The AI-Pocalypse Continues | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 88

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

AOB We are now a weekly show Topics Full screen video Admin tools Envoy 2.3.3 KeyOS 1.4.0 beta3 (public release this week)

NEWS Core Lightning: A Critical Vulnerability, a Binary-Only Patch, and a Docker Pipeline That Broke Because of It -- Stacker News / Blockstream Blog / GitHub Release

Bitcoin's First Quantum-Safe Mainnet Transaction (No Fork Required) -- Bitcoin Magazine

Stacker News Ships Embedded Spark Wallet and Receive Proxy Toggle -- Stacker News

SeedSigner Fork Adds Miniscript Support with Liana Bridge -- X/@UnruggableGG

Roman Storm Retrial Pushed to April 2027 -- X/@rstormsf

Coinbase and Better Mortgage Launch Bitcoin-Backed Mortgages -- Bitcoin Magazine

HRF Awards 500 Million Sats to 16 Freedom Tech Projects Worldwide -- Bitcoin Magazine

Kraken Users Locked Out After 12,000 Dust Transfers From Sanctioned HTX Wallets -- Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Knots BLAKE2b Hardfork Goes Live as a "Mainnet Trial" -- CryptoSlate / GitHub PR #359 / The Bitcoin Manual explainer

Peach Bitcoin Pauses Escrow Model After Swiss Regulator Reversal -- Peach Blog

RELEASES

Flint v1.0.3 -- 2026-08-28 Security audit follow-up for Seth's BTCPay Server plugin. Strips macOS payloads from the build, pins the release path, and restores file permissions after dylib stripping. All artifacts are Sigstore-attested with no maintainer key required. Also in window: Flint v1.0.2 (2026-08-27) -- 23% smaller package, shared reconciliation scans reducing SDK calls for idle stores, cached Spark network status reads. Follows the v1.0.0 milestone which fixed a payment-hash association security issue.

Envoy 2.3.3 -- 2026-08-27Point release improving Passport Prime pairing reliability with automatic retry and clock-drift tolerance. Also fixes a visual bug where seed verification puzzle words could overflow at high zoom, and removes a hardcoded Stripe test key.

Sparrow Wallet 2.5.4 -- 2026-08-27Significant hardware wallet security hardening: mandatory anti-klepto on BitBox02, Ledger wallet policy re-registration on rejection, and serialised USB device access to prevent enumeration interrupting operations. Also improves BIP129/descriptor import validation and SLIP39 passphrase handling.

Eclair v0.14.2 -- 2026-08-26ACINQ released Eclair v0.14.2 with fixes for bugs that "can be exploited by malicious nodes." The release also documents that bitcoind should run on the same machine as eclair or use a secure tunnel. Upgrade is "highly recommended."

BTCPay Server v2.4.3 -- 2026-08-24Security release recommended for servers shared with many users. Release notes are minimal, stating only that updating is recommended. Published by NicolasDorier with a GPG-verified commit.

BitBox02 Firmware 9.27.0 -- 2026-08-24Displays long transaction and swap amounts in full instead of truncating. Adds message signing for keys in the m/45' namespace and supports timestamp-based absolute locktimes. Stepped upgrade path required from older firmware versions.

Blockstream Ships Jade 1.0.41 and Reflects on the Coldcard Fallout -- Blockstream BlogPublished: 2026-08-25 Blockstream released Jade firmware 1.0.41 alongside a blog post responding to the Coldcard RNG vulnerability. Jade is not affected (no degraded RNG fallback path, mixes multiple entropy sources through SHA512). Release is security hardening: runtime bumped to latest stable, increased stack protection, updated dependencies, audited sensitive-memory clearing. Not urgent but recommended. 1.0.42 on an expedited timeline for less serious reports. The post reveals dozens of AI-automated scans landed on Jade within days of the Coldcard disclosure, plus multiple human reviews. Credit to Spiral's Loupe tool and the Kvazar agentic harness.

Everything Else Arkade v0.9.16 -- Aug 2026Major security hardening and admin web console for the Ark protocol server.

BasicSwap DEX v0.18.5 -- Aug 2026Breaking proto