Table of Contents
Dev Updates: Focusing on Stability, Observability and Performance
Overall, it was a pretty slow month, and I was focused on paying back technical debt as well as fixing some performance bottlenecks in BTC Map backend. There was no other dev activity related to BTC Map, as far as I know.
Admin Updates: Huge Area Backlog
Our places backlog is managed by Rockedf, who leaves no task unhandled, and last month was no exception. Unfortunately, our areas backlog just keeps growing, with little to no activity.
Trending Countries
- South Africa - 410 changes
- Brazil - 220 changes
- Italy - 116 changes
- Thailand - 107 changes
- Switzerland - 67 changes
South Africa is clearly an employee of the month, and most local changes were data actualization, which is very good. Brazil added almost 100 places last month, and many existing places were re-verified. There were also some serious maintenance efforts in Italy, leading to significant local data quality improvement.
Most changes in Thailand were driven by a new local community.
Switzerland had some minor data quality bump, mosty related to a local ATM network.
Big thanks to Rockedf for contributing to almost every region!
Trending Communities
- Bitcoin Amantikir - 92 changes
- Bitcoin Witsand - 79 changes
- Bitcoin Cape Town Monthly Meetup - 50 changes
- Bitshack - 35 changes
- FREE Madeira - 33 changes
Bitcoin Amantikir have seen some serious work and reached flawless 100% up-to-date rating. Bitcoin Witsand maintained the same rating and it’s one of the highest quality Bitcoin hubs in Africa.
Global Metrics
The number of verified merchants has increased from 6,967 to 7,055 (+1.3%), continuing its upwards trend. 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 12,285 to 12,689 (+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 343 to 357 (+4%), 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- There are many outdated locations, we need more maintainers who can contact those merchants and verify that they are still in business and still accept sats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 are still not shown in our iOS app and on our website, because we don’t have active devs targeting those platforms. Ping us if you can help!
The best way to help us is to re-verify some outdated locations in your area, if you have any: