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2026-03-09 15:11:39 UTC

BTC Map on Nostr: February update is now out! 1.1k new merchants, 5 new communities, major ...

February update is now out!

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

Graph showing merchant adoption over the last month

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:

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:

Graph showing website analytics over the last month

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:

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.
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