rust-bitcoin

rust-bitcoin is the low-level library stack much of the Rust Bitcoin ecosystem builds on. The main bitcoin crate gives developers types and utilities for protocol messages, blocks, transactions, scripts, keys, addresses, and PSBTs. The wider rust-bitcoin organization also maintains companion crates for hashing, secp256k1, Miniscript, and Bitcoin Core RPC access.

Projects such as BDK, LDK, electrs, and Fedimint build on this stack. OpenSats has supported maintainers working on crate stabilization, extracted-crate refactors, broader test coverage, and the corepc work that helps Rust projects talk to Bitcoin Core.

Why fund it?

A lot of Bitcoin software in Rust starts here. Wallets, hardware wallet firmware, indexers, and node-adjacent tools all depend on exact behavior around fee rates, locktimes, addresses, scripts, hashes, and transaction serialization. Bugs at this layer can ripple outward into many other projects at once.

OpenSats first funded rust-bitcoin maintainer Tobin Harding in 2023. Support continued with a dedicated project grant in 2025 and a renewal in 2026. That work pushed bitcoin-units, bitcoin-primitives, and consensus_encoding toward 1.0 releases, expanded test coverage across the stack, and kept work moving on corepc and the ongoing crypto split.

What's next?

Current work is centered on pushing the stabilizing crates closest to 1.0, especially hashes, units, primitives, and consensus_encoding. Maintainers are also building an incremental upgrade path from rust-bitcoin 0.32.x to the newer extracted-crate architecture so downstream projects can move forward in smaller steps.

In parallel, work continues on the crypto split, the move of PSBT code into rust-psbt, and the async client in corepc.