Blockstream Quarterly Update - Q4 2025

In the latest quarterly update, we look back on Blockstream’s growing reach in the industry, among the community, and abroad. A series of consumer product updates, the Distributed Lab integration, and global conference presence ensured our team finished this year in full sprint.

Major Q4 2025 Highlights

Blockstream’s Q4 was a quarter defined by execution. Liquid Bootcamp initiatives expanded in Latin America, the team grew through new integrations, and a steady cadence of releases strengthened wallets, hardware security, Lightning functionality, and developer tooling. Together, these initiatives reinforce Blockstream’s multi-faceted impact across consumer, enterprise, and developer initiatives.

• Liquid Bootcamps: Mexico City and São Paulo events brought nearly 100 developers together to compete for $6,000 in BTC rewards, with winners announced at Brazil’s largest Bitcoin conference.
• Plan B Week in Lugano: Huge Blockstream presence showcased our team’s multi-faceted impact on the Bitcoin industry. 
• Blockstream app v5.1.0 → v5.1.4: Focused on advanced user flows, the most recent string of updates introduced exciting new features to maximize user flexibility.
• Jade v1.0.37 → v1.0.38: New upgrades to Jade firmware, including camera enhancements and anti-rollback, strengthened device security and improved usability.
• Distributed Lab integration: Onboarded new developer talent to bolster Blockstream’s leadership position in cryptography and accelerate execution across consumer, enterprise, and institutional offerings.
• Core Lightning 25.12 "Boltz's Seamless Upgrade Experience": BIP39 recovery phrases, xpay improvements, and optimizations.  
• Explorer API 25.12: Introduced transparent subscription pricing, comprehensive documentation resources, and a modernized dashboard experience.

Blockstream Enterprise — Taking the Stage

To cap off our international, institutional 2025 push, Blockstream Enterprise made a few final appearances that earmark our presence in the enterprise spotlight. 

Blockstream took the stage at BTCPrague’s Bitcoin Corporate Day for a panel discussion on “Enterprise Bitcoin Solutions: Treasury, Custody & Corporate Infrastructure.”

This panel focused on how Bitcoin transitions from a personal asset to an institutional-grade treasury tool, covering strategy, custody, regulation, trust, and the practical realities enterprises face when adopting Bitcoin at scale. It’s a must listen for any business or financial entity that’s on the fence about fully embracing the Bitcoin standard.

Meanwhile, the private Bitcoin Capital Summit event, hosted in October by Blockstream, STOKR, and Fulgur Ventures, featured a panel discussion led by our CEO Adam Back alongside Tether CEO Paolo Ardino, macro analyst Willy Woo, and Ego Death Capital’s Preston Pysh.

Each of these events brought new relationships, strengthened existing ones, and established greater trust in the fastest growing sect of Bitcoin adoption. Institutional appetite for Bitcoin is soaring to all time highs, and we’re preparing to meet this demand.

Talent Expansion — Welcome Distributed Lab!

As part of that preparation, one of the largest developments of Q4—perhaps even all year—was the November announcement of our agreement to integrate the technology and expertise of Distributed Lab, a laser-sharp software engineering company known for its Bitcoin, cryptography, and smart contract expertise. 

The agreement includes adding Distributed Lab’s proprietary software modules, developer tooling, and intellectual property to Blockstream’s platforms, including the Blockstream app, Jade hardware wallet, Liquid Network services, tokenization, Simplicity, and enterprise custody solutions.

This integration strengthens our position across consumer, enterprise, and institutional use cases by expanding its team. Their deep expertise will be critical to accelerating product execution and advancing Blockstream’s mission to usher Bitcoin into the world’s financial future. 

Core Lightning — Optimizing on All Fronts

Core Lightning 25.12 delivered a major step forward in usability, speed, and robustness, while doubling down to improve based on feedback from our open source community.

• New nodes now support a standard 12-word BIP-39 mnemonic instead of a raw 32-byte hex seed to simplify backup and recovery while giving the option to restore on-chain funds with any BIP-39/BIP-86-compatible wallet. 
• xpay received major improvements based on community feedback and contribution.
• Every node runner will benefit from major performance optimizations in database functionality and latency reductions. Previously, sql users reported latency spikes when calling the epicentre of core lightning; lightningd for 2M entries. The worst latency was 4.5 seconds, but we’ve reduced it by more than 99% to just 0.028s. More broadly, we’ve made filtering of requests and database “behind-the-scenes” work smarter to increase performance.

The release also adds expansion features to the networkevents subsystem to surface peer-level information like ping times and connection times. The team added improvements to recurring-offer functionality, and community contributors have worked hard to ensure our conformance to the BOLT spec for splice commitments.

Beyond behind-the-scenes improvements, our team took center stage to represent Blockstream in Berlin during October at Bitcoin++’s Lightning Edition. The Bitcoin++ conference series is the frontier of Bitcoin, running technical conferences for in-depth lectures, hands-on workshops, and more. This event brought developers, designers, and researchers together to push the next wave of Bitcoin scaling. 

Attended by several Core Lightning open-source contributors and power users, Blockstream sponsored the Berlin conference and put on a Happy Hour++ for attendees to talk candidly without the pressure of missing the next talk.

• Principal Engineer Christian Decker presented an overview of Running Lightning at Scale. Starting with the first principles of Core Lightning’s genius modular architecture through to the innovation of Greenlight to further enable its ability to scale. Christian sat alongside fellow Lightning legends on a panel, moderated by Nifty to discuss Implementing Lightning. 
• Lightning Product Manager Michael Blankenship gave a talk on payment rails, bringing his learnings from real-world scaling on lightning and vision for the future of enabling a bitcoin world. 

Explorer API — Raising the Bar

More provisions. More stability. More predictability.

With its latest 25.12 release, Blockstream Explorer API is now equipped for early-stage startup support all the way up to full enterprise accommodation: 

• Fine-tuned subscription pricing with an all-new Enterprise tier.
• Faster block syncing thanks to QuickSync.
• Full support for Simplicity transaction visualization.
• Revamped dashboard that lets you see everything at a glance: API keys, current usage, documentation links, health status, and quick actions.
• Dedicated Help Center resources with step-by-step guides for every common integration pattern.

Beyond headline features, 25.12 includes dozens of fixes that make the API more predictable. Testnet behavior is more stable. Error messages are clearer. Staging and production responses are now aligned.

These elements all come together to provide an experience that scales for teams at any stage of growth. Whether you're building a high-performance wallet that needs QuickSync, a trading dashboard that queries real-time blockchain data, or an exchange platform that demands institutional-grade uptime, Explorer API has a tier designed for your use case.

Blockstream Research — Exploring Post-Quantum Solutions

The quantum computing conversation keeps getting louder and louder. We’re seeing new technology market themselves as “quantum-ready” and more speculation as to how quantum will affect the world at large.

What we care most about: how does Bitcoin fare in a post-quantum world? Last quarter, Blockstream Research cryptography engineer Tim Ruffing published The Post-Quantum Security of Bitcoin’s Taproot as a Commitment Scheme, examining how Taproot could be used to commit to post-quantum public keys in a way that remains secure even if Schnorr and ECDSA were broken. Rather than proposing a new signature scheme, this work showed that a quantum attacker would have no alternative way to open a Taproot commitment.Building on that foundation, our team has continued exploring concrete post-quantum paths forward, now focusing on signature schemes themselves. This quarter, Tim Ruffing collaborated with Cryptography Team Leader Jonas Nick and Cryptography Engineer Mikhail Kudinov to publish Hash-based Signature Schemes for Bitcoin, highlighting hash-based signatures as a promising post-quantum alternative to ECDSA and Schnorr. These schemes could be used directly, or placed inside a Taproot tree using the commitment approach outlined in Tim’s earlier work.They joined Marty Bent from TFTC to break down this new research paper; be sure to check it out.

No one wants to wake up one day and learn that a thief used cutting edge computing innovation to reverse engineer their Bitcoin private key from their public key and sweep the balance. Whether it’s five years, 10, or several decades from now, rest assured knowing that we’re way ahead of the curve, working hard to gracefully usher Bitcoin into a post-quantum reality. 

Besides quantum research, Simplicity development keeps marching forward:

• The research team introduced a language server protocol (LSP) implementation for SimplicityHL, which offers autocomplete and nice IDE integration. For developers, this means they can develop programs with immediate feedback and guidance for available functionality.
• They created hal-simplicity, a command-line tool which can create addresses and transactions as well as "stepping through" the execution of Simplicity programs, making debugging, inspecting, and manipulating developers’ programs easier than ever before.

Consumer Growth — App and Jade Advancement

Our consumer products made large strides in user experience, flexibility, and security during the final leg of 2025. 

The Blockstream app version 5.1.0 introduced Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT) exporting for watch-only BTC wallets, faster, cleaner, and easier two-factor authentication for Android, as well as a cleaned up UI to maximize the user experience. 

In 5.1.4, Bitcoin payments become effortless, reliable and extremely private thanks to Liquid ↔ Lightning swaps. Now, you have full control over how you transact: receive Liquid bitcoin from a Lightning payment, or pay a Lightning invoice using your Liquid balance. You can access Lightning’s speed and convenience without having to manage channels or pay for inbound liquidity. All self-custodial, all open-source, empowered by Bitcoin-native trustless atomic swaps provided by Boltz, a long-time collaborator with Blockstream.

If you haven’t downloaded the Blockstream app yet, what are you waiting for?

Last but not least, Jade firmware versions 1.0.37 and 1.0.38 delivered major updates to improve security and usability.

Headlining the 1.0.37 release was the Jade Plus camera enhancement, which makes QR scanning 35% faster. Air-gapping your bitcoin has never been easier and more accessible than with the updated Jade Plus. 

1.0.38 introduced a major security update: anti-rollback. This feature prevents bad actors from tricking users into downgrading their device in order to exploit outdated firmware vulnerabilities. Oh, and 1.0.37’s 35% camera scanning speed boost? This update cut down scanning time by another 40%.

Above all else, Blockstream values our users’ security and our device’s simplicity. To overcome Bitcoin adoption barriers in UX, it’s critical we demonstrate that you don’t have to compromise on either to create a product that people not only rely on, but also love to use. That’s the guiding light for all of our consumer products.  

Global Community Engagement

We kicked off Q4 with two exciting Liquid Developer Bootcamps in Mexico City, Mexico and São Paulo, Brazil. Focused on Liquid and Simplicity, nearly 100 developers participated in total, with participants in Brazil competing for $6,000 in BTC rewards at our Simplicity hackathon. 

We were thrilled to see all of the enthusiasm and interest in Simplicity. Here are the three winning hackathon projects that were announced at Satsconf in São Paulo:

• Mare Nostrum: A proof of concept for discovering Simplicity contracts via Nostr
• Simplicity Playground: An upgrade to the SimplicityHL web IDE UI
• Partnerfy: An event voucher contract mechanism

The end result of this hackathon? More Simplicity contracts out in the wild, established company presence as a major sponsor for Brazil’s largest Bitcoin conference, and a showcase study of the budding Bitcoin adoption taking place throughout Brazil.

As mentioned, we've been improving our Simplicity documentation and tooling to improve developers’ experience and get more people developing programmable smart contracts. A few ways to get involved in the Simplicity community:

• Join the Telegram channel.
• Follow Blockstream Research to stay up to speed.
• Explore SimplicityHL and deploy your first contract!

Our team also turned out in force for Plan B Week in Lugano, Switzerland. With more than 20 Blockstreamers in attendance, this event showcased Blockstream’s multi-faceted impact on the Bitcoin industry.

• Adam’s schedule was full of stage appearances, joining the hot conversations for institutions surrounding asset tokenization and corporate treasury evolution, as well as participating as a judge for the Cypher Tank pitch contest.
• Blockstream Engineer Valerio Vaccaro was busy all week long. He ran a full Blockstream Jade DIY session, educating on the ins and outs of our self-custody tech through a hands-on, how-to experience. Additionally, he went on stage to discuss entropy generation using dice, rounding out the DIY discussion. Finally, he joined Jade engineer Riccardo Casatta to present the “Master of the Keys” masterclass on hardware wallet multisig.
• Enterprise Product Manager Alessandro Saglimbeni gave a demo for Bitcoin management using Blockstream Jade, walking audience members through a setup and full control overview.
• Blockstream Developer Leonardo Comandini explained node configuration to shed light on how users can take full control over how they interact with the Bitcoin network, and discussed Liquid and digital assets on Bitcoin alongside other Bitcoin builders.
• Core Lightning Contributor and Principal Greenlight Engineer Christian Decker sat on a panel coined “Inside Lightning Implementations” alongside builders at Lightning Labs, Breez, and Synonym.
• Adam finished off the week with a Jade signing session at the Blockstream booth, taking photos, talking Bitcoin, and getting to know our community on a more personal level.

Before the big week, we supported Lugano’s local meetup “Satoshi Spritz” event—a night filled with great conversation, drinks, and prizes for the community.

Media & Event Highlights

Our team kept busy in the media spotlight throughout Q4:

• Director of Blockstream Research Andrew Poelstra went on Bitcoin News to talk Simplicity, the Bitcoin market, mining, and more.
• While in Lugano for Plan B Week, Adam Back did an interview with BeInCrypto on Bitcoin’s past and project forward into the future.
• At the Bitfinex Derivatives Gamma Summit, Adam Back’s fireside chat with Thalex CEO Hendrik Ghys covered early risk perception, the long-term holder mindset, and how Bitcoin’s volatility has shifted over the years.
• Adam Back sat down with Simply Bitcoin to talk about market cycles, layer-2 scaling, and the next wave of Bitcoin adoption.
• Adam Back interviewed with Yahoo! Finance TV’s show “Catalysts” to share his thoughts on Bitcoin and its place in the current macro environment.
• Adam Back joined The Bitcoin Economy to discuss how Bitcoin’s cypherpunk vision survives in the face of Wall Street regulation.
• At Bitcoin Amsterdam, Adam Back sat down in the conference hall to break down Bitcoin’s market structure, ETF impact, layer-2 innovation, why 2026 may defy all previous cycles, and more.

Looking Ahead: Q1 Priorities

Q4 of 2025 marked the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Blockstream. With transformative team expansion, new feature sets, and optimized infrastructure performance, 2026 will be a year characterized by accelerated development and breaking new ground.

Here’s what we’re focused on for Q1 of 2026:

• Consumer: New Jade product releases. We dropped one easter egg already—stay tuned for the reveal!
• Enterprise: Expand Explorer API into new audiences, crystallize our Liquid product offering, and launch custody solution products.
• Research: Refresh Simplicity documentation to welcome new audiences.
• Community: Get more Jades in the hands of educators to push for greater self-custody adoption.

We’d also like to thank our talented team of builders and our passionate community for all the support this year. No matter what lies in store for Bitcoin next year, 2026 is set to be Blockstream’s most bullish year yet. 

For more information, visit blockstream.com, reach out to press@blockstream.com, or DM @Blockstream on 𝕏.