Today, we’re thrilled to announce the newest member of the Blockstream hardware wallet family: Jade Core. 

Jade Core is the easiest way for anyone to take self-custody of their bitcoin with a hardware wallet. We’ve taken the enhanced design and trusted, open-source principles that secure the Jade Plus and packaged them into a dead simple device that’s purely focused on simple self-custody, without all the bells and whistles of more advanced devices.

If you’ve let your bitcoin sit idly on an exchange, here’s your call to truly own your wealth with Jade Core.

Self-Custody Made Simple

Jade Core strips away all the friction. Whether you're moving your bitcoin off an exchange or buying it in the Blockstream app, Jade Core streamlines the migration process:

• Simple Setup: Power the device with a standard USB-C cable and pair instantly with the Blockstream app on desktop, or iOS and Android over Bluetooth.
• Clear Confirmation: An enhanced vibrant display allows you to easily verify every send and receive address before you confirm the transaction.
• Stay Offline: Your hardware wallet stays offline during the entire transaction process. The signing process happens only on Jade Core, never on another device.

In minutes, your bitcoin is stored securely offline where you hold the keys, not some third-party exchange that could go belly up in a moment’s notice. 

Transparent, Open-Source Security

Like Bitcoin itself, Jade Core doesn’t make you choose between simplicity and security. You can have them both. Your bitcoin is protected by the same security model that’s made Blockstream Jade one of the most trusted Bitcoin hardware wallets:

• Blind Oracle PIN Protection: Harnessing advanced end-to-end encryption, an innovative PIN security system splits the secrets needed to access your wallet between your unique PIN, the Jade Plus device, and a remote blind oracle server that never sees or stores your data. Even if your device is physically compromised, your bitcoin remains secure. Don’t trust a remote server? No problem: you can even run your own. At every level, we want you to feel comfortable with your preferred protection.
• Genuine Check: We took Jade Core’s security another step further by allowing you to verify your device’s authenticity during setup. You can know with certainty that your Jade Core came directly from Blockstream, not a phony third-party clone.

Real money needs real protection. That's why every aspect of Jade Core—from its hardware to its firmware and security model—is completely open source. You can verify every component and rest assured knowing there’s no hidden backdoors or loopholes. 

Cold Storage. Clear Mind.

At the core of self-custody is peace of mind. If you’ve been around the Bitcoin space for some time, you know just how fickle third-party custody can be. Exchanges can freeze withdrawals, lose funds, or disappear entirely. With Jade Core, your bitcoin belongs to you and you alone.

When you first set up the device, you’ll be shown a 12-word recovery phrase. This is your master backup. Store it safely offline, and you will always have control of your funds, even if your Jade Core is lost, stolen, or damaged.

Wide Compatibility

Jade Core pairs seamlessly with the Blockstream app, or you can connect your favorite companion app to offer a tailored, intuitive Bitcoin management experience. Either way, the simplicity of Jade Core ensures you’re equipped with all you need for everyday use, giving you instant, wireless access to your wallet wherever you are.

Ready to Take Control?

Jade Core is built on a legacy of uncompromising security and deep expertise from Blockstream engineers who help maintain the Bitcoin ecosystem at its foundation. We are proud to be champions for self-custody adoption, and we’re excited to offer a device that makes self-custody something to look forward to. 

Buy Jade Core now. Begin your Bitcoin journey with confidence. 

Managing a multi-asset Bitcoin wallet just got more intuitive. The Blockstream app now displays live fiat prices for Liquid assets, starting with Tether USDT and USTBL. It's the first step toward full fiat price visibility across the Liquid ecosystem with more assets coming soon.

This update is live across both mobile and desktop, bringing a consistent experience whether you're managing funds on the go or at your desk.

See Your Liquid Assets in Fiat

Until now, Liquid assets in the Blockstream app displayed balances in their native denominations. Knowing how much USDT or USTBL you hold is useful, but seeing that value expressed in your local currency makes day-to-day decisions easier, especially when moving between bitcoin and stablecoins.

With fiat price display enabled, individual Liquid asset balances now update alongside live market data. No manual conversion, no context switching.

This is the beginning. We're actively working to bring fiat price endpoints to more Liquid assets, including CMSTR and CMTPL, with more to follow as the ecosystem grows.

USTBL: Institutional-Grade Assets on Liquid

USTBL is a U.S. Treasury Bill token issued by NexBridge, a Liquid Federation member and one of the network’s key institutional partners. It gives holders exposure to short-term U.S. government debt in a self-custodied, Bitcoin-native format, combining the security model of Liquid with the yield profile of traditional finance.

USTBL is issued through Blockstream AMP, Blockstream's policy and compliance engine for issuing and managing tokenized securities on the Liquid Network. AMP enables issuers to handle ownership tracking, transfer controls, and distribution to verified holders. USTBL operates on this basis, and the Blockstream app is the native wallet for AMP assets — giving verified holders a self-custodied environment to hold and manage their positions.

With USTBL now supported in the Blockstream app's fiat price display, users can track its real-world value directly inside the wallet — the same place they already manage their bitcoin, LBTC, and other Liquid assets.

Why Liquid Is Different

Liquid's architecture is purpose-built for high assurance and security. Core functionality is embedded directly into the protocol, whereas many other blockchain platforms rely on external tooling, increasing both operational complexity and risk. Asset issuance, multisignature, and privacy, for example, are native to Liquid and enabled through low-level opcodes and lightweight cryptography.

This security-first design also extends to network operations. Liquid functionaries, the validators responsible for block production, are required to use tamper-resistant HSM-secured keys and are distributed across multiple jurisdictions. By contrast, many other platforms depend on optional external signing infrastructure such as Web3Signer.

This fundamental misdesign is why EVM-based chains have been repeatedly burned by vulnerabilities at the contract, key, and tooling layers.

The same security-first design extends to the smart contract layer. Simplicity, Blockstream's formally verifiable scripting language, is live on Liquid mainnet, enabling contracts that can be mathematically proven correct before deployment. In March 2026, Blockstream Research executed the first post-quantum signed transaction on a production Bitcoin sidechain on Liquid.

For institutions managing high-value assets, these architectural differences matter. By minimizing external dependencies and enforcing stronger security defaults from the outset, Liquid provides a more robust and dependable foundation for real-world financial infrastructure.

What Liquid Assets Carry

Not all tokenized assets are created equal. Liquid assets carry properties that set them apart from equivalents on other networks. These value propositions are why financial providers are choosing Liquid, with more than $5B worth of RWAs issued on the network today.

Confidential Transactions hide transaction amounts and asset types from third parties by default. When you send assets on Liquid, the details of that transfer are visible only to the parties involved (sender and receiver), not to the entire network. For anyone moving meaningful value, that privacy is not a nice-to-have — it's a baseline requirement to protect sensitive financial data on-chain. And for participants who need to demonstrate compliance with essential standards, senders and receivers (as well as issuers via AMP) can selectively unblind transaction details to authorized parties without exposing anything to the broader network.

MicroStrategy and Metaplanet have both issued tokenized securities on the Liquid Network through STOKR — CMSTR and CMTPL respectively. The "C" is Roman numeral for 100: each token represents a bundle of 100 underlying shares, held in custody, and tradeable peer-to-peer on Liquid around the clock. Like USTBL, both are issued through Blockstream AMP as transfer-restricted assets, accessible only to verified participants and with full programmability by the issuer. It's a structure that makes previously inaccessible equities — including Metaplanet shares, listed only on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — available to a global audience without intermediaries. We look forward to bringing fiat price display to CMSTR, CMTPL, and other issued assets soon.

Available on Mobile and Desktop

This update ships across both the Android and iOS mobile apps and the Blockstream desktop app, so your asset price view is consistent regardless of how you access the wallet. Alongside fiat price display, this release includes swap IDs on lockup transactions for better traceability, a refreshed wallet header UI on desktop, and a range of bug fixes and stability improvements.

Get the Update

Download or update the Blockstream app on mobile or desktop to start tracking your Liquid asset values in fiat.

The 26.03 release focuses on giving developers better visibility into their API usage and improving the underlying infrastructure that powers production applications. Enhanced dashboard analytics provide complete usage transparency, and infrastructure improvements ensure reliability at scale.

Better Visibility into Your API Usage

The dashboard now includes historical usage analytics, giving teams complete visibility into API consumption patterns over time.

Understanding usage patterns helps teams optimize integration points, forecast costs accurately, and identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary API calls. For teams managing multiple environments across development, staging, and production, per-key analytics make it clear where resources are being consumed. Additionally, access token expiration time is now customizable. The default is 5 minutes, but teams can set custom expiration periods from 5 minutes up to 300 minutes (five hours), depending on their security policies and workflow requirements.

What's new:

• Historical usage tracking across configurable time periods
• Per-API-key breakdown showing exactly where traffic originates
• Visual charts separating Bitcoin mainnet and Liquid Network requests
• Time-range selection for custom usage analysis
• Current billing period summary with credits consumed and remaining
• Customizable access token expiration (default 5 minutes, configurable up to 300 minutes)

The analytics page makes it easy to identify usage spikes, track trends across billing cycles, and understand which parts of your application consume the most resources. Teams can pull historical data for financial planning and optimize their integration based on actual consumption patterns.

Electrs Performance Improvements

The underlying Electrs infrastructure has been upgraded with performance optimizations that improve query response times and overall system stability. These improvements benefit all users across free and paid tiers.

Production-Ready Rate Limiting

To ensure consistent performance as usage grows, we're introducing rate limits across free tier access to both REST API and Electrum RPC.

Free tier rate limits are designed for individual use, prototyping, and development. Production applications requiring higher throughput should use paid tiers, which offer production-grade rate limits that scale with your business. This change helps maintain service quality for all users while ensuring the infrastructure can continue supporting the growing Bitcoin developer ecosystem.

Paid tiers (Basic, Advanced, Enterprise) include significantly higher rate limits designed for production workloads, with Enterprise tier offering unlimited API calls.

Coming Soon: Electrum RPC for Bitcoin Dev Kit

Electrum RPC integration with Bitcoin Dev Kit (BDK) is in progress. Once released, BDK users will be able to authenticate and access both RPC and REST endpoints directly, bringing real-time blockchain monitoring to the broader BDK ecosystem.

Get Started

The 26.03 release continues our focus on providing production-ready Bitcoin and Liquid infrastructure for developers building at scale. Enhanced analytics give you visibility, infrastructure improvements ensure reliability, and new integrations expand what's possible to build.

Create an account through the self-service dashboard, generate API keys, and start building. The dashboard provides real-time usage monitoring, billing management, API key rotation, and access to comprehensive documentation.

Choose Basic, Advanced, or Enterprise based on your application's needs. Monitor API usage in real-time, track costs, and manage multiple API keys across environments, all from the dashboard.

• Learn more: blockstream.info/explorer-api
• Enterprise enquiries: blockstream.typeform.com/enterpriseAPI
• Documentation: github.com/Blockstream/esplora/blob/master/API.md

Blockstream’s latest update to our implementation of the Lightning Network, Core Lightning v26.04 “Negative Routing Fees”, is now available. This release makes Core Lightning nodes more flexible, more private, and easier to operate at scale.

A Standing Splice-Ovation: Channel Liquidity, Unlocked

We'll let you off the hook if you haven't been closely following the rise of Splicing, which is being welcomed out of experimental in this release, truly deserving of a standing… splice-ovation. Those in the details truly understand the power of Splicing and its ability to alter the network as we know it. 

Splicing, explained by Dusty, is a simple concept: the ability to resize Lightning channels. The capability provides many additional benefits that fundamentally improve the utility of Lightning. 

Splicing removes the need for expensive closing and opening of channels. This dramatically lowers operating costs, complexity, and idle capital challenges faced when operating a Lightning node. Splicing does this by enabling the direct transfer of funds between "Lightning accounts" at the lowest cost possible. Even better, splicing makes the network more robust by helping these mini Lightning banks stay independent — ending their reliance on "centralized liquidity providers".

This dynamic Lightning experience with Splicing on core-lightning means liquidity management becomes continuous rather than disruptive. By allowing node operators to rebalance liquidity without closing channels, reducing downtime and on-chain overhead through:

• splicein: for convenient splicing funds into a channel
• spliceout: removing funds from a channel. Plus: an added bonus: you can now initiate a splice across two channels using spliceout with a channel identifier as the destination. 
• Cross-splicing: moving liquidity directly between channels

DustyDaemon, a passionate, highly valued open-source contributor to Core Lightning has brought Splicing from a concept (in 2022) to changing the network as we know it today. That's a seriously long term commitment to Lightning in general, with Core-Lightning front of mind.

So get up out of your seats again, Dusty deserves a standing… splice-ovation of his own. He tells us:

This is the first release where massive many channel splices are fully tested and supported. For example, splice funds out of 5 channels and into 2 other channels all in one command: dev-splice. These scripts allow you to specify any number of splice actions in a clean simplified syntax.... Splicing is truly unleashed for elite channel routing. Up your node’s efficiency game by utilizing the power of splicing!

Respect the Bookkeepers  

We’ve improved the output of Core Lightning’s bookkeeper plugin to better meet global accounting standards. This gives you control to map your node’s activity into journal entries, General Ledger accounts, and audit-ready records.

Building on the bookkeeper updates of 25.09 and 25.12, we have added the ability to:

• Record the at-time bitcoin to fiat currency conversion rate for each bookkeeper event,
• Create summaries of bookkeeper income, flexibly! You can specify the format, using tags, to whatever accounting standards you prefer, and
• Easily examine the current values from the currencyconvert plugin's sources.

More Reliable Payments, Less Guesswork

Routing improvements continue to be a major focus area. Routing improvements mean payment success, and payment success is at the top of everyone’s mind... After all, we are a *cough-cough* payment network.

This release enhances payment success rates through:

• parallel path finding improvements in the askreneengine
• smarter retry logic and bug fixes across payment flows
• better control over routing via payment fronting nodes

Users can now attach a payer-note to xpay payments, making it easier to send a message with your payment.

Better Visibility into Channels and Offers

v26.04 includes several usability improvements that make it easier to inspect and manage node state:

• listpeerchannels now supports filtering by channel_id
• Offer RPCs expose decoded descriptions directly
• Enhanced support for BOLT11 and BOLT12 flows via fronting nodes

These changes reduce friction for operators and developers alike, especially when debugging or integrating with higher-level applications.

A Leaner, Faster Node

Under the hood, Core Lightning continues its trend toward efficiency and scalability.

This release delivers:

• ~20% smaller binaries
• faster startup times via gossip store compaction offloading
• improved logging with a more efficient ring buffer
• reduced database and runtime overhead

For large node runners, these improvements translate into faster sync times and smoother operation.

Developer Experience: More Power, Less Friction

These improvements make it easier to build, extend, and operate Core Lightning in production environments, including:

• Dynamic REST endpoints via clnrest-register-path
• simplified Bitcoin backend interactions with a synchronous bcli plugin
• plugin options that support multiple values ("multi": true)
• stricter database safety guarantees with STRICT tables

Core Lightning remains the most extensible Lightning implementation, and these are just a few examples of how v26.04 continues to invest in developer tooling.

Privacy and Protocol Alignment

This release strengthens Core Lightning’s alignment with the BOLTs: Lightning protocol and privacy expectations to ensure interoperability and improve our resistance to network-level observation through:

• removal of legacy onion formats, matching current ecosystem behavior
• padding all peer messages to make them the same length to reduce traffic analysis (excluding LND < v21 and current Eclair)

Acknowledgements

Core Lightning doesn’t just happen. Since v25.12, we have merged 421 commits in 110 days by 23 authors, reflecting the serious momentum of our Core Lightning ecosystem. A huge thanks to all contributors for their continued dedication to this project to make this release possible

A special mention to our newest contributors: @ScuttoZ @Raimo33 @TatianaMoroz @dovgopoly @erdoganishe and @Nazarevsky.

To Blockstream’s core-Core Lightning team for their continued dedication to this project: Rusty Russell, Shahana Farooqui, Sangbida Chaudhuri, Christian Decker, Lagrang, Peter Neuroth and Lisa Neigut, Daywalker and Níckolas Goline.

And to our extended team of contributors: Oleg Fomenko, Ihor Diachenko, Illia Dovhopolyi, Mykhailo Khotian, Nazarii Shcherbak, Eduard Mikhrin, Zakhar Naumets, Vladyslav Doronchenkov, Emanuele Napoli, Federico Scutti, and Mattia Simeone.

Another special mention here to celebrate @dusty_daemon, for his enormous efforts with Splicing implementation and maintainer of the Splicing spec. Dusty has been working on full time Lightning development since 2021. In 2022, Dusty dedicated himself to developing Splicing code, and created code that accomplishes the task, he finished the first splice on chain on May 2, 2022!

Big props also go to @chand-ra who dutifully lived up to the IYKYK vibe of naming duties and Sangbida Chaudhuri for your calm, considered and seamless release-captaining journey. 

To all of our loyal open source community members contributing to this project, thank you!  

Go Forth and cln!

As always, we encourage node operators to upgrade, test, and provide feedback as we continue refining and improving the Lightning experience.

You can find the full changelog and upgrade instructions on GitHub.

We'll see you around in Github or Discord!

The headlines say quantum computers will break Bitcoin. The reality: one specific part of Bitcoin's security is vulnerable. Blockstream engineers are already working on the fix.

What Is a Quantum Computer?

Your laptop thinks in bits: tiny switches that are either 0 or 1. Every calculation it does, from loading a webpage to verifying a Bitcoin transaction, comes down to flipping billions of these switches really fast.

A quantum computer thinks in qubits. Where a bit is always either 0 or 1, a qubit holds a combination of the two that only resolves into a single value when you measure it. Combining many qubits produces a set of possible states that grows exponentially with the number of qubits, and the math that governs quantum hardware lets a computation act on all of those states at once in a way a classical computer cannot match.

Think of it like a maze. A regular computer tries every path one at a time until it finds the exit. A quantum computer explores many paths at once. For certain specific types of math problems, that means arriving at an answer in far fewer steps for certain specific problems. However, the gains are not universal; quantum computers are better at a narrow class of mathematical problems, but not at everything.

Quantum computers are not just "faster computers." They will not make your web browser faster, your videos stream more smoothly, or your documents load any quicker. They are a specialized tool, and one of the problems they excel at is directly relevant to how Bitcoin secures your keys.

How Bitcoin Keeps Your Money Safe

Bitcoin uses two types of math to protect your bitcoin.

The first type proves ownership. When you send bitcoin, you prove it is yours by signing the transaction with a secret key (your private key). The network checks your signature using a related public key. The whole system relies on one assumption: nobody can recover your private key from your public key. Today's computers cannot do this. It would take them longer than the age of the universe!

The second type secures mining. Bitcoin miners compete to find a specific hash output by trying trillions of guesses per second. This keeps the network running and prevents anyone from rewriting transaction history.

Quantum computers threaten the first type directly. Their impact on the second is much more distant and concerns decentralization rather than network integrity.

Why Quantum Computers Change the Equation

A quantum computer running a specific algorithm (called Shor's algorithm) can work backward from a public key to recover the private key. With the private key, an attacker can take the bitcoin.

Think of it like a lock. Today's computers cannot pick this lock in any meaningful timeframe. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could.

The mining side uses different math (SHA-256 hashing). Grover's algorithm gives a quantum computer a quadratic speedup on hashing, which would hand a large quantum miner a mathematical edge over smaller ones. This is a concern for mining decentralization, not for Bitcoin's ability to confirm transactions. In practice the risk sits much further out than signature breaking: it requires quantum hardware far larger than what is needed to attack secp256k1, and Grover's algorithm does not parallelize well, which limits how much that theoretical advantage would translate into real performance.

The quantum threat to Bitcoin is about who owns the bitcoin, not how the network runs. Most coverage gets this backwards.

How Close Is the Threat?

Quantum hardware has advanced quickly, but the numbers depend on what you measure. IBM's Condor gate-model chip reached 1,121 qubits in 2023. Google's Willow chip reached only 105 qubits in December 2024 but hit a more important milestone: the first "below threshold" quantum error correction, something researchers had pursued since 1995. Larger neutral-atom arrays exist — a Caltech team demonstrated a 6,100-qubit array — but raw qubit counts do not measure useful computation.

Breaking Bitcoin's signature math requires far more than any current hardware can deliver. Three research papers published between May 2025 and March 2026 dropped the estimated requirement by roughly 20x:

• 2022 estimate (University of Sussex, 2022): ~13 million physical qubits to crack a 256-bit key in one hour
• Updated estimate (Google Quantum AI, March 2026): fewer than 500,000 physical qubits
• Most aggressive estimate (unproven architecture): fewer than 10,000 physical qubits

Current hardware is still well short of even the most aggressive estimate, and raw qubit counts are a rough proxy at best. The Google paper cautions that counting qubits misses most of what determines a quantum computer's usefulness: error rates, fidelity, connectivity, and the ability to sustain error-corrected computation long enough to finish the calculation. The gap is closing, but not uniformly across every dimension that matters.

Expert consensus places the arrival of quantum computers powerful enough to break cryptography at 10 to 20 years out. The Global Risk Institute's 2025 survey found a 28-49% probability of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arriving within the next 10 years, the highest estimate in the survey's seven-year history. Adam Back, Blockstream CEO and inventor of the proof-of-work system Bitcoin uses, estimates 20 to 40 years.

