Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #389 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by René Pickhardt to discuss ⁠Newsletter #389⁠ (https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2026/01/23/).

News ● A mathematical theory of payment channel networks (0:31)

Changes to services and client software ● Electrum server for testing silent payments (30:04) ● BDK WASM library (33:28)

Releases and release candidates ● Core Lightning 25.12.1 (35:14) ● LND 0.20.1-beta.rc1 (39:14)

Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #32471 (40:57) ● Bitcoin Core #34146 (42:02) ● Core Lightning #8831 (45:00) ● LDK #4261 (45:35) ● LDK #4152 (46:24) ● LND #10488 (47:42) ● LND #10331 (48:43) ● Rust Bitcoin #5402 (49:06) ● BIPs #1820 (50:39) ● BOLTs #1306 (51:41) ● BLIPs #59 (53:05)