February 2026 Update

Global Metrics 🌍️

• Total Bitcoin-accepting places: 23,063 -> 24,146 (+1,083 +4.7%)
• Recently verified (1y): 12,727 -> 13,470 (+743 +5.8%)
• Avg. days since last verification: 393 -> 396 (+3 +0.8%)
• Merchants boosted: 20 -> 41 (+21 +105.0%)
• Total boost duration: 2,240 -> 4,920 (+2,680 +119.6%) days
• Comments posted: 39 -> 29 (-10 -25.6%)

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	1106	913	160	33	6
🇮🇹 Italy	69	8	58	3	1
🇧🇷 Brazil	65	29	31	5	1
🇳🇱 Netherlands	59	4	50	5	4
🇸🇻 El Salvador	55	12	42	1	4
🇰🇷 South Korea	47	0	47	0	0
🇹🇭 Thailand	45	18	26	1	2
🇩🇪 Germany	39	5	28	6	0
🇯🇵 Japan	38	1	37	0	0
🇨🇿 Czechia	37	0	35	2	0

Community Activity 📈

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

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇰🇷 Sea of Corea	52	0	52	0	0
🇺🇸 BitPlebs Los Angeles	50	40	9	1	0
🇧🇯 Bitcoin Benin	35	7	26	2	0
🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base	32	1	31	0	0
🇺🇸 Colorado Bitcoin	25	20	4	1	1
🇺🇸 Bay Area Bitcoiners	25	21	3	1	0

New Communities 🫂

We welcomed the following new communities over the past month:

• 🇸🇻 Bitcoin Acajutla
• 🇳🇱 Eenentwintig Utrecht
• 🇳🇱 Eenentwintig Limburg
• 🇯🇵 Tokyo Bitcoin Base
• 🇿🇦 BitFitness

We now have 638 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 602 edits
• 🥈 RoseBTCmap with 432 edits
• 🥉 Comino with 337 edits

Name	Total Edits	Created	Updated	Deleted
Rockedf	602	537	65	0
RoseBTCmap	432	422	10	0
Comino	337	28	293	16
descubrebitcoin	136	13	89	34
Beinardus	33	23	10	0
Dimitar155	25	0	25	0
Bitcoin Amantikir	19	1	18	0
wildmaps	18	0	18	0
BTCMAP-TBB	17	1	16	0
Mind09	16	7	8	1
skquinn	16	0	16	0
Carlos404	13	3	9	1
samuelzammit	13	0	13	0
BigKev97	13	0	13	0
emiliomorles	12	4	7	1

Find current and historical stats on the Tagger Leaderboard.

Web App 🕸️

February was a very active month for the Web App, with a strong focus on localization, UX polish, and performance.

• Major internationalization 'i18n' rollout across map controls, merchant pages, area views, leaderboards, dashboard, tickets, onboarding, support pages, and errors. Thanks to new contributor Nackoo2000 for assisting Hannes here!
• New language support expanded, including Bulgarian and broader translation coverage.
• Community and tagging UX updates including Verify Community forms and translated onboarding flows.
• Map UX improvements from PR #695 (search list design updates) and PR #694 (nearby list real-distance display).
• Performance improvements on merchant pages and non-map pages (sync bottleneck reductions and sync progress indicators).
• Community contact support expanded with Satlantis, Geyser and improved social/contact rendering.
• Merchant page performance improved by orders of magnitude for cold clients by removing full-sync bottlenecks and relying on targeted API endpoints.

Android App 🤖

Android saw major progress in February, with a large app refactor and several UX improvements landing ahead of the next release.

• Improved clustering now feels stable after significant map refactoring and testing.
• Map rotation is back, enabled by the new clustering approach.
• Website-aligned default colors now improve readability across map styles in both light and dark modes.
• Customization remains strong with optional Material-based theming still available in settings.

Preview builds are available at: btcmap-android preview releases.

Admin App 🛠️

Admin App work in February included validation and maintenance improvements:

• Added support for 'Login with Nostr'.
• Added additional new social contact fields to validation rules.
• Updated JS module dependencies and Bootstrap.
• Added contributor setup guidance and repo hygiene updates.

Infrastructure ⚙️

Infrastructure and platform work was significant in February:

• API/Backend: large refactor and migration work across DB layers, schema handling, request logging, v4 endpoint improvements, and reliability updates
• Lightning stack: continued LND-related work and associated backend improvements
• Data portability and resilience: DB structure evolved around focused files (main.db, images.db, log.db) to improve portability and backup workflows
• Request logging and OG caching: faster logging with richer diagnostics (including user-agent) plus OpenGraph image caching to reduce tile-server load
• New API capabilities: endpoint additions for place areas and place activity

For a technical contributor view, see Igor's February recap.

Analytics 📊

Our February 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 and admin contributions
• Nackoo2000 - major i18n rollout across web pages and flows
• 5atoshiNakamoto - web locale wording fix
• Igor Bubelov - major API and Android contributions
• Nathan / dadofsambonzuki - blog, data, and admin contributions
• kanishka0411 - web app contributions

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.