Several institutions are planning around shorter horizons. NIST has published deprecation targets for today's signature standards (ECDSA and RSA) that begin near the end of this decade, and Google's quantum team has publicly recommended that organizations migrate sensitive systems on a similar timeline. Whether the threat arrives in 10 years or 40, the planning windows overlap with Bitcoin's own upgrade timeline.

Here is the part that matters most: Bitcoin upgrades take years. Taproot took about 3.5 years from its first mailing-list proposal to activation, and a post-quantum migration may take longer because every holder would need to move their coins to new address types, not just update their software. The time to start preparing is now, not when the threat arrives.

The Clock Is Already Ticking

A quantum attacker does not need to wait for quantum hardware before choosing targets. The moment a public key is visible to anyone watching the chain — in an old P2PK output, in the spending script of any address that has sent a transaction, or in a funded Taproot (P2TR) output — that key is permanently recorded on the chain and can be attacked as soon as hardware catches up.

Nothing has to be decrypted. Bitcoin does not encrypt its consensus data. The attacker is waiting for the hardware that can derive a private key directly from a public key that is already in the open.

Security researchers describe a similar pattern in traditional cryptography as "harvest now, decrypt later," and the U.S. Federal Reserve published a 2025 paper calling it an active risk for distributed ledger networks. Bitcoin's version is different in the details (there is no encryption, and nothing is decrypted), but the shape is the same: collect the target data today, break it tomorrow.

Data collection could already be happening. The theft would come later.

Is All of Bitcoin Exposed?

No. Not all aspects of Bitcoin face equal quantum risk.

At risk: Any bitcoin where the public key is already visible to attackers. This includes:

• Early Bitcoin addresses from 2009-2010 (P2PK format) that stored the public key directly, including an estimated 1 million bitcoin widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.
• Any address that has been used to send a transaction, which reveals the public key on-chain in the spending script.
• P2TR (Taproot) addresses, which expose a version of the public key as soon as the address is funded. This was an accepted tradeoff when Taproot was designed because the quantum threat appeared distant. Proposals like BIP 360 are designed to remove this exposure.
• Transactions sitting in the mempool. These are not yet on-chain, but the public key is visible to anyone watching the network, giving a quantum attacker a window to derive the private key before miners confirm the transaction.

Chaincode Labs researchers estimated in May 2025 that roughly 30% of circulating bitcoin, approximately 6 million BTC, sits behind exposed public keys.

Hidden (for now): Older address formats like P2PKH, P2SH, P2WPKH, and P2WSH hide the public key behind an additional layer of math (a hash). The public key only gets revealed when you spend. If you have received bitcoin at one of these addresses but never sent from it, your public key remains hidden. About 65% of bitcoin sits behind unrevealed public keys.

That hidden state ends as soon as you spend it. The transaction broadcasts the public key into the mempool, and a sufficiently powerful quantum attacker could try to derive the private key during the window before the transaction confirms. P2WSH currently provides the strongest public key concealment, but only until the first time you move the funds.

Safe: Proof-of-work, address derivation, and the structures that link transactions together all use SHA-256 hashing. Quantum algorithms cannot meaningfully compromise these operations.

What about Satoshi's coins?

Adam Back has posited that a long post-quantum migration window makes it "more plausible to deprecate unmigrated ECDSA/schnorr signatures" via soft fork. Under that path, coins that had years to move to quantum-resistant addresses remain safe, while coins that never moved, whether from lost keys or Satoshi's wallets, would become unspendable by anyone, including an attacker. Back has separately rejected proposals to freeze vulnerable addresses proactively, framing that as developer overreach.

Solutions Aren't the Most Difficult Part

The cryptographic solutions exist. NIST (the U.S. standards body) finalized the first three post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024 after an eight-year evaluation. The math is ready. Getting the Bitcoin network to upgrade is the hard part.

Bigger signatures, higher costs. NIST's smallest standardized post-quantum signature scheme (ML-DSA, FIPS 204) requires approximately 3,700 bytes for a signature and public key combined. Bitcoin's current Schnorr key-path spends are 64 bytes. That is roughly a 58x increase in per-transaction cryptographic overhead, and a proportional decrease in how many transactions fit into each block. Bigger signatures mean bigger transactions and higher fees for everyone.

Bitcoin changes slowly, and that is by design. Modifying Bitcoin requires broad consensus across a global, decentralized network. But Bitcoin has upgraded before. SegWit (2017) fixed transaction malleability and improved scalability. Taproot (2021) brought smarter scripting and better privacy. Both were soft forks that the network adopted. A post-quantum migration would follow a similar playbook, but would be significantly more complex than either.

Every single holder must act. Upgrading Bitcoin's code does not automatically protect existing funds. Every bitcoin holder would need to actively move their coins from old addresses to new quantum-safe addresses. At Bitcoin's current throughput (3 to 10 transactions per second), a full network migration would take months to years.

BIP 360 proponents have suggested that even under optimistic assumptions, a full migration would take several years. That clock only starts once the community agrees on a plan, and no such plan exists yet.

What Is Already Being Built

The Blockstream team isn't waiting for the threat to arrive.

A testing ground on Liquid. The Liquid Network is a Bitcoin sidechain built by Blockstream. It runs Simplicity, a smart contract language designed for Bitcoin's security model. On Bitcoin mainnet, deploying new cryptography requires a network-wide protocol change. On Liquid with Simplicity, the same capability ships as a smart contract without a network-wide consensus change, which means post-quantum protection can ship in weeks, not the years a Bitcoin soft fork requires.

The first post-quantum transactions on a live network. In March 2026, Blockstream Research deployed SHRINCS (a compact post-quantum signature scheme) on Liquid mainnet. Five real transactions were broadcast and confirmed, marking the first post-quantum-signed transactions on a production Bitcoin sidechain.

SHRINCS produces 324-byte signatures in normal operation. (Reusing the same key in stateful mode adds about 16 bytes per subsequent signature.) The smallest NIST standard produces signatures of 2,420+ bytes. That 7x size reduction is the difference between a practical blockchain signature and one that dominates every transaction's cost.

SHRINCS relies only on the security of SHA-256, the same hash function Bitcoin already uses for proof-of-work, address derivation, and Merkle trees. No new cryptographic assumptions are required, just more of what Bitcoin already trusts. Several of NIST's original post-quantum candidates were broken using classical computers during the standardization process, which underscores the value of conservative cryptographic foundations.

Hardware wallet rollover with SHRIMPS. Proposed in March 2026 by Blockstream cryptographer Jonas Nick, SHRIMPS is designed for the hardware wallet lifecycle: what happens when your current device breaks, or when you want to upgrade to a newer generation. Up to 1,024 devices loaded from the same backup can sign independently, with 2.5 KB signatures — still 3x smaller than NIST's hash-based standard (SLH-DSA). If you ever expect to replace a hardware wallet, SHRIMPS is the scheme designed with that transition in mind.

A path to Bitcoin mainnet. Blockstream Research is exploring the rationale for OP_SHRINCSVERIFY, a proposed opcode concept that would bring hash-based post-quantum signature verification directly to Bitcoin Script. The work is still at the open-questions stage, not a finalized BIP. If a future version is proposed and adopted, holders could protect their bitcoin with quantum-resistant signatures one address at a time, without waiting for a full network migration.

This approach complements BIP 360 (Pay-to-Merkle-Root), which removes Taproot's quantum-vulnerable key-spend path. BIP 360 provides the address structure. OP_SHRINCSVERIFY provides the signature verification. Different approaches that work together.

The proving ground pattern. Liquid operates as a live financial network with billions in total value locked. Deploying new cryptography on Liquid produces the kind of production evidence that Bitcoin's consensus process needs. OP_CAT is live on Liquid and has a concrete proposal (BIP 347) for inclusion in Bitcoin. Post-quantum cryptography is following the same path: build on Liquid, prove it works under real economic conditions, then let that production data inform any future Bitcoin proposal.

What You Can Do Today

• Use a modern wallet. The Blockstream app uses modern address formats. For most address types, your public key stays hidden until you spend.
• Avoid address reuse. Most modern wallets generate a fresh address for every transaction automatically. If yours does not, switch to one that does. Address reuse is a surefire way to increase your exposure to a future quantum threat.
• Move coins off old, exposed addresses. If you have bitcoin sitting in a legacy address you have spent from before, especially old paper wallets or early exchange withdrawals, send those coins to a fresh address. This removes your public key from the "exposed" category.
• Stay informed. Follow the development of BIP 360 and OP_SHRINCSVERIFY as they move through Bitcoin's proposal process.

For institutions: Include quantum readiness in long-term custody planning. The migration window means decisions made in 2026 shape preparedness for the years ahead.

The quantum threat to Bitcoin is real, specific, and further away than the headlines suggest. But Bitcoin's upgrade timeline is measured in years too, and the resource estimates for breaking its cryptography are dropping fast. The margin for preparation exists, and it is narrowing.

Explore Blockstream's post-quantum research

In the latest update, Blockstream delivered a landmark quarter. We executed the first post-quantum signed transactions on the Bitcoin-based Liquid Network, enabled the first hardware wallet–secured Lightning payments, launched real-time blockchain data infrastructure for developers, and expanded its institutional presence across seven countries. Together, these milestones further define Blockstream’s role in supporting Bitcoin’s evolution across consumer, enterprise, and developer ecosystems. 

Major Q1 Highlights

Q1 was a quarter of firsts. Blockstream Research broadcast the first post-quantum-signed transactions on a production sidechain. Jade became the first hardware wallet to send and receive Lightning payments through cold storage. A sustained institutional calendar spanning seven countries, a new real-time developer API, and strategic hardware partnerships rounded out three months defined by the kind of product breakthroughs that only a full-stack Bitcoin infrastructure company can deliver.

• Post-quantum milestone: Blockstream Research deployed SHRINCS post-quantum signature verification using Simplicity, broadcasting the first post-quantum-signed transactions on Liquid.
• Jade Lightning payments: The Blockstream app 5.2.0 pairs with Jade to deliver the first cold-storage-secured Lightning payments experience in any Bitcoin wallet.
• Desktop app: Blockstream desktop app 3.0.0 and 3.1.0: A ground-up redesign with built-in bitcoin purchasing, followed by Lightning ↔ Liquid swaps arriving on desktop.
• Jade Plus Colors: Along with new partnerships, we revealed three new colors for Jade Plus in its sleek metal finish.
• Global institutional presence: Blockstream presented across El Salvador, Dubai, Zurich, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Italy, and Miami to advance institutional and developer adoption.
• Explorer API Electrum RPC: Real-time address monitoring via persistent connections, batch requests, and compatibility with the Waterfalls protocol.
• Lightning: Core Lightning 25.12.1 and cln-application v26.01: Critical fixes for new nodes and a refreshed application layer with faster load times, improved UX, and stronger system resilience.

