Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier, Rearden Code, and Pieter Wuille to discuss Newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special (https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/12/19/).

January ● Updated ChillDKG draft (43:08) ● Offchain DLCs (45:53) ● Compact block reconstructions (2:29:27)

February ● Erlay update (1:53:55) ● LN ephemeral anchor scripts (0:50) ● Probabilistic payments (54:45)

March ● Bitcoin Forking Guide (3:29:35) ● Private block template marketplace to prevent centralizing MEV (3:05:28) ● LN upfront and hold fees using burnable outputs (13:12)

April ● SwiftSync speedup for initial block download (2:09:35) ● DahLIAS interactive aggregate signatures (3:26:02)

Summary 2025: Quantum (58:07)

May ● Cluster mempool (1:22:11) ● Increasing or removing Bitcoin Core’s OP_RETURN policy limit (2:45:43)

June ● Calculating the selfish mining danger threshold (2:20:39) ● Fingerprinting nodes using addr messages (3:11:38) ● Garbled locks (3:19:01)

Summary 2025: Soft fork proposals (26:57)

July ● Chain code delegation (49:07)

August ● Utreexo draft BIPs (2:15:57) ● Lowering the minimum relay feerate (2:39:52) ● Peer block template sharing (2:56:01) ● Differential fuzzing of Bitcoin and LN implementations (3:16:08)

Summary 2025: Stratum v2 (2:04:49)

September ● Details about the design of Simplicity (3:23:01) ● Partitioning and eclipse attacks using BGP interception (3:13:47)

October ● Discussions about arbitrary data (3:01:15) ● Channel jamming mitigation simulation results and updates (11:05)

November ● Comparing performance of ECDSA signature validation in OpenSSL vs. libsecp256k1 (2:01:47) ● Modeling stale rates by propagation delay and mining centralization (2:22:32) ● BIP3 and the BIP process (3:31:37) ● Bitcoin Kernel C API introduced (3:35:35)

December ● Splicing (7:33)