a standalone component with added tests.

Back button and gesture handling were improved.

Shared mutable state issues that caused occasional bugs were cleaned up.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat - major web app contributions across MapLibre, components, i18n, and infrastructure.

Igor Bubelov - API Nostr auth, place issues endpoint, import pipeline, Ansible, and Android maintenance.

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - web app apps page, LNURLp forwards, OG images, about-us page, wiki URLs, API contributions, and admin tooling.

Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR - API icon improvements and LNURLp configuration.

Davi de Sa Luquini - web app merchant tag issues fix.

Marco / darthmassari - Italian translation.

pepakriz, Rockedf, RoseBTCmap, Comino, and all the active taggers listed above.

Analytics 📊

Our May website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	616	522	77	17	2
🇧🇷 Brazil	37	4	29	4	0
🇸🇻 El Salvador	35	1	22	12	0
🇨🇷 Costa Rica	32	2	29	1	0
🇮🇹 Italy	27	2	21	4	0
🇩🇪 Germany	25	2	18	5	1
🇨🇿 Czechia	24	1	22	1	1
🇳🇿 New Zealand	24	0	21	3	0
🇨🇭 Switzerland	23	5	16	2	0
🇬🇧 United Kingdom	16	1	14	1	3

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast	42	2	28	12	0
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	36	25	11	0	0
🇹🇴 NZBitcoiners.org	32	0	29	3	0
🇨🇷 Bitcoin Jungle	30	1	28	1	0
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	16	13	3	0	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	13	13	0	0	0
🇨🇿 Dvacet Jedna Praha	12	0	11	1	1

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
pepakriz	711	0	0	711
Rockedf	501	470	27	4
RoseBTCmap	490	445	42	3
Comino	193	29	143	21
SherbetS	116	63	53	0
bitcoincoast_sv	48	2	33	13
confusedbuffalo	34	0	34	0
TheSwavu	26	0	26	0
BTCGVA	20	5	11	4
Mind09	19	5	9	5
Satoshi Team	18	18	0	0
mueschel	13	3	9	1
Bitcoin Amantikir	12	3	6	3

Shout out from @nprofile…u090 from the main stage of ...

2026-06-13T14:32:34Z

Shout out from giacomozucco (nprofile…u090) from the main stage of BTCPrague (nprofile…pa92) ✊

Twas @nprofile…vyxv 🫂

2026-06-13T08:45:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…p8ep
_________________________

Twas The Bullish ₿itcoiner (nprofile…vyxv) 🫂

@nprofile…9ccm 👀

2026-06-12T12:10:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…h85h
_________________________

Gigi (nprofile…9ccm) 👀

The Map is the Territory. ...

2026-06-12T12:10:22Z

The Map is the Territory.

No lies detected.

2026-06-12T06:23:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…3fmj
_________________________

No lies detected.

We are ready for you @nprofile…zusf 📍🗺️ ...

2026-06-11T11:07:16Z

We are ready for you BTCPrague (nprofile…zusf) 📍🗺️

Sure. Fairly easy to source locally though. Maybe we need a merch ...

2026-06-06T21:47:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…ympt
_________________________

Sure.

Fairly easy to source locally though.

Maybe we need a merch store.

Ser, that is a G☠️☠️gle Map link. 🫠

2026-06-06T21:46:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…pkjj
_________________________

Ser, that is a G☠️☠️gle Map link. 🫠

We have a booth and everything. 🤣

2026-06-06T17:15:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…dwl5
_________________________

We have a booth and everything. 🤣

Preparations for @nprofile…4c5t are underway! ...

2026-06-06T13:17:56Z

Preparations for BTCPrague (nprofile…4c5t) are underway!

https://btcmap.org/verify-location?id=12177

2026-06-05T16:13:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…clc7
_________________________

https://btcmap.org/verify-location?id=12177

Cc @npub1hcw…h9rq @npub18s4…ydrt @npub13lj…cfhw ...

2026-06-05T15:00:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…xv7w
_________________________

Cc Wallet of Satoshi (npub1hcw…h9rq) Proton Wallet (npub18s4…ydrt) Blink Wallet (npub13lj…cfhw) Manna (npub1xkh…xycs) @npub1w27mc4aa6m0ufe3xs5z3m6qyr52gc0rglept7vqlwx4xeaf72tasnqz70r blitz (npub1cm3…96wt) Fedi (npub1uq7…u0c2) Alby (npub1get…0nfm)

>1M sats per channel ideally.

2026-06-05T14:56:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…kuh3
_________________________

>1M sats per channel ideally.

Receiving sats for donations, boosts and comments. ⚡ Thx for ...

2026-06-05T10:35:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…hler
_________________________

Receiving sats for donations, boosts and comments. ⚡

Thx for the recent donation btw 🤟

We are once again asking for your inbound liquidity! ⚡️ New ...

2026-06-05T08:50:36Z

We are once again asking for your inbound liquidity! ⚡️

New node, init. 🙏

https://amboss.space/node/038f4d8a3fdeeb92bbcd97f510c28c2ad814f1736792f5df97a476d38ef4280cb5

#asknostr #lightning #noderunners

No thanks. Try bchmap.org instead.

2026-05-28T17:20:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…n56j
_________________________

No thanks. Try bchmap.org instead.

Check it out... btcmap.org/map For the techies, we switched from ...

2026-05-28T11:04:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…t84v
_________________________

Check it out...

btcmap.org/map

For the techies, we switched from Leaflet to MapLibre for full vector support.

What started as 'can we enable map rotation on the web ...

2026-05-28T11:03:50Z

What started as 'can we enable map rotation on the web app' led to a wholesale migration of our mapping engine!

Thanks to escapedcat (nprofile…dvh8) , we now have all the nice things and performance improvements to boot.

Low time preference behavior. 🤟

2026-05-27T12:05:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…nzrv
_________________________

Low time preference behavior. 🤟

Check out the full roster here: btcmap.org/apps

2026-05-27T10:34:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…mh69
_________________________

Check out the full roster here:

btcmap.org/apps

A very nice native integration 😍 ...

2026-05-27T10:33:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…mh69
_________________________

A very nice native integration 😍

Welcome to the 'Powered by BTC Map' club ...

2026-05-27T10:32:20Z

Welcome to the 'Powered by BTC Map' club blitz (nprofile…q6x9)!

👀

2026-05-21T20:38:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…mawa
_________________________

👀

Nostr event nevent1qqsxfv2eqxpz8fsrl3jv36sga4g6yaqpuk5m9j8v838sv5zs80u0vdqzyql2kfruvwanthar3cru5yp0dk3gh2de6358r9m5800r52caszhw6n5ld3j

2026-05-19T07:29:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…jn2g
_________________________

Hear me out ... ...

