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Company Quarterly Update

Blockstream Quarterly Update - Q3 2025

Blockstream Team

In this latest quarterly update, we trace Blockstream’s continued expansion across Bitcoin’s core layers—from the global self-custody push and multiple Blockstream app releases to Simplicity’s mainnet debut, Lightning scalability work, and the institutional lead-in to Lugano Plan B.

Major Q3 2025 Highlights 

Q3 reinforced Blockstream’s position as Bitcoin’s infrastructure leader—advancing open-source tech while converting that momentum into real adoption.

Some key achievements:

  • Blockstream Jade Community Initiative: Large-scale hardware wallet distribution through educational and regional partners, directly increasing global self-custody.
  • Blockstream app v5.0.4 → v5.0.9: A sequence of incremental updates improving onboarding, hardware pairing, and watch-only setup, with strong user retention and conversion trends.
  • Simplicity Launch on Liquid: Bitcoin’s first formal verification smart-contract language went live on Liquid mainnet.
  • Core Lightning v25.09 “Hot Wallet Guardian”: Bookkeeper integration delivered real-time transparency for node operators.
  • Blockstream Explorer API Upgrade: New Waterfalls scanning and Ark-compatible relay strengthened enterprise infrastructure.
  • Greenlight v0.3.1 Release: Rolled out under the Scaling Bitcoin C++ initiative, delivering improved reliability for enterprise Lightning deployments.
  • Institutional Engagement: Token 2049 Singapore, the Safeheron × Komainu collaboration, and the announcement of the Bitcoin Capital Summit in Lugano. 

Blockstream Enterprise — Institutional Momentum

Building on Q2’s strong launchpad, Blockstream Enterprise ramped up its institutional efforts this quarter, focusing on deepening relationships and building infrastructure for allocators, treasury teams, and financial institutions. 

In early October, we pushed forward with our efforts to expand Bitcoin’s institutional reach in Asia with the Token 2049 Singapore event. Blockstream partnered with Safeheron and Komainu to host an event that brought institutions and market leaders together to explore custody, infrastructure, and how digital assets integrate with global commerce.

Later that month, Plan B Network week in Lugano shifted our momentum into overdrive. First was the Bitcoin Capital Summit: a private gathering focused on the evolving landscape of Bitcoin-backed finance and capital markets. Hosted alongside STOKR and Fulgur Ventures, a select group of founders, investors, wealth managers, treasury teams, and financial professionals gathered for an evening of deep insight and personal exchange. Through focused talks and panel discussions, Blockstream CEO Adam Back explored key developments such as tokenization, bitcoin as collateral, and emerging treasury solutions.

We capped off our flagship autumn presence at the Lugano Plan B Forum, where our team covered a number of topics ranging from asset issuance on Bitcoin, multisig mastery, Bitcoin corporate treasury evolution, Lightning, capital market tokenization, and more.

Institutional demand for Bitcoin custody is growing like never before. They recognize the vulnerabilities present in multi-coin solutions and increasingly see Bitcoin as the premier, institutional-grade financial asset. We are ensuring that demand is getting a warm welcome. 

Core Lightning — Scaling the Network

In the spotlight of this quarter was the release of Core Lightning v25.09, aptly titled “Hot Wallet Guardian” by contributor @king-11. This release came packed with new features and enhancements which all translate to a faster, safer, and more reliable Lightning experience:

  • Bookkeeper integration that introduced real-time fee and payment analytics, 
  • DNS provision for human-readable Lightning addresses,
  • reinforcements to discover valid payment routes more efficiently,
  • mandatory payment secrets for BOLT11 invoices to prevent payment interception,
  • and more.

September also marked the exciting Scaling Bitcoin Hackathon at BTC++ Istanbul. Eight teams of hackers competed for a grand prize of 5M sats, bridging UX and protocol development under the mentorship of our very own Lightning protocol engineers, Lisa Neigut and Peter Neuroth, and our Head of Design Basak Haznedaroglu.

Behind the scenes, Blockstream’s Lightning Engineers have made increases to payment success and reliability, continued to explore expanded LSP capability and efforts to improve the developer experience using Core Lightning and Greenlight. 

Greenlight — Minor Update, Major Impact

In July, our engineering team released Greenlight v0.3.1 which saw an upgrade for Greenlight nodes to now run the performance, protocol, and reliability improvements made in Core Lightning v25.05. Our Lightning node runners can expect a faster, more stable, and more cost-efficient Greenlight service, while consumers will enjoy less friction and faster, more reliable payments for Greenlight-reliant services.

Greenlight Principle Architect Christian Decker said, “This release has been in the making for quite some time. Congratulations to everybody involved. It’s a minor release in versioning but a big one in impact, automatically upgrading all nodes to CLN v25.05.”

With the latest update:

  • signer policies have been refined, especially around acceptable fee rates,
  • a zeroconf fix also ensures long-confirming channels will no longer be closed,
  • Greenlight includes the new signer for CLN v25.05, meaning faster commit/revoke messaging, tighter fee accuracy, and smoother channel management.

Blockstream Explorer API — Gaining Traction

In the midst of all these exciting updates, the Blockstream Explorer API has quietly become one of the most relied-on pieces of Bitcoin infrastructure. From open-source wallets to fintech dashboards and institutional analytics tools, it underpins a growing number of production applications in both the Bitcoin and Liquid ecosystems. Now, with a series of backend improvements and new developer features, Explorer is entering its next phase as a scalable, enterprise-grade API. 

  • Waterfalls is a new open-source scanning tool that helps light clients scan for balances more efficiently, far surpassing the speeds of traditional electrum-style scanning, where each address needs to be individually calculated and queried. This means wallets can find balances almost instantly instead of waiting through slow, address-by-address lookups.
  • Ark-ready relays have arrived, allowing clients to broadcast multiple transactions together as a package, which solves previous mempool limitations that would reject low-fee parent transactions and were irreplaceable with high-fee versions, saving time and fees!
  • Along with these new features, our new Explorer API upgrade aligns Explorer’s mempool policy with the broader Bitcoin ecosystem by reducing the minimum relay fee to 0.1 sat/vB. It may seem like a minute technical detail, but it has real impact for builders and users alike. Now, developers can rely on more consistent results when working in low-fee or experimental transaction environments.

Blockstream Research — Security and Verification

Simplicity is one of the most exciting frontiers in Bitcoin today. In Q3 2025, nearly a decade of research and developments culminated in the launch of Simplicity on Liquid mainnet on August 1st, bringing expressive and verifiable contracts poised to unlock a new wave of financial tooling on Bitcoin. To support developer education, we released Simplicity High-Level (SimplicityHL) toolchain and docs to prepare builders for Liquid Bootcamps.

StarkWare has already integrated Simplicity by building a STARK verifier directly in the language. “It shows you you can do an enormous number of very flexible things with Simplicity and do it with high assurance,” said Blockstream CEO Adam Back.

  • Our joint livestream with StarkWare on August 4th covered the launch and highlighted Simplicity’s synergy with STARKs. Be sure to watch the replay if you missed it.

With the staggering improvement of artificial intelligence over the past couple of years, we are all left wondering whether major breakthroughs in computing will arrive much sooner than anticipated. In particular: quantum computing, and how it potentially threatens Bitcoin’s security. What happens if quantum computing can break Bitcoin’s Schnorr and ECDSA digital signature schemes?It’s possible that the foundation for a solution is already in place, and Blockstream Research’s Cryptography Engineer Tim Ruffing sees it within Taproot. The Post-Quantum Security of Bitcoin’s Taproot as a Commitment Scheme, released in July, provides justification for a Taproot-based approach by demonstrating the upgrade’s post-quantum security.

Meanwhile, our Cryptography team, led by Jonas Nick, has been continuing the hard work on a trifecta of developments: DahLIAS, ChillDKG, and Shielded CSV.

  • Efficient data use keeps Bitcoin accessible for everyday node runners. However, more complex transaction schemes increase data requirements as they involve additional signatures. Discrete Logarithm-Based Interactive Aggregate Signatures (DahLIAS) addresses this problem. As Jonas Nick puts it, “A DahLIAS signature is always 64 bytes…regardless of how many messages and signers that we have”. In addition, verification is twice as fast as batch verification of n individual Schnoor signatures. Jonas joined Brink engineers in July to discuss more.
  • ChillDKG, on the other hand, is a distributed key generation (DKG) protocol that complements schemes like DahLIAS by providing a robust way to generate and refresh shared keys without trusting a single party.
  • Last but not least, Shielded CSV sets a precedent for enhancing on-chain privacy—making it possible to hide spending conditions and improve transaction confidentiality on Bitcoin’s base layer, all without requiring a soft fork.

Together, these developments are supporting Blockstream Research’s broader effort to make Bitcoin contracts more private, secure, and programmable.

Want to get started on building projects like these yourself? Jonas Nick created Provable Cryptography for Bitcoin: An Introduction, a comprehensive workbook that teaches formal security definitions and proofs through hands-on exercises with solutions included. It’s free to download for builders and students alike.

Consumer Growth — App Evolution

The Blockstream app enjoyed a slew of updates throughout Q3. Improved onboarding, enhanced Jade pairing, easier watch-only wallet setups, fine tuned UX improvements, and general stability upgrades have all come together to make our users’ Bitcoin experience more seamless and intuitive than ever before. 

Here are some of our favorite updates:

  • v5.0.7: We simplified the app UX to make asset balances, transaction history, and send/receive flows easier to access. For older 2-of-2 Liquid wallets, users now have the ability to reactivate 2FA. BIP21 payment URIs are clickable links that pre-fill both the recipient address and amount in your wallet. They are now better validated in-app to protect your funds when sending.
  • v5.0.9: Android got smoother pairing with Jade and faster signing in watch-only wallets. Bitcoin buys now show live status updates in the transaction list. You can also sweep funds from closed Lightning channels into your on-chain wallet with one tap. On iOS, watch-only wallet setup got faster, and we enabled wallet rename or removal directly from the dashboard with zero friction.

We have some exciting new updates in store for you that are just around the corner. Download the Blockstream app now if you haven’t yet.

Ecosystem Engagement & Media

In Q3, we spurred on global self-custody adoption with the rollout of our hardware distribution initiative across Latin America, Africa, and Asia as part of our Bitcoin Pizza Day Celebration. Coordinated with education partners including Mi Primer Bitcoin and Exonumia, we successfully delivered 1,000 Jades into the hands of new Bitcoin users.

At the same time, Blockstream Local expanded to new heights, reinforcing community-level education and wallet literacy. We have positioned the Blockstream app at the very foundation of these events, facilitating new users’ first bitcoin transfers to self-custody. Now, organizers can access free workshop materials, receive Jades to distribute at events, and onboard their community directly to self-custody with the Blockstream app and Jade.

We announced two highly anticipated Liquid Bootcamps in Mexico City (Oct 29-30) and São Paulo (Nov 3-4). Nearly 100 developers joined the Blockstream team to get hands-on with the new Simplicity contract language. Both bootcamps will be recorded and freely available on the Liquid YouTube channel and the Plan B educational platform. In addition, we are supporting the Brazil event with a $6,000 prize pool in BTC for the winning teams with the best Simplicity project at the Sats Conf hackathon.

Our social reach garnered more than three million impressions this quarter, and a large part of that was thanks to our wildly viral Hashcash 25th Anniversary post, celebrating Blockstream’s cryptographic origins.

Providing further tailwinds for our social reach, Blockstream has been on a historic run in the media and community this quarter:

Looking Ahead: Q4 Priorities

Q3 2025 captured a clear inflection point for Bitcoin adoption—hardware in hands, software maturing, and institutional interest turning into action. Blockstream’s combination of open-source engineering and commercial execution will drive that momentum into the next quarter.

Here’s what’s coming next:

  • Consumer: The Blockstream app is getting a fresh UI for the upcoming v6 update. Stay tuned!
  • Enterprise: Expand Explorer API adoption, provide Liquid issuance tooling, and launch our flagship enterprise custody solution.
  • Institutional: Execute follow-ups from Bitcoin Capital Summit and Plan B Forum.
  • Research: Continue our Simplicity discovery and advance its developer docs and Miniscript extensions.
  • Community: Grow Jade Community Initiative and Blockstream Local to 100 chapters worldwide.

We’re marching forward into Q4 with laser-focused commitment to execution. To discuss any of the topics detailed in this quarter’s update, please contact press@blockstream.com or reach out to us on 𝕏 or LinkedIn.

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