2025 Q2 Update: What Have We Been Up To?

By matthewramsden on 7/3/2025 - Tags: BDK, Project

The second quarter of 2025 was an exciting one for the Bitcoin Dev Kit. With major releases, new libraries, a YouTube launch, and ongoing contributions from our community of grantees and collaborators, BDK continues to push forward the frontier of building Bitcoin wallets.

Here are some of the notable releases and changes over Q2 to the software libraries we maintain:

  • The bdk_wallet 2.0 release! Following on the heels of 1.0, we've released BDK 2.0 (opens new window) which includes a bug fix for handling stuck or evicted transactions, performance enhancements for large wallets, more extensive test coverage, and the return of TxDetails.
  • BDK CLI 1.0. Our command-line interface has reached its 1.0 milestone (opens new window), uses bdk_wallet 1.0.0 and integrates Kyoto, the new client for compact block filters in BDK. It sets SQLite as the default database and drops support for sled.
  • Language Bindings version 1.2 for iOS, Android, and Python 1.2 The bdk-ffi 1.2 release (opens new window) brings Compact Block Filter support through our Kyoto integration, making privacy-preserving light clients accessible to mobile developers. We've also published comprehensive API documentation (opens new window) for Java and Android bindings.

There are also new projects and initiatives being built.

  • Silent Payments. The new bdk-sp (opens new window) crate brings BIP352 Silent Payments functionality to BDK. It has delivered a complete CLI implementation with wallet initialization, PSBT creation and signing, and blockchain scanning capabilities, and full compatibility with BIP352 test vectors and integration examples with bdk-tx.
  • Transaction Building. The experimental bdk-tx (opens new window) project represents an evolution of transaction building. This effort to decouple transaction building from the wallet, using rust-miniscript's planning module for optimal satisfaction-weight calculations and the new bdk_coin_select crate for policy-aware coin selection.
  • Streaming Electrum Client. The electrum_streaming_client (opens new window) is a streaming, sans-IO Electrum client for asynchronous and blocking Rust applications. This crate provides low-level primitives and high-level clients for communicating with Electrum servers over JSON-RPC. It supports both asynchronous (futures/tokio) and blocking transport models.

# Our Grantees in Action

We're excited to welcome new Silver corporate members (opens new window) to the BDK Foundation and thank them for their financial support!

We're also excited to welcome new Associate members who are supporting the BDK Foundation by training & funding developers working on BDK!

Grantees

BDK Project Maintainer

  • Leonardo (opens new window), funded by Vinteum, continues his work on Tor integration for the Electrum and Esplora crates, enhancing privacy options for BDK users.

Btrust Starter Grantees

Thunderbiscuit is taking a 2-month break from BDK using an HRF grant to create an iOS version of Padawan Wallet (opens new window)

We've launched our official BDK YouTube channel (opens new window) featuring our Technical Talks series of 6 videos (opens new window), covering topics:

  1. Language Bindings by thunderbiscuit (opens new window)
  2. Silent Payments by nymius (opens new window)
  3. Transaction Ordering (opens new window) by ValuedMammal (opens new window)
  4. CLI by Peter Tyonum (opens new window)
  5. Compact Block Filters by Robert Netzke (opens new window)
  6. Mobile by Matthew Ramsden (opens new window)

# BDK in the Wild