Blockstream Research — Post-Quantum Security and Beyond

The quantum conversation has been loud since the turn of the new year. While debates roar surrounding Bitcoin’s efficacy in a post-quantum world, our research team has been making major advances in post-quantum cryptography, cross-input signature aggregation, and Simplicity tooling across research and development.

Post-Quantum Signature Deployment on Liquid

Blockstream Research achieved a major milestone in Q1 2026: deploying post-quantum signature verification on the Liquid Network using Simplicity smart contracts and broadcasting the first transactions on a production Bitcoin sidechain signed with a post-quantum signature scheme, securing real value on Liquid mainnet.

The deployment uses SHRINCS, a compact hash-based post-quantum signature scheme developed by Blockstream Research specifically for blockchain environments. SHRINCS offers two modes: a stateful mode producing compact signatures for normal operation, and a stateless fallback ensuring fund recovery if state is lost. The scheme relies solely on hash function assumptions already underpinning Bitcoin's design.

Rather than requiring a consensus change, the team built a complete post-quantum signature verifier using Simplicity's custom spending conditions. You can voluntarily lock assets, including Liquid bitcoin (LBTC), stablecoins, and tokenized securities, to contracts requiring post-quantum signatures. Two production transactions demonstrated the system: one using a stateful signature and one using the stateless fallback. In a nod to the cypherpunk roots of the work, extra transaction space was filled with the Bitcoin whitepaper.

This builds on earlier Q1 momentum, where Blockstream cryptography engineer Mikhail Kudinov and Director of Research Jonas Nick posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list about evaluating hash-based signatures as a post-quantum alternative to ECDSA and Schnorr.

The verifier is open-source and available on GitHub. The signing code is also available, and technical discussion continues on Delving Bitcoin.

The deployment received coverage across BTC Times, MEXC News, and other outlets.

DahLIAS Accepted to Eurocrypt 2026

In March, Blockstream Research announced that the DahLIAS paper has been accepted to Eurocrypt 2026 in Rome. DahLIAS enables cross-input signature aggregation (CISA) on Bitcoin's secp256k1 curve, a technique that could meaningfully reduce transaction sizes and fees on the Bitcoin network. The paper was co-authored by Yannick Seurin (Ledger), Tim Ruffing, and Jonas Nick of Blockstream Research.

Simplicity Development

Simplicity is the high-assurance smart contracting protocol bringing greater financial expressivity to Bitcoin. Our tooling continued to mature through Q1:

• Language server protocol (LSP): The research team shipped an LSP implementation for SimplicityHL, providing autocomplete and IDE integration. Developers can now write Simplicity programs with immediate feedback on available functionality.
• Simplicity SDK (Simplex) is released.
• LWK is now the primary way to interact with Simplicity contracts.
• Jade signing support for Simplicity works.
• A prototype lending contract, connected to the Blockstream app and Jade signing support are now working.
• Simplicity Unchained as a way to bring Simplicity Execution to chains other than Liquid.
• Lending Smart contracts are written and working.
• A distributed exchange (DEX) for matching smart contract makers and takers is built. 
• SHRINCS verifier: The post-quantum signature verifier deployed on Liquid mainnet represents the most complex real-world Simplicity program to date, demonstrating the language's capability for production-grade cryptographic applications.
• Active GitHub development: Multiple Blockstream Research repositories received updates through Q1, including rust-simplicity, SimplicityHL, simplicity-contracts, and secp256k1-zkp.

Documentation work continues as the team prepares to welcome new developers to the Simplicity ecosystem. Join the Simplicity community on Telegram, follow @blksresearch on X, or attend weekly Office Hours every Tuesday at 8 AM PST.

Additional Research Highlights

Beyond the headline deployments, research activity remained consistent through Q1:

• PQ provers for P2PKH outputs: Oleg Kurbatov published benchmarks and analysis on post-quantum migration strategies for unmigrated Bitcoin UTXOs, exploring whether proof-of-knowledge schemes can protect coins without freezing them.
• BLISK: New research on practical boolean authorization policies compiled into MuSig2-style keys for complex Bitcoin custody scenarios, discussed on Bitcoin Optech.
• Shielded CSV: Andrew Poelstra shared work on a model where blockchain validation is flipped: users verify coin history themselves, and the chain becomes an ordering layer, not an execution engine.
• OP_SHRINCSVERIFY: Jonas Nick will present on the main stage at OP_NEXT 2026 in April about a proposed new opcode enabling SHRINCS post-quantum signatures directly on Bitcoin.
• SHRIMPS: Building on SHRINCS, Jonas Nick introduced SHRIMPS at the end of Q1, extending compact hash-based signatures to multi-device scenarios. SHRIMPS produces 2.5 KB signatures from any device loaded from the same seed backup, removing the single-device constraint while maintaining signatures three times smaller than SLH-DSA.
• libsecp256k1-zkp: In late March, Blockstream Research completed a major sync of libsecp256k1-zkp, the extended fork of Bitcoin's core cryptographic library, incorporating 2.5 years of upstream libsecp256k1 improvements. The update brings faster test frameworks, improved MuSig2 documentation, performance optimizations, and security hardening to the library that powers Elements, Liquid Wallet Kit, Blockstream Explorer API, Jade, the Blockstream app, Core Lightning, and the entire Liquid ecosystem.

Blockstream App — Cold Storage Meets Instant Settlement

The firsts continued on Blockstream’s consumer front. In March, the Blockstream app 5.2.0 delivered what no other Bitcoin wallet has achieved: Lightning payments secured by a hardware wallet's cold storage. By combining the app's native Liquid ↔ Lightning swap functionality with Jade's air-gapped signing, you can now receive Lightning payments that settle to hardware-secured cold storage, or send Lightning payments funded directly from it.

The practical implications reach beyond the technical architecture. For merchants, it means accepting Lightning payments at point-of-sale directly to the safety of cold storage without involving a custodian or third party. For regular stackers, it means Lightning withdrawals to Jade-secured LBTC that helps to maximize fee savings and minimize time stuck in transaction processing. There’s no better way to access Lightning's speed while maintaining cold-storage protection.

In one flow, you’re maximizing transaction speed, optimizing your unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), and enhancing your bitcoin's security.

• Download the Blockstream app for iOS, Android, or desktop.
• Get Jade Plus for air-gapped security with QR transactions.
• Use our UTXO calculator to see how much bitcoin stacking with Liquid will save you.

Desktop App — Strengthening the Foundation

The Blockstream desktop app 3.0.0, released in January, laid the foundation with a ground-up redesign. Built-in bitcoin purchasing via Apple Pay, Google Pay, debit and credit, and wire transfers means you no longer need an external exchange to stack sats into self-custody. A redesigned home dashboard consolidates Bitcoin and Liquid balances alongside real-time pricing. Interactive price charts, improved send and receive flows, and a dedicated security tab round out a self-contained Bitcoin environment where you can buy, hold, transact, and secure your digital assets without leaving the app.

In March, desktop app 3.1.0 brought Lightning ↔ Liquid swaps to desktop for the first time. You can now receive and send Lightning payments from the desktop with the same cold-storage security as mobile, without reaching for your phone. The release also includes enhanced 2FA presentation for existing multisig sessions, improved Jade hardware wallet verification, and a refreshed onboarding experience that makes first-time setup faster and clearer.

Together, these updates are laying groundwork for a unified, robust command center for serious Bitcoin management, where deeper UTXO visibility and a full-screen workspace give you the control you need.

Download the Blockstream app for desktop.

Jade Plus — New Colors, New Partners

In February, Blockstream expanded the Jade Plus lineup with three new metal color variants: Rose Gold, Stealth Black, and Sovereign Green. These join the existing Genesis Grey and Lunar Silver metal options, alongside the $149 Black plastic variant. All models share identical firmware, security architecture, and the same open-source Blind Oracle design, so whichever color you pick, you get the same security.

The following month, Blockstream announced that Jade is now officially supported by Unchained. You can now use your fully open-source, Bitcoin-only Jade as a key within Unchained's collaborative 2-of-3 multisig custody vaults, offering a natural upgrade path from single-signature to collaborative custody without switching hardware.

Earlier in the quarter, Swan began including a Jade Plus in every Swan Vault welcome package, putting Jade directly in the hands of Swan's growing user base.

Blockstream Enterprise — Taking the Institutional Stage

Blockstream Enterprise maintained an aggressive Q1 calendar, presenting across seven countries to allocators, treasury teams, and financial institutions.

In late January, a concentrated stretch of institutional activity kicked off in El Salvador. CEO Adam Back and Director of Enterprise Products Sagun Garg spoke at the Bitcoin Capital Summit on the Liquid Network and tokenization with institutional audiences. The same week, the team attended Bitfinex Securities Day in San Salvador, where tokenization's expanding role in Latin American capital markets took center stage. With over $250 million in tokenized digital assets on the Bitfinex Securities platform, the event brought regulators, financial institutions, and issuers together to discuss market inclusion through Bitcoin-native infrastructure built on Liquid.

Adam then joined the Plan B Forum for a panel titled "The Rise of Bitcoin-Based Capital Markets: STO and real-world-asset (RWA) Issuances on Liquid Network," exploring Security Token Offerings and Real World Asset tokenization built on Liquid. The broader Blockstream presence at Plan B included Pablo Greco leading a Liquid workshop and a booth featuring Jade Plus demos and sales.

Institutional engagement extended across multiple continents through Q1. Executives attended the invitation-only Satoshi Roundtable XII in Dubai for business development discussions. In early February, Adam spoke on the main stage at Cayman Crypto Week, where executives also attended a Board of Directors meeting and additional BD engagements. Blockstream hosted a VIP side event during Consensus Hong Kong week, engaging with institutional audiences at Asia's largest blockchain conference.

In February, Blockstream hosted the Liquid Strategy Summit in Viareggio, Italy, a private gathering for Liquid Federation members and the Blockstream Liquid team. The summit featured discussions on Simplicity-powered prediction markets, DEXs, 0-conf settlement, quantum readiness, new Liquid and RWA tokenization tooling, and 2026 roadmap planning. Adam also spoke at Global Alts Miami, one of the largest alternative asset management conferences in the world, discussing Bitcoin's long-term outlook with institutional allocators. 

The quarter's institutional push culminated in Zurich in early March at the Web3 Banking Symposium by Crypto Valley, where Blockstream was a presenting partner alongside FTI Consulting. Adam delivered a keynote titled "Tokenization Without Trust: Why Markets Will Settle on Bitcoin," while Sagun and Head of Delivery Stefan Keller led a workshop on risk-resilient on-chain digital assets banking for institutional audiences. The workshop addressed a question Blockstream hears repeatedly from banks and asset managers: how to integrate Bitcoin-native infrastructure without compromising on security, compliance, or operational continuity. The team walked through on-premise custody deployment and 24/7 settlement operations for digital assets and tokenized RWAs.

These conversations reflect the direction Blockstream Enterprise is building toward: custody infrastructure that institutions can deploy on their own premises, compliance frameworks aligned with emerging regulatory standards like CARF, and settlement architecture that operates around the clock on Bitcoin and Liquid rails.

Later in March, Blockstream sponsored the Japan Bitcoin Future Forum in Yokohama alongside Metaplanet and Bitcoin Japan Inc., marking the company's first major presence at a Japanese Bitcoin conference. The team demonstrated Jade Plus and engaged with institutional and retail audiences across Asia's growing Bitcoin market.

The quarter's institutional calendar closed with a workshop at the USI Long Night of Careers in Lugano. Product Manager Enterprise Gianmarco Guazzo, Business Developer Aron Clementi, and Head of Delivery Stefan Keller presented on Bitcoin infrastructure, Swiss banking integration, and career opportunities across Blockstream's 30+ open roles in Switzerland.

Explorer API — Real-Time Data at Scale

In February, Blockstream launched Electrum RPC support for the Blockstream Explorer API, adding real-time blockchain monitoring to its existing REST API capabilities for Bitcoin and the Liquid Network.

The Electrum RPC protocol provides persistent, stateful connections that deliver three key capabilities: address subscription for push notifications on balance changes, block header subscription for new block notifications, and batch request processing. If you're building wallets, exchanges, or analytics platforms, this eliminates the need for constant polling and reduces latency for performance-critical applications. The protocol is compatible with decade-old, battle-tested tooling available across every major programming language.

The new protocol pairs with QuickSync, which uses the open-source Waterfalls protocol developed by Blockstream engineer Riccardo Casatta. Together, they enable fast initial wallet synchronization followed by real-time monitoring, reducing sync times from hours to minutes. QuickSync currently operates through Liquid Wallet Kit, with integrations in progress for Green Development Kit (GDK) and Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK).

Electrum RPC is available across all tiers:

• Free: Rate-limited access for individual developers
• Basic and Advanced: Scaled access with production-grade limits
• Enterprise: Unlimited connections with dedicated infrastructure and priority support

Get started with Blockstream Explorer API today. Reach out for enterprise inquiries.

Lightning — Keeping the Network Honest

The @Core_LN account spotlighted Validating Lightning Signer's (VLS) latest blog post, the Lightning Security Spectrum, highlighting Greenlight as secure non-custodial Lightning infrastructure. Greenlight combines cloud-based node operations with user-controlled signing (thanks to the VLS Project!) to deliver secure, non-custodial Lightning infrastructure.

In January, cln-application delivered a series of updates focused on efficiency, usability, and robustness. The v26.01 release included faster initial page load times, and an enhanced user experience introducing features like refreshable list views, improved chart readability, and fiat value tooltips. We also strengthened system resilience by addressing dependency vulnerabilities and improving error handling around fiat rate fetching.

Core Lightning 25.12.1 shipped: a recommended point release, addressing critical fixes especially for nodes created with 25.12. Key fixes included correct signing for non-taproot addresses on new nodes, mnemonic hsm_secret file handling, pay and askrene plugin stability improvements, and improved gossipd and lightningd crash prevention.

On the community front, Lightning Product Manager Michael Blankenship led an interactive Lightning workshop at Plan B El Salvador in late January, exploring what it will take to optimize Lightning for mass adoption.

Media & Event Highlights

Blockstream stayed active in the media throughout Q1:

• Jonas Nick joined the Stephan Livera Podcast to discuss post-quantum signature research for Bitcoin.
• Jonas Nick joined the TFTC podcast to discuss developing and deploying post-quantum security for Bitcoin.
• CMO Peter Bain sat down with BeInCrypto at the event to discuss accelerating Bitcoin adoption and real-world usage.
• Peter Bain discussed quantum computing and its implications for cryptography on FINTECH TV Global.
• Adam Back appeared on the Plan B El Salvador Podcast from the Mempool Stage, covering Bitcoin's long-term outlook and cypherpunk values.
• Adam Back joined CNBC's Closing Bell Overtime to discuss Bitcoin's downturn, noting that pullbacks are consistent with historical four-year cycles.
• Adam Back sat down with BlockchaiNorth to discuss Bitcoin cycles, institutional adoption, and why this phase could play out differently.
• Adam Back sat down with Tati Topp during the Web3 Banking Symposium to discuss enterprise custody use cases and quantum readiness.
• Adam Back served on the judging panel for the Cyphertank show put on at Plan B El Salvador. 

On the community front, the Blockstream Local program continued to expand grassroots Bitcoin education across Q1. Meetup organizers in Gabon, France, and Italy received open-source hardware and self-custody resources to equip their communities with practical Bitcoin knowledge. Blockstream also ran a pay-with-Bitcoin campaign, encouraging users to film themselves paying with the Blockstream app anywhere Bitcoin is accepted, with participants reimbursed for their purchases. Get involved and get paid!

Looking Ahead

Blockstream is in relentless pursuit of new features, products, and capabilities that push us closer to a future of finance that’s built on Bitcoin. Q1 2026 set the tone with Jade Lightning payments and post-quantum signatures on Liquid, two milestones that demonstrate Blockstream's ability to ship robust products and solutions. As Q2 kicks off, here’s what we’re focused on:

• Consumer: Jade Lightning adoption and ecosystem development continues. New Jade product developments are on the way, and continued features for the Blockstream app. 
• Enterprise: Expanding Blockstream’s suite of products to serve institutional needs across custody, tokenization, and settlement. Extending Explorer APIs to new audiences and further solidifying Liquid’s institutional position with an upcoming protocol upgrade.
• Research: Extending post-quantum protections to additional Liquid subsystems,  refreshing Simplicity documentation to welcome new developer audiences, and targeting Simplicity activation on a Bitcoin testnet.
• Community: Continued Jade distribution to educators and advocacy for greater self-custody adoption.

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

Abstract: SHRINCS achieves very small hash-based signatures using a stateful signer while still allowing for static backups. However, its efficient stateful path requires transferring state to any new device, which is error-prone, so in practice any restored or secondary device will typically fall back to large stateless signatures. SHRIMPS removes this single-device constraint. In settings where each key is used for only a small number of signatures (as is typical in Bitcoin), a static seed backup can be loaded into many independent stateful signing devices, each producing a ~2564-byte signature at 128-bit security. The construction requires an upper bound on the number of device initializations; with a conservative bound of 𝑛dev =210, SHRIMPS signatures are up to three times smaller than SLH-DSA (7856 bytes). SHRIMPS can be combined with SHRINCS: the primary device produces ~324-byte signatures, while any backup device produces signatures under 3 KB.

Basic SHRIMPS

In SPHINCS+, the parameter 𝑞𝑠 bounds the number of signatures that can be securely produced under a single key. Smaller 𝑞𝑠 allows smaller signature sizes. The construction of SHRIMPS combines two SPHINCS+ instances under a single public key: a compact instance with 𝑞𝑠 =𝑛dev where 𝑛dev is an upper bound on the number of device initializations, and a fallback instance with sufficiently large 𝑞𝑠 (e.g., 240 or 264). The SHRIMPS public key is a hash of the public keys of both instances.

A signing device is initialized by loading the seed, which deterministically derives both SPHINCS+ key pairs. To sign, the device looks up its persistent state for this key to determine whether it has signed before: if not, it signs through the compact instance and updates its state; otherwise, it signs through the fallback instance.

A SHRIMPS signature consists of a SPHINCS+ signature under the selected instance and the public key of the other instance (16 bytes^[1]). The verifier reconstructs the signing instance’s public key from the SPHINCS+ signature, hashes both public keys to reconstruct pk, and compares it to the known public key. The 16-byte sibling public key is the only overhead beyond a standard SPHINCS+ signature.

Since each device signs at most once through the compact instance, the total number of compact-path signatures across all devices is at most 𝑛dev, which is exactly the number of signatures the compact instance is parameterized to support.

More generally, the compact instance can allow each device 𝑛dsig signatures before switching to the fallback, at the cost of increasing 𝑞𝑠 to 𝑛dev ⋅𝑛dsig. In Bitcoin, keys are commonly used for only a few signatures, so a small 𝑛dsig keeps most signatures on the compact path.

In Bitcoin wallet setups, initializing a device with a seed is typically a manual process that happens rarely. 𝑛dev =210 =1024 is conservative; it is hard to imagine importing a single seed into more than a thousand devices. A device that loses its state and re-initializes from the seed will use the compact path again, consuming an additional signature from the compact instance’s 𝑞𝑠 budget.

The fallback instance can be any SPHINCS+ parameterization with sufficiently large 𝑞𝑠. Using SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+ with 𝑞𝑠 =264), the fallback signature is 7856 bytes; using a SPHINCS+ variant with 𝑞𝑠 =240 from Hash-based Signature Schemes for Bitcoin, it is less than 4.5 KB.

The following table shows selected compact-path parameter sets, where sizes are shown as the SPHINCS+ signature size plus the 16-byte sibling public key.

Sign cost is in SHA-256 compression calls. For comparison, SLH-DSA (𝑞𝑠 =264) produces 7856-byte signatures at 2.3M compression calls. Verification costs 0.30 compressions per signature byte; the 𝑑 =1 parameter sets above achieve ~0.19 (about 35% lower), while the 𝑑 =2 sets achieve ~0.25. Each row can be reproduced using the --params option of costs.sage in SPHINCS-Parameters (commit f2ea2a2):

sage costs.sage --params <scheme> <q_s> <k> <a> <h> <d> <w> <S_wn>

For example, the second row: sage costs.sage --params W+C_P+FP 10 8 17 12 1 16 240

State Management

The compact path requires per-key state: the device stores a counter of compact-path signatures made (⌈log2⁡(𝑛dsig +1)⌉ bits).

With key derivation (similar to BIP-32) from a single seed, each derived key is a separate SHRIMPS instance. The device must maintain this state for every derived key, or store a single bit per key indicating that the fallback path should be used.

If the number of compact-path signatures exceeds the 𝑞𝑠 budget (for example, because more devices were initialized than anticipated, or because a device failed to update its state), security does not break down immediately. Instead, it degrades gradually. The following table shows how security decreases for the (𝑘,𝑎,ℎ,𝑑) =(8,17,12,1) parameter set as the total number of compact-path signatures grows beyond the 𝑞𝑠 =210 budget:

As an aside, statefulness is a strong assumption, but the associated risk is localized to individual wallets that mismanage their state. By contrast, alternative post-quantum schemes carry systemic risks: new cryptographic assumptions (lattices, isogenies) or larger signatures.

Discussion

If we assume stateful wallets and can bound the number of device initializations, SHRIMPS compact-path signatures are smaller than SLH-DSA at lower verification cost and comparable signing cost. With 𝑛dev =210 and 𝑛dsig =1, signatures are 2564 bytes, about three times smaller than SLH-DSA’s 7856 bytes. Increasing 𝑛dsig to allow more signatures per device costs additional bytes and signing time, but even at 𝑛dsig =24 the signature size remains under 3000 bytes.

SHRINCS already assumes stateful wallets, so SHRIMPS can be combined with SHRINCS: the primary device uses SHRINCS’s efficient stateful path (~324-byte signatures), while any backup device uses the SHRIMPS compact path instead of falling back to full stateless signatures.

A comparison of key generation costs is left to future work. The parameter sets in this post all constrain verification cost per byte to be at most that of SLH-DSA (~0.30 compressions per byte). Relaxing this constraint (for example, allowing verification cost comparable to Schnorr signature verification per byte) would permit 𝑤 =256, potentially yielding even smaller signatures. We leave this exploration to future work as well.

Thanks to Mikhail Kudinov and Oleksandr Kurbatov for the discussions that led to SHRIMPS and their feedback on earlier versions of this post.

1. A SPHINCS+ public key consists of a public seed (PK.seed, 16 bytes) and a hypertree root (PK.root, 16 bytes). Both SHRIMPS instances share the same PK.seed, so the sibling only needs to include PK.root. ↩︎

Originally posted: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/shrimps-2-5-kb-post-quantum-signatures-across-multiple-stateful-devices/2355

Blockstream Research has completed a significant maintenance milestone: bringing libsecp256k1-zkp fully up to date with 2.5 years of improvements from upstream libsecp256k1. This library underpins the cryptographic foundation of Liquid Network, its functionary infrastructure, and Elements.

Maintaining Bitcoin's Cryptographic Core

libsecp256k1 is Bitcoin's cryptographic foundation. Every Bitcoin transaction you have ever made relies on this library for signature verification. When Bitcoin Core integrated libsecp256k1 in 2016 (replacing OpenSSL), it delivered 2.5x to 5.5x performance improvements for signature verification, making Bitcoin nodes faster and more secure at validating the blockchain.

Members of Blockstream Research co-maintain libsecp256k1. Jonas Nick (Director of Research) and Tim Ruffing (Cryptographic Engineer) are maintainers of the library that secures the Bitcoin mainnet. Every Bitcoin Core node runs code they maintain to verify ECDSA signatures and, since the Taproot upgrade, Schnorr signatures. This is critical infrastructure work for Bitcoin itself.

However, Bitcoin mainnet is conservative by design. Advanced cryptographic features like Confidential Transactions, multisignature schemes with adaptor signature support, and zero-knowledge proofs do not exist in Bitcoin's consensus rules. That's where libsecp256k1-zkp comes in.

What Is libsecp256k1-zkp?

libsecp256k1-zkp is Blockstream's fork of libsecp256k1 that extends the base library with advanced cryptographic primitives. The "zkp" suffix refers to zero-knowledge proofs and related techniques—cryptographic methods that let you prove statements about data without revealing the data itself.

Think of it this way: Bitcoin Core uses libsecp256k1 for cryptographic operations required in the Bitcoin network. Liquid uses libsecp256k1-zkp for those same operations plus advanced features that enable privacy and efficiency beyond what the Bitcoin mainnet supports.

The library includes:

Confidential Transactions and Zero-Knowledge Proofs

• Pedersen commitments: Hide transaction amounts while allowing verification
• Range proofs: Prove a value is positive without revealing it
• Surjection proofs: Prove asset type relationships privately
• Address whitelisting

Advanced Signature Schemes

• ECDSA adaptor signatures: For payment channels and atomic swaps
• Schnorr signature half-aggregation

This is what powers Liquid's Confidential Transactions, enables the federated peg mechanism, and provides cryptographic primitives for Blockstream's enterprise products.

Where It's Used

libsecp256k1-zkp is deployed across Blockstream's stack and the broader Liquid ecosystem:

• Elements Core: Foundation of the Liquid Network
• Functionary infrastructure: Securing Liquid's federated peg (host and HSM components)
• Wally/libwally: Used by Core Lightning, Jade hardware wallets, AMP, Blockstream App
• LWK (Liquid Wallet Kit): Powers the Blockstream app, Blockstream Enterprise, AMP2, and Liquid ecosystem applications
• Blockstream Explorer API: Powers block exploration and transaction unblinding for Liquid
• Simplicity: Smart contract language on Liquid uses libsecp256k1-zkp for cryptographic operations

Every wallet, exchange and application building on Liquid depends on this library for advanced cryptographic features.

What Changed: 2.5 Years of Improvements

Blockstream Research has merged 2.5 years of upstream improvements from libsecp256k1: 

Security Enhancements:

• API functions now use a significantly more robust method to clear secrets from the stack before returning, improving protection against potential memory attacks.

Performance Improvements:

• SDMC (Signed-Digit Multi-Comb) algorithm: 15-20% faster signing and public key generation
• Strauss algorithm optimization: 30% reduction in memory usage for multi-point elliptic curve multiplication operations (authored by Jonas Nick)
• Batch point conversion optimization: New secp256k1_ge_set_all_gej function improves MuSig2 and ECDSA Adaptor module performance (authored by Tim Ruffing)

Testing Infrastructure:

• New unit test framework with parallel test execution, selective test running, and named command-line arguments—dramatically improving developer experience and test coverage

Performance Benchmarks

Blockstream Research ran comprehensive benchmarks comparing libsecp256k1-zkp performance before and after the upstream merge. Benchmarks were conducted on a MacBook Air (M1, 2020) with 8 GB RAM running macOS 14.1.2. The results demonstrate measurable improvements across core cryptographic operations, MuSig2 workflows, and zero-knowledge proofs.

Core Cryptographic Operations:

The SDMC (Signed-Digit Multi-Comb) algorithm delivers 15-20% performance gains for signing and key generation operations that happen millions of times across the Bitcoin and Liquid ecosystems.

MuSig2 Multisignature Operations:

Zero-Knowledge Proof Primitives:

Even privacy-preserving operations like adaptor signatures and surjection proofs (used in Confidential Assets) see measurable improvements.

These benchmarks represent real-world performance gains for every wallet, exchange and application building on Liquid. Faster signing means faster transaction construction. Faster MuSig2 means more efficient Lightning channels.

The Maintenance Work

For 2.5 years, libsecp256k1-zkp had fallen behind upstream libsecp256k1's continuous improvements. Blockstream Research engineers Mariia Zhvanko and Illia Melnyk completed the comprehensive sync work, integrating those upstream changes and bringing the fork back to parity.

This maintenance work required resolving conflicts between upstream improvements and zkp-specific modules, updating tests to ensure compatibility with experimental features, and verifying nothing breaks for downstream projects. The sync included updating libsecp256k1-zkp's MuSig2 implementation to match the upstream version (which was originally developed in zkp by Jonas Nick before being ported to Bitcoin Core in October 2024), then re-adding adaptor signature support that exists only in the zkp fork.

This illustrates an important point: Blockstream Research is not just passively merging upstream changes into libsecp256k1-zkp. As Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing are maintainers of upstream libsecp256k1, they author many of the improvements themselves. When they optimize the Strauss algorithm or implement batch point conversion for Bitcoin Core, those same improvements immediately benefit Liquid and the entire ecosystem building on libsecp256k1-zkp. Mariia and Illia's sync work ensures these improvements flow to zkp while preserving the advanced cryptographic modules that make Liquid's privacy and functionality possible. This is what it means for Blockstream Research to maintain critical infrastructure at both layers.

Post-Quantum Cryptography Research

While libsecp256k1-zkp focuses on elliptic curve cryptography for production use today, Blockstream Research is also preparing for a post-quantum future. The team recently deployed post-quantum signature verification on Liquid using Simplicity, allowing users to protect their Liquid Bitcoin (LBTC) against future quantum computer attacks.

This demonstrates Blockstream Research's approach: maintain production cryptography for Bitcoin and Liquid today while developing the cryptographic schemes that will secure Bitcoin tomorrow.

Why Maintenance Matters

Cryptographic libraries don't get points for flashy features. They succeed by being correct, fast and maintainable. libsecp256k1 became Bitcoin's standard because it prioritizes security and performance. It's written in C with no external dependencies, uses constant-time algorithms to resist timing attacks, and has been battle-tested protecting billions of dollars on the Bitcoin mainnet.

libsecp256k1-zkp inherits that rigor while adding support for Confidential Transactions and advanced signatures that make Liquid's privacy and efficiency possible. Keeping current with upstream means every project building on Liquid benefits from the same security standards that protect Bitcoin Core.

Open Source for the Ecosystem

libsecp256k1-zkp is open source and freely available on Github.

Blockstream Research maintains it not just for our own products but for the entire Liquid ecosystem and anyone building advanced Bitcoin applications. This update ensures developers working with Confidential Transactions, MuSig2 or other advanced cryptographic primitives have access to current, fast and secure foundations.

Active work on both libsecp256k1 for Bitcoin Core and libsecp256k1-zkp for Liquid is part of Blockstream Research's commitment to Bitcoin infrastructure. It’s the unglamorous, essential work that keeps the ecosystem running.

For more on Blockstream Research, visit blog.blockstream.com/research

To learn about libsecp256k1's role in Bitcoin, read Bitcoin Magazine's "The Core Issue: libsecp256k1, Bitcoin's Cryptographic Heart"

The Blockstream desktop app 3.1.0 brings the full Bitcoin stack to your laptop. Receive Liquid bitcoin (LBTC) via Lightning, pay Lightning invoices from your LBTC balance, and swap between bitcoin and LBTC. The same capability that made the mobile app a complete self-custodial Bitcoin platform is now available on desktop.

The Full Payment Stack, Now on Desktop

Paying a Lightning invoice used to mean reaching for a phone. The desktop app now lets users pay Lightning invoices directly from LBTC balances and receive Lightning payments that land as LBTC. No channel management, inbound liquidity concerns, or switching between devices.

When sending a Lightning payment, the Blockstream app generates an invoice and an atomic swap automatically converts the incoming funds to LBTC in your desktop wallet. Sending works in reverse: paste a Lightning invoice, and pay with LBTC through an atomic swap. In the unlikely event a swap fails, funds return automatically. No custodian handles any part of the process.

Swap Between Bitcoin and LBTC

Hold LBTC for Confidential Transactions and Lightning interoperability. Swap back to on-chain bitcoin when you want base layer finality. The entire flow happens within the open-source Blockstream app, without any intermediaries.

On-chain fees high? Stay in LBTC and accumulate. Fees low? Sweep to on-chain cold storage. On-chain swaps lets users time settlements without giving up self-custody at any point.