2026-05-19T07:29:06Z

Hear me out ...

Live now! #nevent1q…3v8w

2026-05-07T14:22:16Z

Live now!

quoting
nevent1q…3v8w
Join lorebitcoin (nprofile…mfjx), frankcorva (nprofile…54t2), and Nathan Day (nprofile…gyz0) this Thursday, May 7th, at 10am EST on X at our handle @fedibtc.

They'll be discussing BTC Map (nprofile…jemv) and how it's been a valuable tool for communities to discover merchants who accept bitcoin.

Be sure to tune in!

April blog just dropped ... #naddr1qv…27yu

2026-05-07T12:41:32Z

April blog just dropped ...

quoting
naddr1qv…27yu

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 23,041 -> 25,470 (+2,429 +10.5%)

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 25,217 -> 27,646 (+2,429 +9.6%)

Recently verified (1y): 14,335 -> 16,401 (+2,066 +14.4%)

Avg. days since last verification: 400 -> 386 (-14 -3.5%)

Merchants boosted: 16 -> 20 (+4 +25.0%)

Total boost duration: 1,270 -> 1,570 (+300 +23.6%) days

Comments posted: 31 -> 52 (+21 +67.7%)

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Note: the charts above track merchant growth only. The total places metric includes merchants plus exchanges/ATMs.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇿🇦 South Africa 1,524 1,487 34 3 0

🇺🇸 United States of America 1,040 886 143 11 8

🇸🇻 El Salvador 119 8 91 20 1

🇧🇷 Brazil 64 10 50 4 0

🇨🇿 Czechia 60 3 32 25 1

🇹🇭 Thailand 54 15 18 21 0

🇵🇹 Portugal 50 1 40 9 0

🇮🇹 Italy 43 7 29 7 1

🇪🇸 Spain 42 4 34 4 0

🇳🇱 Netherlands 39 5 32 2 4

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin 580 574 6 0 0

🇿🇦 Bitshack 265 265 0 0 0

🇿🇦 Bitcoin Cape Town 168 166 0 2 0

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast 132 7 103 22 4

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Beach 72 2 61 9 4

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Berlin SV 43 1 39 3 0

🇿🇦 Bitcoin Sisonke 39 38 1 0 0

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 36 32 4 0 0

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

🇬🇧 Devon Bitcoiners

🇺🇸 CT Bitcoin

🇫🇷 Dreux

🇫🇷 Le Havre

We now have 650+ Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 MoneyBadger with 1,501 edits

🥈 Rockedf with 527 edits

🥉 RoseBTCmap with 460 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

MoneyBadger 1,501 1,501 0 0

Rockedf 527 492 31 4

RoseBTCmap 460 436 24 0

Comino 219 27 165 27

bitcoincoast_sv 127 7 98 22

edgarpaniagua 32 0 30 2

confusedbuffalo 26 0 26 0

NunoCapeloCaldeira 24 0 24 0

Mind09 21 13 6 2

VisibleSouth 20 0 20 0

pepakriz 19 0 0 19

vacuumcoffee 18 0 0 18

Beinardus 17 2 15 0

dknelson9876 15 0 15 0

Bitcoin Amantikir 15 2 12 1

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Sponsorship 🥰

Long term supporters, Wallet of Satoshi and BTC Curaçao generously renewed their sponsorship. WoS joining our Navigator tier and Curaçao our Cartographers tier. Both have been supporters since the early days, which has been a huge help. 💪

April also saw Aqua Wallet join the ranks as an Explorer, courtesy of JAN3. Welcome aboard and thanks for the support! 🤝

Merchant Adoption 🗞️

South Africa and MoneyBadger 🇿🇦

As you can see from the tables above, South Africa and MoneyBadger had a huge month!

The additions were overwhelmingly fuel-station coverage:

Engen: 989 locations

Shell: 493 locations

Freedom fuel now available in 🇿🇦!

Ecosystem 🫂

BitLocal, an iOS app powered by BTC Map and OpenStreetMap data, released v3.0.

The headline feature is Merchant Alerts: users can choose a city and receive a daily morning digest when new bitcoin-friendly businesses appear nearby. The release also improves BTC Map data sync, merchant details, and production notification reliability.

BitLocal helps iPhone and iPad users find real-world places to spend bitcoin, search by merchant name or category, view payment methods and business details, browse bitcoin communities, and share merchant links.

You should try it, it's better than our own iOS app! 🙃

Web App 🕸️

April brought 40+ merged PRs to the Web App, with the biggest theme being early account-based workflows and saved places.

Saved places & custom activity feeds landed across the app. You can now save individual places, your communities or whole countries; enabling you to create a custom activity feeds.

Area and community pages got an extended activity feed and improved community/country SEO.

Community discoverability was enhanced by showing nearby communities on the main map view.

Max zoom increased to 21 because, why not?

Apps page was reworked with typed app configuration, a download modal, and a powered-by section, with Fedi, Stacked Wallet, Manna, Bitkit, Sovran, Speed Wallet, and Alby Go added or cleaned up.

Add location now supports manually entering form coordinates.

Performance and maintenance included skipping Netlify image processing for static icons, server-route fetch cleanup, CI health-review tuning, dependency updates, and Node 22 alignment.

Android App 🤖

Android had a big month for account-based functionality and activity discovery. Igor published a more detailed personal April recap covering his work on the API and Android app.

Authentication was implemented, matching the new opt-in account direction across BTC Map.

Saved places, areas management and activity feeds were added, including upcoming events.

Out-of-date places are now filtered by default.

Cold start performance improved by querying only the visible map area, with a safety margin, instead of loading all places into the clustering engine up front.

Infrastructure ⚙️

The API work in April focused on auth, activity feeds, and endpoint hardening.

Nostr auth via NIP-98 was added for identity linking and token retrieval.

REST auth and endpoints for changing usernames and passwords were implemented.

Saved places and saved areas were added at the database and endpoint layers.

Activity endpoints gained area filtering, multi-area queries, a places filter, and an area-scoped top editors endpoint.

Events gained area bindings and support for cron-like recurring schedules.

Areas gained support for wide icons.

Overpass requests now include a User-Agent header so we don't get banned again 🤣.

Analytics 📊

Our April website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat - major web app and API contributions across saved places, user activity, area feeds, auth, and infrastructure.

Igor Bubelov - API, Android, and infrastructure contributions.

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - web app apps page, mobile UX, map improvements, blog, and coordination.

Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR - API icon improvements.

saunter / stackingsaunter - web app asset updates.

MoneyBadger, Rockedf, RoseBTCmap, Comino, and all the active taggers listed above.

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here or zap ⚡️ this post!

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇿🇦 South Africa	1,524	1,487	34	3	0
🇺🇸 United States of America	1,040	886	143	11	8
🇸🇻 El Salvador	119	8	91	20	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	64	10	50	4	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	60	3	32	25	1
🇹🇭 Thailand	54	15	18	21	0
🇵🇹 Portugal	50	1	40	9	0
🇮🇹 Italy	43	7	29	7	1
🇪🇸 Spain	42	4	34	4	0
🇳🇱 Netherlands	39	5	32	2	4

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin	580	574	6	0	0
🇿🇦 Bitshack	265	265	0	0	0
🇿🇦 Bitcoin Cape Town	168	166	0	2	0
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast	132	7	103	22	4
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Beach	72	2	61	9	4
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Berlin SV	43	1	39	3	0
🇿🇦 Bitcoin Sisonke	39	38	1	0	0
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	36	32	4	0	0

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
MoneyBadger	1,501	1,501	0	0
Rockedf	527	492	31	4
RoseBTCmap	460	436	24	0
Comino	219	27	165	27
bitcoincoast_sv	127	7	98	22
edgarpaniagua	32	0	30	2
confusedbuffalo	26	0	26	0
NunoCapeloCaldeira	24	0	24	0
Mind09	21	13	6	2
VisibleSouth	20	0	20	0
pepakriz	19	0	0	19
vacuumcoffee	18	0	0	18
Beinardus	17	2	15	0
dknelson9876	15	0	15	0
Bitcoin Amantikir	15	2	12	1

https://btcmap.org/supporters

2026-05-07T08:15:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…ws85
_________________________

https://btcmap.org/supporters

Props to @npub1hcw…h9rq ! They just renewed their sponsorship, ...

2026-05-07T07:46:32Z

Props to Wallet of Satoshi (npub1hcw…h9rq) ! They just renewed their sponsorship, joining us as 'Navigators' 🧭

Thanks for your continued support right from the early days, it means a lot. 🫂

For those with a low-time preference, you can now DCA into ...

2026-05-05T15:13:28Z

For those with a low-time preference, you can now DCA into supporting us by selecting the 'Make it monthly' option on our geyser (npub1kmw…xqk9) page.

https://geyser.fund/project/btcmap/funding

You'll slowly climb-up the Pleb Wall each month, with early contributors gaining the advantage as we measure in sats!

https://btcmap.org/supporters

I spy @nprofile…c2ga!

2026-05-03T15:56:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…ckzn
_________________________

I spy nout (nprofile…c2ga)!

https://btcmap.org/supporters

2026-05-03T15:17:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…ckzn
_________________________

https://btcmap.org/supporters

Our new 'Supporters' page is live, now with a ...

2026-05-03T15:17:52Z

Our new 'Supporters' page is live, now with a geyser (nprofile…j908) powered Pleb Wall!

Donate via Geyser and get your name up in lights.

Anons welcomed too 🤐

We can get you access to our Admin Web App 👀

2026-04-28T18:44:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…hdzd
_________________________

We can get you access to our Admin Web App 👀

Yo @npub1qv0…ujnc , pls could you help us verify your ...

2026-04-28T17:53:53Z

Yo Einundzwanzig (npub1qv0…ujnc) , pls could you help us verify your communities on The Map? 🙏

https://btcmap.org/communities/einundzwanzig

Use code BTCMAP for a 10% discount. ...

2026-04-21T13:46:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…0sdc
_________________________

Use code BTCMAP for a 10% discount.

https://btcprague.com/?promo_id=40491&promo_key=3319e3ffa5fecfb2995312ff8046e5ab

We'll see you at @npub167n…zu3r ? ...

2026-04-21T13:45:53Z

We'll see you at BTCPrague (npub167n…zu3r) ?

Nostr event nevent1qqstu3rgcs73e6k6a8q2wupl7zthlvzrurx4dgfkt48pc4gd26t8ucgzyql2kfruvwanthar3cru5yp0dk3gh2de6358r9m5800r52caszhw62hggr9

2026-04-18T17:03:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…uk3s
_________________________

Down in the coming soon section. 👀

2026-04-12T21:26:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…2zz5
_________________________

Down in the coming soon section. 👀

Temporarily, yeah. Our Gitea server that's hosts the wiki and ...

2026-04-12T12:44:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…u3pg
_________________________

Temporarily, yeah.

Our Gitea server that's hosts the wiki and data issues was getting spammed so we had to switch it to private.

Working on a solution.

Yeah, we had to close that this week as we were getting spammed. ...

2026-04-12T10:16:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…3d7m
_________________________

Yeah, we had to close that this week as we were getting spammed.

We can onboard you if you jump in our Matrix:

https://matrix.to/#/#btcmap:matrix.org

March blog post just dropped! 1k new merchants, 10 new ...

2026-04-12T08:07:42Z

March blog post just dropped!

1k new merchants, 10 new communities, massive Android localization, new map drawer UX on web, and major API expansion.

quoting
naddr1qq…zpx8

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 24,146 -> 25,181 (+1,035 +4.3%)

Recently verified (1y): 13,470 -> 14,319 (+849 +6.3%)

Avg. days since last verification: 396 -> 399 (+3 +0.8%)

Merchants boosted: 41 -> 16 (-25 -61.0%)

Total boost duration: 4,920 -> 1,270 (-3,650 -74.2%) days

Comments posted: 29 -> 32 (+3 +10.3%)

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 555 435 93 27 0

🇿🇲 Zambia 51 0 46 5 0

🇿🇦 South Africa 45 0 42 3 0

🇯🇵 Japan 31 7 24 0 0

🇩🇪 Germany 30 5 21 4 1

🇹🇭 Thailand 26 1 24 1 0

🇦🇹 Austria 26 2 24 0 0

🇨🇿 Czechia 23 0 19 4 0

🇨🇦 Canada 22 1 21 0 0

🇧🇷 Brazil 21 6 14 1 0

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇿🇲 Bitcoin Victoria Falls 51 0 46 5 0

🇿🇦 Bitcoin Ekasi 34 0 33 1 0

🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base 30 6 24 0 0

🇿🇦 Bitcoin Plett 29 0 28 1 0

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 20 19 0 1 0

🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners 18 14 4 0 0

🇺🇸 Bitcoin Charlotte 16 11 1 4 0

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

🇳🇱 Bitcoin Bergen

🇧🇬 Bitcoin Club

🇦🇹 Einundzwanzig Außerfern

🇩🇪 Rothenburg ob der Tauber

🇬🇧 Purbeck Bitcoin

🇳🇱 Bitcoin Leiden

🇺🇸 Bitcoin Party KC

🇧🇷 Bitcoin Padawans

🇲🇿 Lwandi Bitcoin

🇺🇸 California Bitcoin Education Lab

We now have 650+ Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 Rockedf with 608 edits

🥈 RoseBTCmap with 511 edits

🥉 Comino with 216 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

Rockedf 608 526 67 15

RoseBTCmap 511 464 47 0

Comino 216 42 160 14

descubrebitcoin 80 3 64 13

VisibleSouth 49 0 44 5

Bitcoinplett 49 2 43 4

BTCMAP-TBB 31 7 24 0

Luthando12 30 0 29 1

Eliseomejia 25 0 25 0

Kartibu 21 0 21 0

Igor Bubelov 19 0 18 1

BitcoinDua 16 13 3 0

TokioBTC 16 15 1 0

confusedbuffalo 13 0 13 0

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Merchant Adoption News 🗞️

Square began auto-enabling Bitcoin payments across it's US customer base of 4M merchants 👀. Merchants still need to opt-in to appear on the maps on CashApp and BTC Map, but this is a huge step forward in Bitcoin's adoption arc. Wen rest of world?!

Qerko locations (mainly in the Czech Republic) no longer accept Bitcoin, apparently due to EU regulations. We're told there may be a way back, but in the meantime we'll be removing all 642 locations. 😢

Web App 🕸️

March was another huge month for the Web App with 60+ PRs merged, focusing on an overhauled merchant drawer, continued i18n expansion, and performance improvements.

New map drawer UX with compact merchant details (#859), payment method pills (#850), drawer header visual hierarchy (#849), phone and website quick info (#853), and merchant comments displayed directly in the drawer (#845).

Share merchant to clipboard (#851) and consistent boost badge styling (#860).

Localized merchant names now lazy-loaded and displayed when available (#794, #817).

New language support: Russian (#793), Dutch (#812), German (#799), French (#869), and Spanish (#870), plus a new language switcher modal (#798).

Dashboard area stats added (#789) and leaderboard generation moved server-side for performance (#846, #813).

Merchant view performance improvements (#790, #834).

Infrastructure: Node 20 to 22 LTS upgrade (#840), Vitest v2 to v3 (#839), CI health report rewrite (#822), and Zapstore added as an app source (#848).

Android App 🤖

BTC Map Android v1.1.0 is officially released! This is a major milestone after months of work since November 2025. Key highlights:

New Carto Dark Matter map style added.

Nearby communities now displayed on the map, helping users discover local Bitcoin communities.

Map rotation re-enabled with the improved clustering approach.

Localized place names and opening hours now displayed, with LLM-translated hours for supported regions.

Localization in 30+ languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (BR), Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Adaptive color scheme now opt-in, defaulting to website-aligned colors for better readability.

Improved payment flow and boosted markers brought back.

Architecture overhaul: clean DB layer abstraction, consolidated sync and API mappings, improved testability with new database and sync tests.

Bookmarks feature added for saving favorite places.

If you're an Android user, update and leave your feedback!

Admin App 🛠️

The Admin App saw significant work in March:

Nostr authentication fully implemented with parallel Nostr and BTC Map login flows, identity linking, and NIP-98 HTTP Auth (#22).

Circular icon preview with cropper overlay for better area icon centering (#38).

SVG icon support fixed for area display (#36).

Infrastructure ⚙️

The API saw major expansion in March with 49 commits:

New REST v4 endpoints: activity, top communities, top countries, top editors, and users endpoints.

Localization support: localized name field, localized opening hours, and humanize_working_hours RPC.

Area improvements: area type filter, area stats, area reverse geocoding, optimized bbox generation.

Sync logging: all OSM sync attempts now logged with failed_at and fail_reason tracking.

Request logging exposed via RPC, plus a new daily infra report RPC.

Major refactoring: relocated mappings for areas, elements, events, comments, users, reports, invoices, bans, and configuration into cleaner module structure.

Feed links fixed and localized name support added for search endpoint.

For a technical contributor view, see Igor's March recap.

Analytics 📊

Our March website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat - major web app contributions across drawer UX, i18n, and infrastructure

Igor Bubelov - major API, Android, and web app contributions

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - admin app, web app, blog, and data contributions

Sync / S7NC - Dutch locale support for web app

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	555	435	93	27	0
🇿🇲 Zambia	51	0	46	5	0
🇿🇦 South Africa	45	0	42	3	0
🇯🇵 Japan	31	7	24	0	0
🇩🇪 Germany	30	5	21	4	1
🇹🇭 Thailand	26	1	24	1	0
🇦🇹 Austria	26	2	24	0	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	23	0	19	4	0
🇨🇦 Canada	22	1	21	0	0
🇧🇷 Brazil	21	6	14	1	0

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted
🇿🇲 Bitcoin Victoria Falls	51	0	46	5
🇿🇦 Bitcoin Ekasi	34	0	33	1
🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base	30	6	24	0
🇿🇦 Bitcoin Plett	29	0	28	1
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	20	19	0	1
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	18	14	4	0
🇺🇸 Bitcoin Charlotte	16	11	1	4

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	608	526	67	15
RoseBTCmap	511	464	47	0
Comino	216	42	160	14
descubrebitcoin	80	3	64	13
VisibleSouth	49	0	44	5
Bitcoinplett	49	2	43	4
BTCMAP-TBB	31	7	24	0
Luthando12	30	0	29	1
Eliseomejia	25	0	25	0
Kartibu	21	0	21	0
Igor Bubelov	19	0	18	1
BitcoinDua	16	13	3	0
TokioBTC	16	15	1	0
confusedbuffalo	13	0	13	0

Can't see a BTC Map integration in their app. 👀

2026-04-12T02:12:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…q8l0
_________________________

Can't see a BTC Map integration in their app. 👀

Bottom right alongside the Cypherpunk Manifesto.

2026-04-11T05:55:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…00qv
_________________________

Bottom right alongside the Cypherpunk Manifesto.

As soon as they integrate!

2026-04-11T04:37:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…l358
_________________________

As soon as they integrate!

As soon as they integrate The Map, they're on!

2026-04-11T04:29:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…gvw0
_________________________

As soon as they integrate The Map, they're on!

Merged!

2026-04-11T04:29:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…55f7
_________________________

Merged!

Addition to map is still opt-in.

2026-04-11T03:36:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…nmfp
_________________________

Addition to map is still opt-in.

