Table of Contents
Dev Updates
As a purely open source infrastructure project, BTC Map faces some significant challenges in monetization. We have some serious funding issues and most of the work is done by volunteers with no compensation at all, and we also need to pay for our infra, which means that we’re always focused on two things:
- Cutting costs
- Finding sponsors
While running a full node is fun, it costs ~$100/month in VPS storage fees. To cut costs, we switched to a pruned node. It looks like the migration went well, and our CLN node has no issues running in a pruned setup.
Another significant expense item is Stadia Maps subscription, it costs ~$300 a month, so we were able to switch to a free alternative:
Vector tiles also look nicer, so I’m very happy with this change. We also needed to switch to a self-hosted solution for OpenGraph static map image generation.
Here is a list of other, less significant updates:
- RPC API underwent heavy refactoring, making it easier to use and maintain
- Some database queries and struct mappings were improved
- Element issues were promoted to a separate entity, which makes our API more composable. The /elements call won’t return the issues as a tag, now there is a separate endpoint for that
- Our web dashboard has been referenced in several Lightning adoption reports, prompting us to optimize its design and improve page load times
Admin Updates
By onboarding additional community admins, we reduced the community submission backlog to just 14 open tickets:
Trending Countries
- Brazil - 313 edits + 4 comments
- Costa Rica - 139 edits + 2 comments
- El Salvador - 108 changes + 5 comments
- South Africa - 93 changes + 2 comments
- Czechia - 70 changes + 7 comments
Trending Communities
- Bitcoin Jungle - 67 edits + 2 comments
- FloripaCoin - 37 edits
- NZBitcoiners.org - 29 edits + 5 comments
- Bitcoin Berlin - El Salvador - 33 edits
- Dezentralschweiz - 29 edits + 3 comments
Most Active Editors
- Rockedf - 297 edits
- descubrebitcoin - 184 edits
- Comino - 102 edits
- saunter - 95 edits
- empty_child - 71 edits
Global Metrics
The total number of merchants has increased from 14,096 to 14,563.
The number of recently verified (1y) merchants has increased from 7,851 to 7,879. We need more local maintainers if we want to bump those numbers.
New Lightning Adoption Report:
We were mentioned in a latest Lightning adoption report by Breez. This is an interesting read, and it looks like LN adoption has been accelerating in the last few months. Our data also confirms their observations.
https://breez.technology/documents/Report_BitcoinPayments_Breez_1A1z.pdf
Conclusion
While funding is still an unsolved issue, we were able to cut our infra expenses and reduce the number of external dependencies. All the key trends are healthy, but we still need to onboard more editors and decentralize the editing process.
You can support us by re-verifying outdated locations in your area. Every contribution makes Bitcoin ecosystem stronger!