Global Metrics 🌍️
- Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 24,146 -> 25,181 (+1,035 +4.3%)
- Recently verified (1y): 13,470 -> 14,319 (+849 +6.3%)
- Avg. days since last verification: 396 -> 399 (+3 +0.8%)
- Merchants boosted: 41 -> 16 (-25 -61.0%)
- Total boost duration: 4,920 -> 1,270 (-3,650 -74.2%) days
- Comments posted: 29 -> 32 (+3 +10.3%)
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.
| Name | Total | Created | Updated | Deleted | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇺🇸 United States of America | 555 | 435 | 93 | 27 | 0 |
| 🇿🇲 Zambia | 51 | 0 | 46 | 5 | 0 |
| 🇿🇦 South Africa | 45 | 0 | 42 | 3 | 0 |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 31 | 7 | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | 30 | 5 | 21 | 4 | 1 |
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | 26 | 1 | 24 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇦🇹 Austria | 26 | 2 | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇨🇿 Czechia | 23 | 0 | 19 | 4 | 0 |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | 22 | 1 | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇧🇷 Brazil | 21 | 6 | 14 | 1 | 0 |
Community Activity 📈
Here are this month’s most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.
| Name | Total | Created | Updated | Deleted | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇿🇲 Bitcoin Victoria Falls | 51 | 0 | 46 | 5 | 0 |
| 🇿🇦 Bitcoin Ekasi | 34 | 0 | 33 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base | 30 | 6 | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇿🇦 Bitcoin Plett | 29 | 0 | 28 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles | 20 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners | 18 | 14 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 🇺🇸 Bitcoin Charlotte | 16 | 11 | 1 | 4 | 0 |
New Communities 🫂
We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:
- 🇳🇱 Bitcoin Bergen
- 🇧🇬 Bitcoin Club
- 🇦🇹 Einundzwanzig Außerfern
- 🇩🇪 Rothenburg ob der Tauber
- 🇬🇧 Purbeck Bitcoin
- 🇳🇱 Bitcoin Leiden
- 🇺🇸 Bitcoin Party KC
- 🇧🇷 Bitcoin Padawans
- 🇲🇿 Lwandi Bitcoin
- 🇺🇸 California Bitcoin Education Lab
We now have 650+ Communities scattered across the planet. 🌎️
Active Taggers 🏆
Here are this month’s most active contributors adding and updating merchant data on BTC Map.
📣 Shoutout to the top 3:
- 🥇 Rockedf with 608 edits
- 🥈 RoseBTCmap with 511 edits
- 🥉 Comino with 216 edits
| Name | Total Edits | Created | Updated | Deleted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rockedf | 608 | 526 | 67 | 15 |
| RoseBTCmap | 511 | 464 | 47 | 0 |
| Comino | 216 | 42 | 160 | 14 |
| descubrebitcoin | 80 | 3 | 64 | 13 |
| VisibleSouth | 49 | 0 | 44 | 5 |
| Bitcoinplett | 49 | 2 | 43 | 4 |
| BTCMAP-TBB | 31 | 7 | 24 | 0 |
| Luthando12 | 30 | 0 | 29 | 1 |
| Eliseomejia | 25 | 0 | 25 | 0 |
| Kartibu | 21 | 0 | 21 | 0 |
| Igor Bubelov | 19 | 0 | 18 | 1 |
| BitcoinDua | 16 | 13 | 3 | 0 |
| TokioBTC | 16 | 15 | 1 | 0 |
| confusedbuffalo | 13 | 0 | 13 | 0 |
Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.
Merchant Adoption News 🗞️
-
Square began auto-enabling Bitcoin payments across it’s US customer base of 4M merchants 👀. Merchants still need to opt-in to appear on the maps on CashApp and BTC Map, but this is a huge step forward in Bitcoin’s adoption arc. Wen rest of world?!
-
Qerko locations (mainly in the Czech Republic) no longer accept Bitcoin, apparently due to EU regulations. We’re told there may be a way back, but in the meantime we’ll be removing all 642 locations. 😢
Web App 🕸️
March was another huge month for the Web App with 60+ PRs merged, focusing on an overhauled merchant drawer, continued i18n expansion, and performance improvements.
- New map drawer UX with compact merchant details (#859), payment method pills (#850), drawer header visual hierarchy (#849), phone and website quick info (#853), and merchant comments displayed directly in the drawer (#845).
- Share merchant to clipboard (#851) and consistent boost badge styling (#860).
- Localized merchant names now lazy-loaded and displayed when available (#794, #817).
- New language support: Russian (#793), Dutch (#812), German (#799), French (#869), and Spanish (#870), plus a new language switcher modal (#798).
- Dashboard area stats added (#789) and leaderboard generation moved server-side for performance (#846, #813).
- Merchant view performance improvements (#790, #834).
- Infrastructure: Node 20 to 22 LTS upgrade (#840), Vitest v2 to v3 (#839), CI health report rewrite (#822), and Zapstore added as an app source (#848).
Android App 🤖
BTC Map Android v1.1.0 is officially released! This is a major milestone after months of work since November 2025. Key highlights:
- New Carto Dark Matter map style added.
- Nearby communities now displayed on the map, helping users discover local Bitcoin communities.
- Map rotation re-enabled with the improved clustering approach.
- Localized place names and opening hours now displayed, with LLM-translated hours for supported regions.
- Localization in 30+ languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (BR), Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Chinese.
- Adaptive color scheme now opt-in, defaulting to website-aligned colors for better readability.
- Improved payment flow and boosted markers brought back.
- Architecture overhaul: clean DB layer abstraction, consolidated sync and API mappings, improved testability with new database and sync tests.
- Bookmarks feature added for saving favorite places.
If you’re an Android user, update and leave your feedback!
Admin App 🛠️
The Admin App saw significant work in March:
- Nostr authentication fully implemented with parallel Nostr and BTC Map login flows, identity linking, and NIP-98 HTTP Auth (#22).
- Circular icon preview with cropper overlay for better area icon centering (#38).
- SVG icon support fixed for area display (#36).
Infrastructure ⚙️
The API saw major expansion in March with 49 commits:
- New REST v4 endpoints: activity, top communities, top countries, top editors, and users endpoints.
- Localization support: localized name field, localized opening hours, and humanize_working_hours RPC.
- Area improvements: area type filter, area stats, area reverse geocoding, optimized bbox generation.
- Sync logging: all OSM sync attempts now logged with failed_at and fail_reason tracking.
- Request logging exposed via RPC, plus a new daily infra report RPC.
- Major refactoring: relocated mappings for areas, elements, events, comments, users, reports, invoices, bans, and configuration into cleaner module structure.
- Feed links fixed and localized name support added for search endpoint.
For a technical contributor view, see Igor’s March recap.
Analytics 📊
Our March website stats are as follows:
Check out the BTC Map Analytics Dashboard. Track our growth and see where users are coming from in real time.
Credits 🫶
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project this month, including the Shadowy Supertaggers:
- Hannes / escapedcat - major web app contributions across drawer UX, i18n, and infrastructure
- Igor Bubelov - major API, Android, and web app contributions
- Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - admin app, web app, blog, and data contributions
- Sync / S7NC - Dutch locale support for web app
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.
- Help improve or maintain our code. Check out our GitHub Team and hop into our Matrix Space.
- Consider donating to the project here.