On it 🫡

2026-04-11T03:35:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…s999
_________________________

On it 🫡

They also pull in no Square merchant from us.

2026-04-11T03:35:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…mk86
_________________________

They also pull in no Square merchant from us.

Why?

2026-04-11T03:04:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…pxn4
_________________________

Why?

Most do. The merchant has to opt-in as part of the Square ...

2026-04-11T02:47:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…qsw5
_________________________

Most do. The merchant has to opt-in as part of the Square on-boarding flow. We then verify and add if it passes our quality standards.

What do you think of our new apps page? Who did we miss? ...

2026-04-11T02:43:26Z

What do you think of our new apps page?

Who did we miss?

https://btcmap.org/apps

Wallet of Satoshi (npub1hcw…h9rq) coinos (npub1w27…z70r) AQUA Wallet (npub1ajl…zx3q) CashApp (npub1cas…dg5l) Alby (npub1get…0nfm)

New version of our Android app just dropped! v1.1.0 now available ...

2026-03-31T08:57:06Z

New version of our Android app just dropped!

v1.1.0 now available on all good npub10r8xl2njyepcw2zwv3a6dyufj4e4ajx86hz6v4ehu4gnpupxxp7stjt2p8s (npub10r8…2p8s).

https://zapstore.dev/apps/org.btcmap

Release includes:
- Add Carto Dark Matter map style
- Display current country and nearby communities on the map
- Enable map rotation
- Display localized place names
- Improve opening hours display and translation
- Improve clustering
- Make adaptive color scheme opt in, default to website colors
- Improve payment flow
- Add support for many new languages
- Improve testability and test coverage

Anyone want to proof read our 🇫🇷 and 🇪🇸translations ...

2026-03-26T07:32:26Z

Anyone want to proof read our 🇫🇷 and 🇪🇸translations to make sure the 🤖 did a good job?

Zaps will flow ⚡

French:

https://deploy-preview-870--btcmap.netlify.app
https://github.com/teambtcmap/btcmap.org/blob/b3e03ce5d010acce6ede5f37cc1ccca129899507/src/lib/i18n/locales/fr.json

Spanish:

https://deploy-preview-869--btcmap.netlify.app
https://github.com/teambtcmap/btcmap.org/blob/92d7eda9fa01e65852913c8ed00295d718308c9f/src/lib/i18n/locales/es.json

Yo @npub10r8…t2p8 wat dis? 👀 ...

2026-03-19T10:19:26Z

Yo Zapstore (npub10r8…t2p8) wat dis? 👀

Carnitas Canitas in Playa Del Carmen 🇲🇽 just got boosted ...

2026-03-19T08:13:49Z

Carnitas Canitas in Playa Del Carmen 🇲🇽 just got boosted for 3-months!

Tacos (and canitas!) taste better when bought with freedom money. ✊

https://btcmap.org/merchant/21195

Happy Cypherpunk Manifesto Day! ...

2026-03-10T11:49:45Z

Happy Cypherpunk Manifesto Day!

https://btcmap.org/cypherpunks-manifesto.pdf

February update is now out! 1.1k new merchants, 5 new ...

2026-03-09T15:11:39Z

February update is now out!

1.1k new merchants, 5 new communities, major internationalization progress, and big Android & API upgrades. 💪

quoting
naddr1qq…7j4t

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 23,063 -> 24,146 (+1,083 +4.7%)

Recently verified (1y): 12,727 -> 13,470 (+743 +5.8%)

Avg. days since last verification: 393 -> 396 (+3 +0.8%)

Merchants boosted: 20 -> 41 (+21 +105.0%)

Total boost duration: 2,240 -> 4,920 (+2,680 +119.6%) days

Comments posted: 39 -> 29 (-10 -25.6%)

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 1106 913 160 33 6

🇮🇹 Italy 69 8 58 3 1

🇧🇷 Brazil 65 29 31 5 1

🇳🇱 Netherlands 59 4 50 5 4

🇸🇻 El Salvador 55 12 42 1 4

🇰🇷 South Korea 47 0 47 0 0

🇹🇭 Thailand 45 18 26 1 2

🇩🇪 Germany 39 5 28 6 0

🇯🇵 Japan 38 1 37 0 0

🇨🇿 Czechia 37 0 35 2 0

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇰🇷 Sea of Corea 52 0 52 0 0

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 50 40 9 1 0

🇧🇯 Bitcoin Benin 35 7 26 2 0

🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base 32 1 31 0 0

🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin 25 20 4 1 1

🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners 25 21 3 1 0

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Acajutla

🇳🇱 Eenentwintig Utrecht

🇳🇱 Eenentwintig Limburg

🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base

🇿🇦 BitFitness

We now have 638 Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 Rockedf with 602 edits

🥈 RoseBTCmap with 432 edits

🥉 Comino with 337 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

Rockedf 602 537 65 0

RoseBTCmap 432 422 10 0

Comino 337 28 293 16

descubrebitcoin 136 13 89 34

Beinardus 33 23 10 0

Dimitar155 25 0 25 0

Bitcoin Amantikir 19 1 18 0

wildmaps 18 0 18 0

BTCMAP-TBB 17 1 16 0

Mind09 16 7 8 1

skquinn 16 0 16 0

Carlos404 13 3 9 1

samuelzammit 13 0 13 0

BigKev97 13 0 13 0

emiliomorles 12 4 7 1

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Web App 🕸️

February was a very active month for the Web App, with a strong focus on localization, UX polish, and performance.

Major internationalization 'i18n' rollout across map controls, merchant pages, area views, leaderboards, dashboard, tickets, onboarding, support pages, and errors. Thanks to new contributor Nackoo2000 for assisting Hannes here!

New language support expanded, including Bulgarian and broader translation coverage.

Community and tagging UX updates including Verify Community forms and translated onboarding flows.

Map UX improvements from PR #695 (search list design updates) and PR #694 (nearby list real-distance display).

Performance improvements on merchant pages and non-map pages (sync bottleneck reductions and sync progress indicators).

Community contact support expanded with Satlantis, Geyser and improved social/contact rendering.

Merchant page performance improved by orders of magnitude for cold clients by removing full-sync bottlenecks and relying on targeted API endpoints.

Android App 🤖

Android saw major progress in February, with a large app refactor and several UX improvements landing ahead of the next release.

Improved clustering now feels stable after significant map refactoring and testing.

Map rotation is back, enabled by the new clustering approach.

Website-aligned default colors now improve readability across map styles in both light and dark modes.

Customization remains strong with optional Material-based theming still available in settings.

Preview builds are available at: btcmap-android preview releases.

Admin App 🛠️

Admin App work in February included validation and maintenance improvements:

Added support for 'Login with Nostr'.