Jade Genuine Check — Dedicated Drawer

Knowing a hardware wallet is authentic is as important as the wallet itself. The Jade Plus Genuine Check flow now has a dedicated drawer in the desktop app, making device verification faster to access and easier to complete.

Genuine Check uses Blockstream's attestation server to cryptographically verify that a device hasn't been tampered with.

Download the Blockstream App on Desktop

The Blockstream desktop app 3.1.0 is available now. Three layers. One open source app. Full self-custody from your laptop.

• Download the Blockstream app
• Secure your swaps with Jade

In a historic first, Jade is now the first hardware wallet to interact with Lightning. Thanks to the app’s existing Lightning ↔ Liquid swaps, the latest 5.2.0 Blockstream app update allows you to send and receive Lightning payments directly from the safety of offline cold storage. Get all the benefits of layer-2 efficiency, and all the benefits of cold storage security. Only with Jade and the Blockstream app.

Striking Innovation

By leveraging the full stack of Bitcoin layer-2 solutions, Jade and the Blockstream app forgo former tradeoffs to unlock new possibilities 

• No more hot wallet security holes: Until now, all received Lightning payments needed to land in an internet-connected device.
• Lightning fast payments: No need to wait for long settlement times; Sats land in your Jade instantly.
• Near-zero fees: Skip the on-chain fees and enjoy low-cost transacting between Liquid and Lightning. Swap to mainnet when fee conditions are best.
• Future-proof your stack: Instead of accumulating on-chain UTXOs during a DCA strategy, withdrawing from an exchange using Lightning payments to Jade-secured LBTC creates a natural buffer to accumulate UTXOs in one place before consolidating on-chain.

How Jade Interacts with Lightning

When someone sends you a Lightning payment, the Blockstream app generates an invoice and an atomic swap provided by Boltz automatically converts the incoming funds to LBTC in your Jade-secured wallet. Jade doesn't need to be connected to receive, so you can accept Lightning payments on the go and they settle directly to cold storage.

Sending works in reverse. Paste a Lightning invoice into the app, and your LBTC funds are used to pay it through an atomic swap. Jade must sign the transaction before anything leaves your wallet, so Jade always keeps your funds safe to the exact moment you authorize a payment.

For funds you don't plan to spend over Lightning, on-chain swaps let you move your LBTC to bitcoin on the base layer. Sign the swap with Jade and settle to mainnet cold storage whenever fees are favorable.

What This Unlocks: 

For merchants: You accept Lightning payments at your store. Each payment lands in your Jade-secured Liquid wallet. That evening, you swap the day's accumulated LBTC to on-chain bitcoin in a single transaction while fees are low. No custodial payment processor taking a cut. No hot wallet sitting exposed overnight.

For regular stackers: You buy bitcoin on an exchange every Friday. Instead of leaving it there, you withdraw over Lightning to your Liquid address on the Blockstream app. It lands in your Jade wallet instantly. Once a month, when on-chain fees dip, you sweep everything to on-chain cold storage. Your DCA goes from exchange to hardware wallet security through the fastest, cheapest route available. 

For fees: Lightning and Liquid fees are consistently low. Bitcoin base-layer fees tend to fluctuate. By receiving on Lightning and holding on Liquid, you can safely wait in cold storage for favorable on-chain conditions before settling to mainnet. Instead of paying an on-chain fee for every incoming payment, accumulate on Liquid and when the time is right, swap to mainnet.

“Blockstream is uniquely positioned to deliver this. Our full-stack infrastructure connects all three Bitcoin layers to make this possible on a single hardware wallet. This is a breakthrough for self-custody,” Jeff Boortz, CPO at Blockstream said.

Three Layers. One App. One Device.

The Blockstream app now connects all three Bitcoin layers in a single self-custodial interface:

• Lightning for fast, low-fee payments
• Liquid for private transfers and flexible holding
• On-chain Bitcoin for base-layer settlement and long-term storage

“Faster payments, stronger self custody, and fewer unnecessary transactions.” – Peter Bain, CMO

Update 5.2.0 demonstrates the capability of Bitcoin when you leverage every layer of the stack. Get all of Bitcoin’s benefits without compromising on security. Only on the Blockstream app and Jade.

Secure Your Lightning Payments with Jade

Cold Storage Lightning is available now in the Blockstream app for iOS, Android, and desktop. Pair with Jade on mobile.

• Download the Blockstream app
• Get Jade Plus to secure your mobile swaps with offline protection.
• Learn how to send and receive Lightning bitcoin directly with Jade.
• Learn how to set up on-chain swaps with Jade.

Unchained’s collaborative custody platform is now officially compatible with Blockstream Jade, bringing together two of the most trusted names in the Bitcoin space.

Unchained has been instrumental in guiding Bitcoiners through the self-custody journey for over nine years. By integrating Jade products into their collaborative multisignature (multisig) solution, clients can now utilize Blockstream’s premier hardware wallets to maintain full sovereignty over their funds while benefiting from Unchained's practical safety net. 

How Jade Works with Unchained

Unchained's flagship product is a collaborative custody model built on a 2-of-3 multisig vault. The client holds two keys, and Unchained holds one. To spend funds, two out of the three keys must sign. 

This model provides two distinct advantages:

• A safety net: If you lose one of your keys, Unchained can provide the second signature to help you recover your funds.
• Operational convenience: For day-to-day transactions, you can sign with one of your keys and request Unchained to provide the second signature, allowing you to keep your second key secured in a separate location.

Jade can now serve as one, or both, of those client-held keys inside an Unchained vault, providing single signature (singlesig) users with a seamless upgrade path to collaborative multisig custody.

Why Unchained and Jade Make a Perfect Match

Jade has earned its reputation in Bitcoin custody circles for good reason:

• Fully open-source: Both its hardware and firmware are open-source, meaning anyone can audit exactly what Jade is running to secure their keys.
• Bitcoin-only by design: There are no altcoins, no distractions, and no roadmap compromises driven by chasing other markets. Jade upholds the same philosophy that Unchained is built upon.
• Built for everyone: For newcomers, Jade's intuitive interface makes onboarding a breeze. For power users, advanced features like QR-based air-gapped signing, duress PIN protection, and more are ready when you need them.

Building for Bitcoin’s Future

Blockstream is committed to its mission of championing Bitcoin self-custody. This integration with Unchained reflects that mission by supplying Jades for platforms that refuse to compromise on Bitcoin custody. Unchained customers already know the value of collaborative custody; Jade makes it easier to help them secure their wealth.

Ready to Get Started?

1. Get a Jade: Available directly from the Blockstream Store or official resellers.
2. Build Your Vault: Head to unchained.com and follow the onboarding flow to link your Jade.
3. Need Help? Join the Jade Telegram channel or reach out to Unchained’s world-class support team.

Today marks a significant milestone in preparing Bitcoin infrastructure for a post-quantum future. Blockstream Research has successfully deployed post-quantum signature verification on the Liquid Network using Simplicity, enabling users to protect their funds against future quantum computer attacks.

Blockstream has broadcast what are, to the best of our knowledge, the first transactions on a production Bitcoin sidechain signed with a post-quantum signature scheme. Real transactions securing real value on Liquid mainnet. This works not only with bitcoin, but also with any asset issued on Liquid.

The Challenge: Post-Quantum Signature Readiness

Today, funds on Liquid are protected by classical ECDSA/Schnorr signatures that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer could break. While such computers don't exist yet, preparing Bitcoin-like systems for this eventual threat is critical infrastructure work that needs to happen now, not in a crisis.

The traditional approach to adding post-quantum signatures would require consensus changes across the network—a slow, careful process involving all stakeholders. But Simplicity, Blockstream's smart contract language on Liquid, offers a different path.

The Solution: Simplicity-Powered Post-Quantum Verification

Because Simplicity allows users to express custom spending conditions, Blockstream was able to build and deploy a complete post-quantum signature verifier without any changes to Liquid's consensus rules. Users who want quantum protection can opt into the verifier by locking their Liquid assets, including LBTC, stablecoins and tokenized securities to a Simplicity contract that requires post-quantum signatures to spend.

This project demonstrates the expressiveness and power of Simplicity as a programming language. A complete cryptographic signature verifier is a non-trivial program. The fact that Simplicity can express this efficiently enough to run in production shows the language's capabilities for advanced blockchain applications.

SHRINCS: Optimized Hash-Based Signatures

The verifier implements a variant of SHRINCS, a compact hash-based post-quantum signature scheme developed by Blockstream Research specifically for blockchain use cases. This builds on the team's ongoing work of optimizing post-quantum cryptography for Bitcoin's unique constraints.

SHRINCS offers two modes:

• Stateful mode for normal use, producing compact signatures
• Stateless fallback for recovery scenarios, ensuring users never lose access to their funds even if they lose state

The scheme has been further optimized for Simplicity's execution model, making it practical for on-chain verification. For technical details on SHRINCS itself, see the write-up on Delving Bitcoin.

Real Transactions, Real Protection

Blockstream has broadcast actual post-quantum-signed transactions on Liquid mainnet:

• Stateful signature transaction, demonstrating normal operation
• Stateless fallback transaction, showing recovery mode

An interesting technical note: Liquid requires transaction sizes to be proportional to the computational budget consumed. Rather than padding these transactions with zeros, Blockstream filled the extra space with the Bitcoin whitepaper—a nod to the cypherpunk roots of this work.

What This Means for Users

While the code still needs thorough auditing and specification finalization, Liquid users who want to try post-quantum protection for their funds can begin using this verifier. The Simplicity script sits in the transaction output and costs nothing until it's spent. There's no wallet integration yet, but the verifier library is available on GitHub for wallet developers to build on.

This is opt-in protection. Users who want it can move their funds to post-quantum-secured contracts. Users who don't need it yet can continue using classical signatures. The beauty of implementing this in Simplicity is that no one needs permission or consensus changes. It's available now for anyone who wants it.

Important Limitations

This verifier does not make Liquid fully quantum-resistant. Several critical components remain classically secured:

• The Bitcoin peg mechanism
• Confidential Assets commitments
• Liquid's blocksigning consensus protocol

Blockstream is actively working on quantum-resistant solutions for these components as well. This verifier is a first building block, not a complete solution. But it's an important building block that users can start benefiting from immediately.

Why This Matters for Bitcoin

While this implementation is on Liquid, the implications extend to Bitcoin itself. Simplicity is designed for Bitcoin-like blockchains, and this work demonstrates that complex post-quantum cryptography can be efficiently verified in environments with Bitcoin's constraints.

Quantum computers capable of breaking Bitcoin's cryptography don't exist today and may not for years or decades. But when they do arrive, the transition needs to be smooth and well-tested. What we’ve done on Liquid—building, testing, and deploying post-quantum solutions on production systems—is how we prepare Bitcoin infrastructure for the future.

Building Blocks for a Quantum-Resistant Future

This release represents the intersection of three major Blockstream Research initiatives:

1. Post-quantum cryptography research, developing signature schemes optimized for blockchain constraints
2. Simplicity language development, creating expressive smart contract capabilities for Bitcoin-like systems
3. Liquid Network infrastructure, providing a production environment to test and deploy advanced Bitcoin technology

Each piece enables the others. Simplicity's expressiveness makes deployment possible without consensus changes. Liquid's production environment proves the approach works with real value and creates a venue for building community consensus around quantum-proof technologies that Bitcoin could eventually adopt itself. This cryptographic research ensures the solutions are optimized for blockchain reality, not just theoretical security.

Get Involved

The SHRINCS verifier library and corresponding signing code are open source and available now. Wallet developers interested in implementing post-quantum protection can start integrating it today.

For developers interested in Simplicity itself, join the weekly Office Hours every Tuesday at 8AM PST to discuss smart contract development, ask technical questions, and see what's being built.

For researchers interested in our post-quantum cryptography work, see our Delving Bitcoin post for full technical details on SHRINCS.

What's Next

This is just the beginning. Blockstream Research continues work on:

• Quantum-resistant peg mechanisms
• Post-quantum Confidential Assets
• Quantum-resistant consensus protocols

Follow us on X to stay in the loop. We will share updates as this work progresses. In the meantime, Liquid users who want to protect their funds against future quantum threats can start using post-quantum signatures today.

The future is quantum-resistant. Blockstream is building it one transaction at a time.

For technical questions about this implementation, join the discussion on our GitHub repository or visit Delving Bitcoin.

To learn more about Simplicity, visit simplicity-lang.org.

Applications that need real-time blockchain monitoring can now use Electrum RPC Protocol alongside REST API, giving developers the complete toolkit for building production Bitcoin and Liquid applications with the Blockstream Explorer API.

What the Blockstream Explorer API Does

Every Bitcoin and Liquid application needs access to blockchain data. When a user opens a wallet, checks a transaction status, or queries an address balance, that application is asking: what's happening on the blockchain right now?

The Blockstream Explorer API is the infrastructure layer that answers those questions, indexing the entire Bitcoin and Liquid blockchains and making that data available through a clean, fast API. Whether building a mobile wallet, a trading dashboard, an analytics platform, or an exchange, Explorer API enables applications to access blockchain state without running their own infrastructure.

Running blockchain infrastructure is resource-intensive. A Bitcoin full node requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage and constant maintenance. But application development requires more than just a node. Indexing infrastructure is needed to query addresses efficiently, caching layers for performance, load balancing for reliability, and monitoring systems to ensure uptime. The Blockstream Explorer API handles all of this so developers can focus on building applications instead of managing servers.

Most applications use the REST API. It's straightforward, stateless, and perfect for on-demand queries. But some applications need more than queries. They need real-time notifications when addresses receive payments, instant alerts when transactions confirm, and the ability to monitor thousands of addresses continuously without repeated API calls.

That's where Electrum RPC comes in.

Why Electrum RPC Matters

Electrum RPC is a persistent, stateful protocol designed for real-time blockchain monitoring. Instead of repeatedly asking "has anything changed?", applications subscribe once and get notified automatically when something happens.

Key capabilities:

• Subscribe to addresses to get push notifications when there is a balance change.
• Subscribe to block headers to get push notifications when a new block is found.
• Batch requests for efficient querying.

Address monitoring delivers instant notifications. Subscribe to an address and get push notifications the moment it receives a transaction or a transaction confirms. No polling. No delays. No wasted API calls checking for updates that haven't happened yet.

Persistent connections enable real-time data streams. Applications can maintain long-lived connections that stream blockchain events as they occur. Perfect for dashboards displaying live transaction feeds, exchanges processing deposits in real-time, or custody platforms monitoring cold storage addresses.

Lower latency supports performance-critical applications. Direct protocol access means faster response times for applications where milliseconds matter, like payment processors confirming transactions or trading platforms tracking mempool activity.

Electrum RPC has been powering Bitcoin wallets for over a decade. It is a battle-tested protocol with broad tooling support, and extensive client libraries exist in every major programming language. Developers already familiar with Electrum-based wallet integrations can use the same tools and patterns.

Available Across All Tiers

Electrum RPC is available on the free public Blockstream Explorer (blockstream.info) with rate limits suitable for individual use and prototyping. Applications exceeding free tier limits will need to upgrade to a paid tier for continued access.

What's new: Electrum RPC is now available across all paid Explorer API tiers with production-grade rate limits designed for high-volume applications.

Basic and Advanced tiers include Electrum RPC access that scales with your API call limits. Enterprise tier provides unlimited Electrum RPC connections with dedicated infrastructure, custom rate limits, and priority support. It's built for exchanges, custody providers, and high-volume applications that demand institutional-grade uptime.

Combining RPC and Quick sync for Maximum Performance

Production applications can potentially achieve optimal performance by combining Electrum RPC with QuickSync. The approach would use Electrum RPC for real-time monitoring and instant notifications, while using QuickSync for fast initial wallet synchronization. QuickSync is built on the Waterfalls protocol, an open-source descriptor-based sync protocol developed by Blockstream's Riccardo Casatta.

Waterfalls offers flexible sync modes. Share a descriptor once and receive complete wallet transaction history in a single response, or use UTXO-only sync to retrieve just the unspent outputs. UTXO-only sync is faster when making a transaction since the wallet only needs to know what it has available to spend, not the full history. Waterfalls can also retrieve the last index, returning an address that hasn't been used yet. What used to take hours now takes minutes.

The theoretical workflow: when a wallet first opens, QuickSync retrieves the complete transaction history quickly. Then Electrum RPC takes over, maintaining a persistent connection to deliver instant notifications as new transactions arrive. This combination could deliver both fast initial sync and real-time updates without the overhead of constant polling. QuickSync is available across all subscription tiers with pricing that scales as teams grow, and it's already running in production through LWK (Liquid Wallet Kit), with GDK and BDK integrations in progress.

Real-World Use Cases

Exchanges need to monitor thousands of deposit addresses simultaneously without overwhelming their infrastructure. Instead of polling each address repeatedly, Electrum RPC lets exchanges subscribe once and receive instant notifications when deposits arrive. This reduces API overhead by orders of magnitude while improving user experience with real-time balance updates.

Custody platforms managing cold storage need immediate alerts when funds move unexpectedly. Electrum RPC eliminates the dangerous gap between polling cycles. Security teams know instantly when monitored addresses show activity, not minutes later when the next polling run completes.

Payment processors need to confirm customer payments the moment they hit the blockchain. Polling creates friction in checkout flows with "pending" states and delayed confirmations. Electrum RPC delivers instant payment detection so customers see confirmations immediately, not after waiting for the next polling cycle.

Trading platforms need real-time notifications when specific addresses receive payments or transactions confirm. Polling introduces latency that matters for time-sensitive deposit processing and withdrawal monitoring. Electrum RPC delivers instant notifications for subscribed addresses, eliminating polling delays for critical transaction tracking.

Analytics dashboards need to display live blockchain activity without constant page refreshes or stale data. Polling creates choppy, outdated interfaces. Electrum RPC keeps dashboards synchronized with blockchain state in real-time, showing users Bitcoin as it happens.

Ready to Get Started?

Electrum RPC is available now across all paid Blockstream Explorer API tiers. Getting started is straightforward: create an account through the self-service dashboard, generate API keys, and start building. The dashboard provides real-time usage monitoring, billing management, API key rotation, and access to comprehensive documentation.

Choose Basic, Advanced, or Enterprise based on your application's needs. Monitor API usage in real-time, track costs, and manage multiple API keys across environments, all from the dashboard.

Learn more: blockstream.info/explorer-api

Enterprise enquiries: blockstream.typeform.com/enterpriseAPI

Documentation: github.com/Blockstream/esplora/blob/master/API.md

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.

Today, we’re rolling out a massive overhaul to the Blockstream app on desktop. 3.0.0 now delivers a professional environment where you can now buy bitcoin, monitor markets with interactive price charts, track your entire stack across Bitcoin and Liquid Network assets from one dashboard, and a dedicated security tab to easily enhance your stack's protection. 

Buy Bitcoin Without the Exchange Hassle

The new bitcoin buy flow makes safely stacking sats easier than ever before, allowing you to skip the exchange and buy sats directly to self-custody. With access to multiple providers, you can compare real-time quotes, select your payment method, and get the most sats for your money, all without leaving the app.

Payment options include Apple Pay, Google Pay, card, or wire transfer. Built-in payment tracking means you know exactly where your bitcoin is from purchase to self-custody. Forget multiple accounts on different platforms; the entire process happens self-custodially from your wallet. 

Refreshed Home Dashboard

We reimagined the home dashboard UI, giving you a bird’s eye view of all your accounts and assets on one clean interface. See your bitcoin and Liquid assets side by side, with real-time price information and recent transaction history at a glance.

The Liquid integration means you can manage Layer-2 assets alongside your mainchain bitcoin, useful for users who want faster, confidential transactions, and varying asset types. 

Bitcoin Price Chart

Monitor the Bitcoin price without switching between apps and browser tabs. The desktop app now includes interactive price charts with multiple timeframes: 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, and 5-year history. Hover over any point for detailed price data exactly when you need it.

Rebuilt Send and Receive Flows

Transferring bitcoin should be precise and seamless. The Blockstream app’s updated send and receive flows deliver exactly that:

• Improved account and asset selectors make it clear where bitcoin is moving.
• QR code scanning improvement works directly from your desktop camera.
• Faster, clearer transactions with better fee estimation and confirmation tracking.

New Security Tab

Security is paramount to our users. That’s why we batched everything security-related in an intuitive, dedicated Security tab. Hardware wallet integration with Blockstream Jade is front and center, including easy access to genuine device checks and firmware updates. The new FAQ section answers important security questions without forcing you to search documentation.

The Blockstream app is a software wallet by default, giving you immediate access to self-custody. When you're ready to upgrade to hardware security, Jade integration is seamless. 

Personalized Desktop UI

Your workspace should fit your workflow, not the other way around. We recognize that newcomers, seasoned HODLers, and advanced builders all interact with their app differently, so we dropped the static layout. The new resizable sidebar lets you prioritize what you need to see, whether that’s deep-diving into a Liquid transaction or keeping tabs on the Bitcoin price. With new keyboard shortcuts, you can move from checking your Jade’s firmware to sending a transaction without your hands leaving the keys.

Take Control

The updated 3.0.0 Blockstream desktop app is here. Download now and experience Bitcoin self-custody the way it should be: fast, secure, and built for people who take their bitcoin seriously.

Download the Blockstream app for desktop: https://blockstream.com/app/