Bitcoin (BTC) Major Core Update: Key Changes Revealed

Bitcoin (BTC), the first and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has welcomed a new major core release, taking a major step forward in its development. Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.

In a tweet, the Bitcoin development team stated that "a new release candidate of Bitcoin Core, v29.0rc2, is available for testing. This is a new major release and follows v28.0."

As stated, the Bitcoin Core v29.0rc2 is a new major release following version 28.0, which was launched in October 2024. This release candidate includes key improvements aimed at enhancing performance, security, and overall network efficiency.

What changed?

The latest Bitcoin Core update introduces several notable changes, including P2P and network changes as well as mempool policy and mining changes. Additions also include updated and new RPCs; and updated REST APIs.

As part of mempool policy and mining changes is ephemeral dust, a new concept that allows a single dust output in a transaction as long as the transaction is zero-fee. To spend any unconfirmed outputs from this transaction, the spender must also spend this dust in addition to any other desired outputs. In other words, this type of transaction should be carried out within a transaction package in which dust is both created and spent at the same time.

Updated settings will also ensure that as a safety check, Bitcoin Core fails to start if the required parameter value is lower than 2000 weight units.

The Bitcoin wallet received GUI changes, including the build system, which was migrated from Autotools to CMake: The minimum required CMake version is 3.22.

Low-level changes include newly developed tools and utilities, as well as updated tests and dependencies. A new tool that converts a compact-serialized UTXO snapshot to a SQLite3 database has been added.