Added additional new social contact fields to validation rules.

Updated JS module dependencies and Bootstrap.

Added contributor setup guidance and repo hygiene updates.

Infrastructure ⚙️

Infrastructure and platform work was significant in February:

API/Backend: large refactor and migration work across DB layers, schema handling, request logging, v4 endpoint improvements, and reliability updates

Lightning stack: continued LND-related work and associated backend improvements

Data portability and resilience: DB structure evolved around focused files (main.db, images.db, log.db) to improve portability and backup workflows

Request logging and OG caching: faster logging with richer diagnostics (including user-agent) plus OpenGraph image caching to reduce tile-server load

New API capabilities: endpoint additions for place areas and place activity

For a technical contributor view, see Igor's February recap.

Analytics 📊

Our February website stats are as follows:

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat - major web and admin contributions

Nackoo2000 - major i18n rollout across web pages and flows

5atoshiNakamoto - web locale wording fix

Igor Bubelov - major API and Android contributions

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - blog, data, and admin contributions

kanishka0411 - web app contributions

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	1106	913	160	33	6
🇮🇹 Italy	69	8	58	3	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	65	29	31	5	1
🇳🇱 Netherlands	59	4	50	5	4
🇸🇻 El Salvador	55	12	42	1	4
🇰🇷 South Korea	47	0	47	0	0
🇹🇭 Thailand	45	18	26	1	2
🇩🇪 Germany	39	5	28	6	0
🇯🇵 Japan	38	1	37	0	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	37	0	35	2	0

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇰🇷 Sea of Corea	52	0	52	0	0
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	50	40	9	1	0
🇧🇯 Bitcoin Benin	35	7	26	2	0
🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base	32	1	31	0	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	25	20	4	1	1
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	25	21	3	1	0

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	602	537	65	0
RoseBTCmap	432	422	10	0
Comino	337	28	293	16
descubrebitcoin	136	13	89	34
Beinardus	33	23	10	0
Dimitar155	25	0	25	0
Bitcoin Amantikir	19	1	18	0
wildmaps	18	0	18	0
BTCMAP-TBB	17	1	16	0
Mind09	16	7	8	1
skquinn	16	0	16	0
Carlos404	13	3	9	1
samuelzammit	13	0	13	0
BigKev97	13	0	13	0
emiliomorles	12	4	7	1

Languages NGU! 🗣 🌍 ...

2026-03-09T10:08:06Z

Languages NGU!

🗣 🌍

Yeah, just a way to show your support for the merchant (they get ...

2026-02-27T21:03:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…ex0s
_________________________

Yeah, just a way to show your support for the merchant (they get better viz) and us (we get the sats).

The Little Salumi in Northville, Michigan 🇺🇸 just got ...

2026-02-27T12:14:26Z

The Little Salumi in Northville, Michigan 🇺🇸 just got boosted for 12-months!

Salumi
säˈlo͞omē/
noun - cured meats that are sliced and served as an appetizer in an Italian meal.

https://btcmap.org/merchant/31002

Yep, will move once and for all to Nostr when it's ready.

2026-02-22T18:34:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…aw85
_________________________

Yep, will move once and for all to Nostr when it's ready.

Ooof. What errornare you seeing? Works fine on Element.

2026-02-22T18:33:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…qy9n
_________________________

Ooof. What errornare you seeing?

Works fine on Element.

Sorry (not sorry). Element is great on web and mobile.

2026-02-22T18:33:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…0huh
_________________________

Sorry (not sorry).

Element is great on web and mobile.

Shadowy Supertagger Comino has updated our Bitcoin sticker pack ...

2026-02-22T18:31:26Z

Shadowy Supertagger Comino has updated our Bitcoin sticker pack list on the wiki!

https://gitea.btcmap.org/teambtcmap/btcmap-general/wiki/Bitcoin-Accepted-Logo-Pack

BTC Map Discord server is now ded. Find us on Matrix: ...

2026-02-20T21:28:44Z

BTC Map Discord server is now ded.

Find us on Matrix:

https://matrix.to/#/#btcmap:matrix.org

Wat dis @npub15xd…t3l3 👀 @npub1etg…8n6e asked and got! If ...

2026-02-11T16:18:56Z

Wat dis Satlantis (npub15xd…t3l3) 👀

freemadeira (npub1etg…8n6e) asked and got!

If any other BTC Map communities want their Satlantis page adding then just shout.

Wat dis @npub1kmw…xqk9? 👀 Sea of Corea just got a shiny new ...

2026-02-11T16:16:06Z

Wat dis geyser (npub1kmw…xqk9)? 👀

Sea of Corea just got a shiny new social icon!

Any other BTC Map communities want their Geyser link adding?

https://btcmap.org/communities/

2026-02-11T16:14:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…xud8
_________________________

https://btcmap.org/communities/

Props to @npub16kz…q79w for grasping the nettle on this beast! ...

2026-02-11T14:06:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…cy65
_________________________

Props to escapedcat (npub16kz…q79w) for grasping the nettle on this beast!

Brazil 🇧🇷 was first as it's roughly 25% of our traffic!

If you want to contribute in your language then get in touch!

Você fala português do Brasil? ...

2026-02-11T13:42:04Z

Você fala português do Brasil?

Sweet. Try and get us some taggers in the USA to start with. ...

2026-02-07T09:13:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…mmx4
_________________________

Sweet.

Try and get us some taggers in the USA to start with.

We're working on a tagging agent skill.

January blog post is in! 1.2k new merchants, 1M views, improved ...

2026-02-06T13:53:22Z

January blog post is in!

1.2k new merchants, 1M views, improved search, onboarding flow and latest stats.

We thought we'd been relatively quiet, but the OSM edits and PRs don't lie. 🤟

quoting
naddr1qq…2kk0

Global Metrics 🌍️

Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 21,823 → 23,088 (+1,265 +5.8%)

Recently verified (1y): 11,874 → 12,746 (+872 +7.3%)

Avg. days since last verification: 392 → 393 (+1 +0.3%)

Merchants boosted: 8 → 20 (+12 +150.0%)

Total boost duration: 635 → 2,240 (+1,605 +252.8%) days

Comments posted: 32 → 40 (+8 +25.0%)

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing. Square merchants continue to dominate in the USA 🇺🇸.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 1050 878 159 13 7

🇧🇷 Brazil 143 71 65 7 2

🇨🇦 Canada 90 40 49 1 0

🇹🇭 Thailand 77 28 45 4 5

🇨🇭 Switzerland 70 1 63 6 2

🇸🇻 El Salvador 58 10 45 3 0

🇪🇸 Spain 46 5 36 5 1

🇿🇦 South Africa 42 11 29 2 0

🇲🇽 Mexico 31 6 16 9 2

🇵🇹 Portugal 30 5 21 4 3

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B 57 0 52 5 0

🇨🇦 Vancouver Bitcoiners 47 4 43 0 0

🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners 38 30 8 0 1

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast 30 1 24 5 1

🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles 28 19 9 0 0

🇧🇬 Bitcoin Bulgaria 25 1 24 0 0

🇲🇽 BTC Isla 24 3 15 6 3

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Ahuachapán

🇳🇬 Bitcoin Ikorodu

🇺🇸 North Jersey Bitcoin

🇬🇧 Bitcoin Beach Bournemouth

🇨🇴 Satoshi Team - Bogotá

🇰🇪 EcoBitz

🇪🇨 Bitmaxis

🇰🇪 Bitsavers Eduhub

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Santa Ana

🇺🇸 Bitcoin 30A

We now have 648+ Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️

Active Taggers 🏆

Here are this month's most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.

📣 Shoutout to the top 3:

🥇 Rockedf with 646 edits

🥈 RoseBTCmap with 455 edits

🥉 Comino with 233 edits

Name Total Edits Created Updated Deleted

Rockedf 646 541 102 3

RoseBTCmap 455 440 14 1

Comino 233 89 129 15

descubrebitcoin 137 55 71 11

Beinardus 88 53 35 0

Bitcoin Diary 41 4 2 35

Nathan Giovannini 39 0 34 5

Dimitar155 32 0 32 0

bitcoincoast_sv 31 1 24 6

Mind09 31 15 14 2

emiliomorles 24 4 19 1

Enfant72 15 5 10 0

paulbrunner 15 0 15 0

Liongrass 15 0 11 4

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Web App 🕸️

With 26 PRs merged in January, the Web App continues to evolve. Notable changes this month:

Google Maps-Style Search with overlay panel (#608) - Enhanced search experience with an intuitive overlay interface

Tagger Onboarding Form (#584) - New streamlined onboarding flow for taggers joining the platform

Verified Date Display (#641) - Locations now show when they were last verified

IP Geolocation - Map now automatically centers based on user's IP location for a better initial experience

Analytics Link in Footer (#617) - Easy access to site statistics from every page

Bug Fixes: - Fixed dark mode data source select styling (#628) - Fixed broken marker icons in production (#626) - Fixed deleted merchants appearing in drawer (#621) - Fixed comment modal closing when clicking backdrop (#620) by keshav0479 - Fixed areas loading indicators (#651) - Upgraded Areas API to v3 for better handling of deleted areas (#625)

Maintenance: - Removed 31 unused icon files reducing bundle size (#627) - Combined MerchantButton and MerchantLink components (#661) by kanishka0411 - Disabled Gitea Issues API with maintenance message (#649)

Admin App 🛠️

Nathan made 54 commits to the Admin App this month, introducing powerful new tools for area management and data quality:

Map Editor: New Edit Shape functionality with GeoJSON simplification for easier area boundary management.

Linting System: Initial linting functionality with automated quality checks including: - Large GeoJSON detection (areas over 500 points) - URL alias clash detection - General data quality validations

Area Management Improvements: - Built-in GeoJSON fetcher and simplifier when adding areas - Population data now fetched from Nominatim - Enhanced icon editing with dedicated modal - Image editing via URL with improved UX - All tags visible in area details, not just required ones

Maintenance Tools: - Country geocoding with continental filtering - Community organization filters - Wildcard search functionality - Tag search on maintenance page - Pagination for large datasets

Bug Fixes: - Fixed silent logout issues with graceful re-login handling - Fixed cache sync to include missing areas - Fixed custom tag addition and optional tag updates - Removed double confirmation for removal actions

Infrastructure ⚙️

Igor made 13 commits to the API this month with some significant infrastructure improvements:

LND Integration: Migrated our Lightning Network payment infrastructure to LND, including comment invoice handling and backend improvements.

Platform Migration: Moved all notifications from Discord to Matrix for better alignment with our open-source values. This includes: - Boost alerts now go to Matrix - OSM changes channel migrated to Matrix - Removed all Discord webhooks from RPC methods

Documentation: Added comprehensive documentation for create_api_key, delete_event, and change_password RPC methods.

Analytics 📊

January was our first full month with our self-hosted Umami analytics!

Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where our users are coming from in real-time.

Credits 🫶

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to the project including the Shadowy Supertaggers:

Hannes / escapedcat - Primary web app contributor with 15+ merged PRs

kanishka0411 - Verified date feature and component refactoring

keshav0479 - Modal fix

Nathan / dadofsambonzuki

Igor Bubelov

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch-in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	1050	878	159	13	7
🇧🇷 Brazil	143	71	65	7	2
🇨🇦 Canada	90	40	49	1	0
🇹🇭 Thailand	77	28	45	4	5
🇨🇭 Switzerland	70	1	63	6	2
🇸🇻 El Salvador	58	10	45	3	0
🇪🇸 Spain	46	5	36	5	1
🇿🇦 South Africa	42	11	29	2	0
🇲🇽 Mexico	31	6	16	9	2
🇵🇹 Portugal	30	5	21	4	3

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B	57	0	52	5	0
🇨🇦 Vancouver Bitcoiners	47	4	43	0	0
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	38	30	8	0	1
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast	30	1	24	5	1
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	28	19	9	0	0
🇧🇬 Bitcoin Bulgaria	25	1	24	0	0
🇲🇽 BTC Isla	24	3	15	6	3

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	646	541	102	3
RoseBTCmap	455	440	14	1
Comino	233	89	129	15
descubrebitcoin	137	55	71	11
Beinardus	88	53	35	0
Bitcoin Diary	41	4	2	35
Nathan Giovannini	39	0	34	5
Dimitar155	32	0	32	0
bitcoincoast_sv	31	1	24	6
Mind09	31	15	14	2
emiliomorles	24	4	19	1
Enfant72	15	5	10	0
paulbrunner	15	0	15	0
Liongrass	15	0	11	4

Look Mom, we're on TV in 🇺🇸! #nevent1q…rnp9

2026-01-22T20:29:21Z

Look Mom, we're on TV in 🇺🇸!

quoting
nevent1q…rnp9
Las Vegas businesses are ditching high credit card fees for Bitcoin payments.

HUUUUGE.

2026-01-20T17:41:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…h2rn
_________________________

HUUUUGE.

