BTC Map April 2026 Update

Global Metrics 🌍️

• Total Bitcoin-accepting merchants: 23,041 -> 25,470 (+2,429 +10.5%)
• Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 25,217 -> 27,646 (+2,429 +9.6%)
• Recently verified (1y): 14,335 -> 16,401 (+2,066 +14.4%)
• Avg. days since last verification: 400 -> 386 (-14 -3.5%)
• Merchants boosted: 16 -> 20 (+4 +25.0%)
• Total boost duration: 1,270 -> 1,570 (+300 +23.6%) days
• Comments posted: 31 -> 52 (+21 +67.7%)

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Note: the charts above track merchant growth only. The total places metric includes merchants plus exchanges/ATMs.

Country Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active countries in terms of merchant data editing.

Community Activity 📈

Here are this month's most active communities in terms of merchant data editing.

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

• 🇬🇧 Devon Bitcoiners
• 🇺🇸 CT Bitcoin
• 🇫🇷 Dreux
• 🇫🇷 Le Havre

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:

• 🥇 MoneyBadger with 1,501 edits
• 🥈 Rockedf with 527 edits
• 🥉 RoseBTCmap with 460 edits

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Sponsorship 🥰

Long term supporters, Wallet of Satoshi and BTC Curaçao generously renewed their sponsorship. WoS joining our Navigator tier and Curaçao our Cartographers tier. Both have been supporters since the early days, which has been a huge help. 💪

April also saw Aqua Wallet join the ranks as an Explorer, courtesy of JAN3. Welcome aboard and thanks for the support! 🤝

Merchant Adoption 🗞️

South Africa and MoneyBadger 🇿🇦

As you can see from the tables above, South Africa and MoneyBadger had a huge month!

The additions were overwhelmingly fuel-station coverage:

• Engen: 989 locations
• Shell: 493 locations

Freedom fuel now available in 🇿🇦!

Ecosystem 🫂

BitLocal, an iOS app powered by BTC Map and OpenStreetMap data, released v3.0.

The headline feature is Merchant Alerts: users can choose a city and receive a daily morning digest when new bitcoin-friendly businesses appear nearby. The release also improves BTC Map data sync, merchant details, and production notification reliability.

BitLocal helps iPhone and iPad users find real-world places to spend bitcoin, search by merchant name or category, view payment methods and business details, browse bitcoin communities, and share merchant links.

You should try it, it's better than our own iOS app! 🙃

Web App 🕸️

April brought 40+ merged PRs to the Web App, with the biggest theme being early account-based workflows and saved places.

• Saved places & custom activity feeds landed across the app. You can now save individual places, your communities or whole countries; enabling you to create a custom activity feeds.

• Area and community pages got an extended activity feed and improved community/country SEO.

• Community discoverability was enhanced by showing nearby communities on the main map view.

• Max zoom increased to 21 because, why not?

• Apps page was reworked with typed app configuration, a download modal, and a powered-by section, with Fedi, Stacked Wallet, Manna, Bitkit, Sovran, Speed Wallet, and Alby Go added or cleaned up.

• Add location now supports manually entering form coordinates.

• Performance and maintenance included skipping Netlify image processing for static icons, server-route fetch cleanup, CI health-review tuning, dependency updates, and Node 22 alignment.

Android App 🤖

Android had a big month for account-based functionality and activity discovery. Igor published a more detailed personal April recap covering his work on the API and Android app.

• Authentication was implemented, matching the new opt-in account direction across BTC Map.
• Saved places, areas management and activity feeds were added, including upcoming events.
• Out-of-date places are now filtered by default.
• Cold start performance improved by querying only the visible map area, with a safety margin, instead of loading all places into the clustering engine up front.

Infrastructure ⚙️

The API work in April focused on auth, activity feeds, and endpoint hardening.

• Nostr auth via NIP-98 was added for identity linking and token retrieval.
• REST auth and endpoints for changing usernames and passwords were implemented.
• Saved places and saved areas were added at the database and endpoint layers.
• Activity endpoints gained area filtering, multi-area queries, a places filter, and an area-scoped top editors endpoint.
• Events gained area bindings and support for cron-like recurring schedules.
• Areas gained support for wide icons.
• Overpass requests now include a User-Agent header so we don't get banned again 🤣.

Analytics 📊

Our April 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 :

• Hannes / escapedcat - major web app and API contributions across saved places, user activity, area feeds, auth, and infrastructure.
• Igor Bubelov - API, Android, and infrastructure contributions.
• Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - web app apps page, mobile UX, map improvements, blog, and coordination.
• Edwin Comino / LighthouseFR - API icon improvements.
• saunter / stackingsaunter - web app asset updates.
• MoneyBadger, Rockedf, RoseBTCmap, Comino, and all the active taggers listed above.

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 or zap ⚡️ this post!