Read on Nostr instead?

Global Metrics 🌍️

Here are the top stats from the last period (01-09-2025 → 30-09-2025):

  • Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 17,931 → 18,242 (+311 +1.7%)
  • Recently verified (1y): 9,409 → 9,698 (+289 +3%)
  • Avg. days since last verification: 400 → 407 (+7 +1.8%)
  • Merchants boosted: 12 → 16 (+4 +33%)
  • Total boost duration: 1,530 → 2169 days (+639 +42%)
  • Comments posted: 40 → 56 (+16 +40%)

Graph showing merchant adoption over the last quarter

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month’s most active countries in terms of merchant data editing:

Country Name Created Updated Deleted
🇹🇭 Thailand 47 184 16
🇵🇹 Portugal 21 173 12
🇸🇻 El Salvador 51 126 10
🇸🇰 Slovakia 42 122 1
🇿🇦 South Africa 12 104 2
🇨🇿 Czechia 3 90 6
🇳🇱 Netherlands 12 55 22
🇨🇦 Canada 10 79 1
🇧🇷 Brazil 28 45 5
🇬🇧 United Kingdom 15 54 2

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month’s most active communities in terms of merchant data editing::

Community Name Created Updated Deleted
Bitcoin Coast 57 178 12
FREE Madeira 16 160 7
Vancouver Bitcoiners 7 80 1
Bitcoin Beach 11 63 3
21 Bratislava 11 43 1
BOB Space 3 34 6
Proof of Bitcoin 0 40 0

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

We now have 573 Communities from all across the planet.

MoneyBadger Adds 31,000 Merchants 🤯

Through an integration with Zapper - a QR payment network in South Africa 🇿🇦 - our friends at MoneyBadger have paved the way for Bitcoiners to access up to 31,000 additional locations!

This is a similar approach to Pick ’n Pay in that a custom QR is generated and their companion app is required to generate the ⚡️ invoice, but that line is becoming a little more blurred as leading wallets (Blink, Aqua, Strike, WoS, Bitz, Zeus) now support scanning the MoneyBadger QR naively.

Given the huge number of merchants and the companion app requirements, we’re working closely with the MoneyBadger team to work out how we most appropriately show these locations on BTC Map.

Data Clean-up on Aisle El Salvador 🇸🇻

Two brand new projects - BitMap Adoption & Bitcoin Coast - have popped-up and are working in parallel to ensure the map in Bitcoin Country is as good as it can be … as can already can be seen in the countries table above and they only just got started!

Bitmap Adoption post on X

Other Adoption News 📰

  • DFX Swiss added a further 22 SPAR locations in Switzerland 🇨🇭. This brings the total to 134!

Web App Diet 🚀

Some of you have noticed an order of magnitude improvement in the performance of our Web App!

Well, that’s because last month saw a lot of effort focused on a long overdue performance overhaul and migration to v4 of our API. Massive thanks to Hannes and Igor who did most of the heavy lifting here. 🙏

The main changes we made were:

  • We switched from a ‘full-sync’ model to a ’lightweight incremental sync and fetch on-demand’ model so that users, particularly those on low-end devices with limited data services, can get what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.

  • We introduced a global CDN for initial map pin sync so that pins load as fast as possible from servers local to users.

  • We now only draw pins for the current map view. The performance improvement on mobile is particularly noticeable.

  • Search has returned to the Web App and now uses our new Search API. We can now focus on improving the search to the benefit of all clients that use it.

As with all engineering, compromises have been made and these changes have come at a cost in terms of full offline capability, but we have the native apps for that.

Credits

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to the project this period:

Support Us

There are many ways in which you can support us:

  • Become a Shadowy Supertagger and help maintain your local area or pitch-in with the never-ending global effort.

  • Consider a donation to the project:

    Lightning donation QR On-chain donation QR