BTC Map - March 2026 Update

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.

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:

• 🇳🇱 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

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 :

• 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.