Bitcoin Core Development Surges 60% After Years of Decline
Source: X/@lopp
Despite this decline, 33 million inscriptions were stored on the blockchain in 2025, a 58% year-over-year increase. However, fee rates remained incredibly low, with inscriptions paying just $12 million in total fees.
The BSV fork lost another 64% against Bitcoin in 2025, now worth a mere 0.02% of the original protocol.
Lightning Network capacity also quietly surged to an all-time high of 5,805 BTC after dropping for most of the year, indicating renewed interest in the Layer 2 payment solution.
2025: Year of Security Audit and Controversial Upgrades
Bitcoin Core completed its first public third-party security audit in November after 16 years of operation, with Quarkslab’s 100-man-day assessment finding no critical vulnerabilities.
The audit, commissioned by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund and funded by Brink, identified only two low-severity issues across the peer-to-peer layer, mempool, and consensus logic.
A month earlier, Bitcoin Core released version 30.0, removing the 80-byte OP_RETURN limit, increasing the default data carrier size to 100,000 bytes, and allowing multiple OP_RETURN outputs per transaction.
Adam Back, Blockstream CEO, defended the update as containing essential security patches from “200 most skilled people on the planet,” while critics warned of spam risks and potential legal liabilities.
The upgrade triggered an exodus to Bitcoin Knots, an alternative implementation that grew to represent 28% of network nodes.
Back in December, a proposal called “The Cat” by developer Claire Ostrom also proposed to permanently ban Ordinals inscriptions and NFTs by marking their dust-sized outputs as unspendable, prompting a fellow contributor, Greg Maxwell, to call it “outright theft” of millions in funds.
Bitcoin Recovery Follows Geopolitical Shock
As the Bitcoin community cheers growth, Akshat Siddhant, lead quant analyst at Mudrex, said institutional interest returned strongly following developments in Venezuela.
“If BTC closes above $93,700, momentum could carry it toward $100,000, with support forming near $88,500,” he said, noting the Fear-Greed Index turned neutral for the first time since October as crypto ETFs attracted fresh capital.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $92,861, up 1.64% in the past 24 hours.
Read original story Bitcoin Core Development Surges 60% After Years of Decline by Anas Hassan at Cryptonews.com
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