2025 Year in Review is in! #naddr1qq…dc2x

2026-01-19T20:51:45Z

2025 Year in Review is in!

quoting
naddr1qq…dc2x

General 🫶

2025 was a pivotal year for the BTC Map project. A year defined by technical progress and a maturing of sorts. We saw growing community involvement and what we will look back on as the year that merchant adoption really began to accelerate.

We continued to lean into our distributed, community-driven ethos with volunteers from across the world working asynchronously on everything from code to community engagement and data curation to local merchant on-boarding. What can look from the outside like a “glorious dumpster fire of chaos” was in practice a resilient, anti-fragile way of enabling merchant adoption and community building across the planet.

Product improvements and performance 🚀

A major focus throughout the year was making BTC Map faster, smoother and more robust. Performance improvements touched everything from map rendering and search responsiveness to API improvements that keep merchant data fresh and snappy under growing load.

In addition to shipping v1 of the Android App, we also implemented some major visual changes to the Web App that makes exploring BTC Map merchants more intuitive.

Our iOS is still in desperate need of maintenance and so please do get in touch if you'd like to contribute!

Merchant growth and real-world adoption 🏪

Merchant coverage continued to expand, with BTC Map closing in on new milestones and deepening coverage globally. The key adoption stories of 2025 where:

Square enabling payments for their 4M merchants within the US 🇺🇸. To date we have have processed over 5k tickets and still have 1.5k in the backlog, with no end in sight.

MoneyBadger lighting-up South Africa 🇿🇦 with 1M+ merchant via integrations with legacy QR payment networks. Chasing the heels of Tando, who have already lit-up all of Kenya!

Steak 'n Shake going full maxi-mode and not only accepting Bitcoin across their hundreds of stores across the US, but introducing Bitcoin-themed food and announcing a treasury strategy.

Nothing shows this growth better than infographics and animations by Wicked!

And here are the 2025 stats in full:

Global Metrics 🌍️

Metrics for 2025 are in!

Total Bitcoin-accepting locations: 13,672 → 21,823 (+8,151 +59.6%)

Recently verified (1y): 7,877 → 11,874 (+3,997 +50.7%)

Avg. days since last verification: 345 → 392 (+47 +13.6%)

Merchants boosted: 124

Total boost duration: 10,340

Comments posted: 23 → 603 (+580 +2521.7%)

A 60% increase in Bitcoin locations is mind-blowing, but if you strip out ATMs and exchanges and focus on merchants only, this increase moves up to 65%! 🤯

Here is a graph showing growth of merchants (excluding ATMs and exchanges):

And here is the same data filtered for only those locations verified within 2025:

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Country Activity 📈

These were the most active countries in terms of merchant data editing in 2025:

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇺🇸 United States of America 6539 3547 2400 592 47

🇧🇷 Brazil 2885 912 1832 141 28

🇿🇦 South Africa 2276 918 1082 276 8

🇹🇭 Thailand 1231 328 818 85 70

🇨🇭 Switzerland 1246 297 889 60 20

🇨🇿 Czechia 1194 222 908 64 22

🇸🇻 El Salvador 1175 387 693 95 15

🇮🇹 Italy 1036 224 727 85 42

🇳🇱 Netherlands 1004 105 798 101 23

🇩🇪 Germany 873 144 649 80 37

Community Activity 📈

These were the most active communities in terms of merchant data editing in 2025:

Name Total Created Updated Deleted Comments

🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin 610 268 269 73 1

🇵🇹 FREE Madeira 485 64 398 23 28

🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast 501 138 338 25 5

🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B 475 52 398 25 3

🇨🇿 Dvacet Jedna Praha / Jednadvacet Praha 397 75 290 32 11

🇨🇦 Vancouver Bitcoiners 370 113 235 22 2

We also saw the addition of over 100 new communities over the year.

Sponsors 🙏

We wanted to take a moment to thank our long-term sponsors Wallet of Satoshi and the BTC Reef / Curacao community - your assistance from very early on in has meant a great deal.

We also welcomed Square as a sponsor towards the end of 2025 🎉.

And thank-you to all the individual donations we have received throughout the year.

Credits 🫶

We welcomed the following significant new contributors during the year:

descubrebitcoin

SiriusBig

vv01f

pjw1965

Mind09

Matúš Sekerák

Jim Netskas

Juan Colchete

Trigger

Rose

John Doe

And of course relied upon the old guard:

Comino

Hannes

Igor Bubelov

Nathan Day

Rockedf

Saunter

Beinardus

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to the project!

Support Us 🤝

There are many ways in which you can support us:

Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch-in with the never-ending global effort.

Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.

Consider donating to the project here.

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	6539	3547	2400	592	47
🇧🇷 Brazil	2885	912	1832	141	28
🇿🇦 South Africa	2276	918	1082	276	8
🇹🇭 Thailand	1231	328	818	85	70
🇨🇭 Switzerland	1246	297	889	60	20
🇨🇿 Czechia	1194	222	908	64	22
🇸🇻 El Salvador	1175	387	693	95	15
🇮🇹 Italy	1036	224	727	85	42
🇳🇱 Netherlands	1004	105	798	101	23
🇩🇪 Germany	873	144	649	80	37

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin	610	268	269	73	1
🇵🇹 FREE Madeira	485	64	398	23	28
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast	501	138	338	25	5
🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B	475	52	398	25	3
🇨🇿 Dvacet Jedna Praha / Jednadvacet Praha	397	75	290	32	11
🇨🇦 Vancouver Bitcoiners	370	113	235	22	2

Butcher Block Cafe in Denver, CO 🇺🇸was just boosted for ...

2026-01-17T08:18:33Z

Butcher Block Cafe in Denver, CO 🇺🇸was just boosted for *checks notes* 3-years!

https://btcmap.org/merchant/12143

Bitcoin on The Map interview with Dr Padraig Corcoran by ...

2026-01-14T10:24:56Z

Bitcoin on The Map interview with Dr Padraig Corcoran by stephanlivera (nprofile…22ck):

https://rumble.com/v74b6ra-bitcoin-on-the-map-with-dr.-padraig-corcoran-slp709.html

BREAKING: Merchants in @nprofile…mwln have doubled! ...

2026-01-12T19:37:45Z

BREAKING: Merchants in Bitcoinikorodu (nprofile…mwln) have doubled!

quoting
nevent1q…vpy7
History keeps repeating itself in Ikorodu 🔥

Our second Bitcoin-accepting merchant is now officially listed on BTC Map (nprofile…jemv).

📍 Merchant address:
https://btcmap.org/merchant/node:13446400534

One by one, we’re building a real Bitcoin circular economy.

More proof of work coming ⚡️

#BitcoinIkorodu