Table of Contents
Merchant Comments
I released merchant comments API last month, and I was busy integrating it in our Android app. Here are my key observations:
- Comments are a solid quality indicator, so I decided to show the number of comments on map pins, making it super easy to discover the highest quality merchants
- Comments are extremely valuable, they often contain useful tips and warnings, and they also mention discounts and promotions
- Comments are currently our best source of data on real user activity. Areas without comments are suspicious, so we can use comment data to identify fake or abandoned areas
Vector Maps
We had some good progress on switching to open source vector map dataset, powered by OpenFreeMap. After some initial discussions and tests, we decided to go ahead and roll out vector maps in the coming weeks. OpenFreeMap is a really cool project, our users can even self-host their own map data provider by following the official instructions.
Trending Countries
- Brazil - 309 changes
- Netherlands - 202 changes
- Italy - 154 changes
- Spain - 130 changes
- El Salvador - 84 changes
- South Africa - 80 changes
- Kenya - 77 changes
- Slovakia - 77 changes
- Germany - 66 changes
- United States of America - 61 changes
Top 5 countries are well-known bitcoiner hubs, but South Africa and Kenya never showed up in our top trending countries list. Something might be brewing there, but only time will tell.
Big thanks to Rockedf for contributing to almost every region!
Trending Communities
- Porto Alegre Bitcoin - 89 changes
- Bitcoin Dada Nairobi - 77 changes
- The Core - 77 changes
- Arnhem Bitcoin City - 58 changes
- Einundzwanzig Portugal - 56 changes
- Einundzwanzig Schweiz - 44 changes
- Bitcoin Association Switzerland - 44 changes
- Free Madeira - 44 changes
- Dezentralschweiz - 44 changes
- De Bitcoin Meetup - 41 changes
Porto Alegre vent from 60% up-to-date to 100% up-to-date, thanks to Go BTC contributions.
Global Metrics
The number of verified merchants has increased from 6,747 to 6,935 (+2.8%), reversing previous month-on-month decline. It looks like we’re able to keep ~7,000 merchants up-to-date, and we need more local maintainers if we want to bump those numbers.
The total number of merchants has increased from 11,842 to 12,222 (+3.2%), which is ~x2 our long-term trend. The stream of new merchants is stronger than ever, but we’re just struggling to keep some of them up-to-date.
The average number of days since the last verification has increased from 340 to 344 (+1.2%), which means that our data is slightly less reliable than it was a month ago. This is yet another confirmation that our main bottleneck is the lack of local maintainers.
Conclusion
Things are looking good overall, and I think that we need to focus on the following issues:
- There are many outdated locations, we need more maintainers who can contact those merchants and verify that they are still in business and still accept sats
- Some merchants are just better than others, we need to make the best ones more discoverable. Comments is a good first step but there are many other things we can do to highlight our rockstar merchants!
- Our iOS and Web apps need some love, it would be cool to onboard more devs who can fill the feature gap and fix some known bugs
The best way to help us is to re-verify some outdated locations in your area, if you have any: