Repent, The Fork is Nigh | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 85

A bi-weekly news show informing you on the latest in Bitcoin, privacy and open source tech hosted by Ungovernables, Max and Q.

AOB Freedom.Tech launch reminder KeyOS v1.3 now publicly available

NEWS India orders GitHub to take down BitChat's source code; Internet Freedom Foundation calls it unconstitutional - TFTC: India BitChat GitHub takedown, I4C, IFF / CoinDesk

Fourth Circuit says border agents can hand-search your phone with zero suspicion, as a man is prosecuted for a duress-wipe - EFF: Fourth Circuit says border agents can search your phone by hand, no suspicion required / TechCrunch: US accuses American of wiping his phone with a duress password at the border

Senate Democrats kill the CLARITY Act before recess; the developer safe harbor (Section 604) stalls with it - TFTC: CLARITY Act rejected, Bitcoin ownership surpasses gold

State Department launches a "Freedom Tech" program with BPI, Palantir, and Anduril as founding partners - Bitcoin Magazine: State Department tech program with Bitcoin

Block open-sources Buzz: a Nostr-native, keypair-identity workspace for humans and AI agents - LINK

BIP-110 approaches its mandatory signaling window with support under 1%, and enforcing nodes staring at a minority fork - TFTC: BIP-110 enters mandatory signaling window below 1% hashrate

RELEASES

Bitcoin core / protocol btcd v0.26.2 - 2026-07-25Security-hardening for the Go full node: stricter PSBT/input parsing, Schnorr and WIF validation, rejection of malformed bech32, tighter inbound admission.

Hardware / signing Keystone 3 v3.0.0 - 2026-07-21Major firmware across all variants of the airgapped open-source signer: reworked passcode/recovery flow, stronger validation, upgraded security policies. Reproducible with published checksums.

Trezor Suite v26.7.2 - 2026-07-22Firmware security updates plus a lower 0.2 sat/vB minimum fee and cancel-pending-transaction support.

Nunchuk 2.7.1 - 2026-07-16Collaborative-custody multisig wallet. 2.7.0 (07-15) added self-custodial USDT on Liquid and Trezor Bluetooth support; 2.7.1 is bug fixes on top. On-lens for multisig self-custody.

Bitkey App 2026.11.0 - 2026-07-14Block's consumer hardware wallet. Release highlights its Emergency Access (recovery/inheritance) path; full notes hosted off-repo at bitkey.world/releases.

Lightning Core Lightning v26.06.6 - 2026-07-22Patch release (26.06.3-5 pulled over broken PyPI publishing). Now rejects channels reusing an existing funding outpoint, closing a channel-security edge case.

LNDg v1.11.0 - 2026-07-26Self-hosted LND dashboard: peer-offline reporting, auto re-index on data migration, historic failed-HTLC data via API. Update logging config on upgrade.

Zeus v13.1.3 - 2026-07-21Point release / version bump on the 13.1 line for the self-custodial Lightning wallet.

LNbits v1.5.6 - 2026-07-15Minor patch on 1.5.5 (payments extension-field refactor and fixes) for the self-hosted Lightning accounts system.

Lightning Labs Wavelength - 2026-07-21A toolkit for adding self-custodial bitcoin (and stablecoin) payments to any application, designed to create the best developer experience for humans and agents.

Ecash Cashu TS v5.0.0-rc.5 - 2026-07-23RC for the major v5 of the reference TS Cashu library: NUT-18 payment requests (PaymentRequestBuilder), mint-preference support, hardened P2PK validation, integer fee math. Foundational for ecash wallets.

Nutshell 0.20.3 - 2026-07-22Reference mint/wallet: Pay-to-Blinded-Key (lock ecash to a receiver without revealing their pubkey to the mint), a Spark L2 backend, and a false-UNPAID melt-race fix. DB migration, back up first.

Fedimint v0.12.0-beta.0 - 2026-07-23Beta pre-release of the federated ecash / community-custody protocol. Flagged unstable, no upgrade guarantee. "In the pipeline," not production. (Admin UI: Fedimint UI v0.7.4, adds arm64 image.)

On-chain privacy / coinjoin Wasabi Wallet v2.8.1 - 2026-07-22Now receives to Taproot addresses by default (a real "state of the network" adoption nudge, f