2025 Annual Review

General 🫶

2025 was a pivotal year for the BTC Map project. A year defined by technical progress and a maturing of sorts. We saw growing community involvement and what we will look back on as the year that merchant adoption really began to accelerate.

We continued to lean into our distributed, community-driven ethos with volunteers from across the world working asynchronously on everything from code to community engagement and data curation to local merchant on-boarding. What can look from the outside like a “glorious dumpster fire of chaos” was in practice a resilient, anti-fragile way of enabling merchant adoption and community building across the planet.

Product improvements and performance 🚀

A major focus throughout the year was making BTC Map faster, smoother and more robust. Performance improvements touched everything from map rendering and search responsiveness to API improvements that keep merchant data fresh and snappy under growing load.

In addition to shipping v1 of the Android App, we also implemented some major visual changes to the Web App that makes exploring BTC Map merchants more intuitive.

Our iOS is still in desperate need of maintenance and so please do get in touch if you'd like to contribute!

Merchant growth and real-world adoption 🏪

Merchant coverage continued to expand, with BTC Map closing in on new milestones and deepening coverage globally. The key adoption stories of 2025 where:

• Square enabling payments for their 4M merchants within the US 🇺🇸. To date we have have processed over 5k tickets and still have 1.5k in the backlog, with no end in sight.
• MoneyBadger lighting-up South Africa 🇿🇦 with 1M+ merchant via integrations with legacy QR payment networks. Chasing the heels of Tando, who have already lit-up all of Kenya!
• Steak 'n Shake going full maxi-mode and not only accepting Bitcoin across their hundreds of stores across the US, but introducing Bitcoin-themed food and announcing a treasury strategy.

Nothing shows this growth better than infographics and animations by Wicked!

And here are the 2025 stats in full:

Global Metrics 🌍️

Metrics for 2025 are in!

• Total Bitcoin-accepting locations: 13,672 → 21,823 (+8,151 +59.6%)
• Recently verified (1y): 7,877 → 11,874 (+3,997 +50.7%)
• Avg. days since last verification: 345 → 392 (+47 +13.6%)
• Merchants boosted: 124
• Total boost duration: 10,340
• Comments posted: 23 → 603 (+580 +2521.7%)

A 60% increase in Bitcoin locations is mind-blowing, but if you strip out ATMs and exchanges and focus on merchants only, this increase moves up to 65%! 🤯

Here is a graph showing growth of merchants (excluding ATMs and exchanges):

And here is the same data filtered for only those locations verified within 2025:

Find current stats over at the 👉 BTC Map Dashboard.

Country Activity 📈

These were the most active countries in terms of merchant data editing in 2025:

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇺🇸 United States of America	6539	3547	2400	592	47
🇧🇷 Brazil	2885	912	1832	141	28
🇿🇦 South Africa	2276	918	1082	276	8
🇹🇭 Thailand	1231	328	818	85	70
🇨🇭 Switzerland	1246	297	889	60	20
🇨🇿 Czechia	1194	222	908	64	22
🇸🇻 El Salvador	1175	387	693	95	15
🇮🇹 Italy	1036	224	727	85	42
🇳🇱 Netherlands	1004	105	798	101	23
🇩🇪 Germany	873	144	649	80	37

Community Activity 📈

These were the most active communities in terms of merchant data editing in 2025:

Name	Total	Created	Updated	Deleted	Comments
🇿🇦 Proof of Bitcoin	610	268	269	73	1
🇵🇹 FREE Madeira	485	64	398	23	28
🇸🇻 Bitcoin Coast	501	138	338	25	5
🇨🇭 Lugano Plan B	475	52	398	25	3
🇨🇿 Dvacet Jedna Praha / Jednadvacet Praha	397	75	290	32	11
🇨🇦 Vancouver Bitcoiners	370	113	235	22	2

We also saw the addition of over 100 new communities over the year.

Sponsors 🙏

We wanted to take a moment to thank our long-term sponsors Wallet of Satoshi and the BTC Reef / Curacao community - your assistance from very early on in has meant a great deal.

We also welcomed Square as a sponsor towards the end of 2025 🎉.

And thank-you to all the individual donations we have received throughout the year.

Credits 🫶

We welcomed the following significant new contributors during the year:

• descubrebitcoin
• SiriusBig
• vv01f
• pjw1965
• Mind09
• Matúš Sekerák
• Jim Netskas
• Juan Colchete
• Trigger
• Rose
• John Doe

And of course relied upon the old guard:

• Comino
• Hannes
• Igor Bubelov
• Nathan Day
• Rockedf
• Saunter
• Beinardus

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to the project!

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.