Hey devs 👋
I’ve been diving deeper into Bitcoin development lately and wanted to hear from others working under the hood — whether you’re contributing to core, building Lightning apps, or experimenting with tools like Miniscript, Fedimint, or rollups.
A few things I’ve been thinking about:
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Are you still building on top of Bitcoin directly, or leaning more on second-layer solutions now?
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What’s your go-to dev stack for BTC-related projects these days?
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Any major pain points or things you feel the ecosystem really needs right now?
Personally, I’ve been tinkering with a Lightning-based microtransaction tool and playing around with Rust-based Bitcoin libraries. Still getting used to some quirks, but loving how much the tooling has improved even in the last 1–2 years.
Also — curious how folks are navigating dev environments (regtest vs signet), and whether anyone’s integrating AI tools into their Bitcoin-related workflows yet?
Would love to hear what you're building, learning, or stuck on. No matter what level you're at — let’s share ideas and maybe help each other out.
Code on ⚙️👾
Love this post — and really cool to see more devs diving into the Bitcoin stack beyond just holding.
I’m mostly working on Lightning right now too — building a rewards/payments layer for small e-commerce sites using LNURL and Bolt11. Started with LND, but lately I’ve been experimenting more with Core Lightning + plugins (the flexibility is underrated).
To your questions:
Building on Bitcoin or 2nd layers?
Definitely leaning more into second-layer stuff. Lightning is finally getting stable enough to build real products on, and tools like Fedimint and Ark are making me rethink what’s possible off-chain.
Dev stack?
Rust + Bitcoin is becoming my default. Thebdkandrust-bitcoinecosystem is surprisingly solid. For Lightning, it’s a mix ofln-service(Node),cln-grpc(for Core Lightning), and custom webhook handlers in Go or Rust. Frontend’s usually just Svelte or React.
Biggest pain point?
Honestly? Dev UX. Setting up regtest/signet is still more annoying than it should be. Also, managing channels on Lightning at scale is a headache — especially liquidity balancing and node reliability.
AI tools?
I’ve started using AI to write integration tests and sanity-check wallet logic. Not perfect, but definitely speeds up boilerplate work. Would love to hear more if anyone’s using LLMs to help with transaction scripting or decoding PSBTs.
Curious what you’re building with Rust + Lightning — feel free to share a link if it’s public. Also down to jam on ideas or collab if anyone’s looking to build weird Bitcoin stuff together.
Keep coding y’all ⚡
