2026 ₿OSS Challenge
Portfolio Projects
As part of the 2026 BOSS Challenge, some participants completed self-directed portfolio projects to gain hands-on experience and apply skills they developed earlier in the program. With the freedom to choose their own topics, these projects reflect a wide variety of interests and approaches. Discover them below.
Cory: A local-first bitcoin transaction ancestry explorer and BIP-329 label editor. Cory helps you inspect where a Bitcoin transaction's funds came from, interactively, on your own machine.
Bitcoin transaction history explorer with visual graph tracing, wallet fingerprint detection, and BIP-329 label management.
Traffic analysis of post-BIP324 P2P Bitcoin traffic. Designed to figure out if P2P Bitcoin encrypted traffic is detectable by ISPs.
Research project around Bitcoin's encrypted P2P protocol (BIP-324). This report investigates whether a passive network adversary — such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or a BGP-hijacking attacker positioned on the network path — can determine the timing of specific Bitcoin P2P protocol events from encrypted traffic metadata alone.
Interactive visual tool that lets users create and observe real blockchain forks/reorgs on test networks.
Contributions to ddust, a new tool by bubb1es71 that finds and safely removes dust attack UTXOs from a wallet. ddust creates small, low-fee, stand-alone transactions that spend dust UTXOs to an OP_RETURN output, preventing dust from accidentally being spent with other wallet UTXOs.
The first implementation of SuperScalar, a new kind of lightning channel factory that can more easily scale LN and provide cooperative LSP services with no bitcoin softfork needed.
Rust library and CLI tool that analyzes a bitcoin wallet's UTXO set and evaluates whether the wallet is safe for operating a Lightning node. This tool acts as a Lightning wallet diagnostics engine and performs several analyses like wallet liquidity analysis, channel funding strategy recommendations, and UTXO fragmentation detection.
Tool for exploring forks, tip divergence, and reorg behavior across multiple node backends.
Fee bumping service that helps Lightning users get stuck commitment transactions confirmed. Uses anchor outputs and CPFP.
CLI tool that identifies dust attack UTXOs and safely removes them before they can be used to deanonymize you.
Know Your Coin History: Transaction graph explorer that lets you trace where your coins came from. Load a transaction or UTXO, recursively trace its ancestry, attach labels, detect wallet fingerprinting heuristics, and export everything in the BIP-329 wallet label standard — all against your own local Bitcoin Core node or Electrum server.
A passive observability platform for the Lightning Network gossip layer. Ingests raw BOLT 7 gossip snapshots and produces an interactive intelligence dashboard for analyzing message propagation, peer behavior, and network-level privacy exposure. Built on top of jharveyb's gossip_observer. Finalist and honorable mention at BTC++ Exploits Edition hackathon (February 2026).
Real-time, interactive tool for visualizing and modeling blockchain forks and reorganizations on a local bitcoin Regtest network.
A peer-observer tool that subscribes to NATS events and emits alerts to stdout when anomalous peer behavior is detected.
Real-time dashboard for analyzing and monitoring a Bitcoin Core node's P2P network activity. It combines beautiful, responsive visual components with an integrated AI assistant to help users understand what is happening under the hood of a bitcoin node. Third place winner for the BTC++ Exploits Edition hackathon (February 2026)
Provenance: Local-first analysis tool for people and businesses that need to trace the history of coins through their transaction ancestry. Supports classifying and labeling UTXOs or transactions, and allows BIP-329 and CSV exports.
Dust Sweeper: Scans a wallet for dust UTXOs and creates a PSBT to consolidate or burn them. Guides the user through review, signing with a BDK wallet, verification, and broadcast.
Composable Rust library for parsing, building, and resolving Bitcoin payment URIs (BIP-321). Supports silent payments, payjoin, and lightning.
BIP-321 (Bitcoin URI) parser written in Rust. Designed to be the backbone of modern wallets that need to support not just simple on-chain payments, but also payjoin, silent payments, lightning, and beyond.
Fountainhead: Fountain coded blocks for useful bitcoin blockchain pruning. Allows nodes to prune data, yet still assist in initial block download for new nodes. Based on fountain codes, a class of erasure codes, that enable any full node to encode validated blocks into a small number of coded blocks, thereby reducing storage costs.
BINST (Bitcoin Institutions) Protocol and Web App: Pilot project deployed on testnet4 that demonstrates how complex entities can be registered, owned, and controlled on bitcoin.
Point of Sale system that enables merchants to receive fiat payments for bitcoin transactions via peer-to-peer matching offers.
RootScope: Taproot script-path analyzer with witness fetch, Merkle proof reconstruction, and address verification.
A visual chain, reorg, and fork creator for Regtest and Signet based on 0xB10C's visual chain/reorg project. Helps visualize how bitcoin's block tree works, mining blocks, seeing forks form, and understanding reorgs.
Light client block filter research. Benchmarking BIP 158 against Binary Fuse filters, with reproducible datasets, wallet scenarios, and ground-truth validation on real mainnet data. Now with ARM results from a Raspberry Pi 5.
node-bench: Node-agnostic high-level performance benchmark harness. Measures Initial Block Download (IBD) throughput, across commits, giving you a longitudinal record of sync performance.
Know Your Coin History: A privacy-first bitcoin transaction ancestry explorer with interactive graph visualization, BIP-329 labeling, and eight wallet fingerprinting heuristics. Powered by your own node.
Educational resource explaining the Lightning Network. Inspired by Learn Me a Bitcoin. Aims to make the Lightning Network accessible to everyone through clear explanations, interactive tools, visual diagrams, and progressive difficulty.
Automated Lightning Network channel manager for batch channel opens with rejection tracking.
Early-access release of ESP-Miner, the firmware for Bitaxe miners. This release merges many open PRs into a single testing firmware, making it easier for testers to perform QA.
Node.js Payjoin v2 (BIP-77) demo that proves the JavaScript bindings in the Payjoin Dev Kit.
Conduit: Peer-to-peer system where paying a Lightning invoice atomically reveals the decryption key for digital content.
Small, focused apps for learning how bitcoin is serialized and how Bitcoin Core is structured.
Stories About Bitcoin: Bitcoin's history, told as literature — not textbook. A bilingual (Chinese/English) book covering 1976–2025 in 39 chapters.
anchorwatch: P2A anchor fee-bumping service paid with Lightning. Monitors the bitcoin mempool for transactions with P2A (Pay-to-Anchor) outputs and offers CPFP fee bumping as a paid service.
Hoover: A watch-only bitcoin CLI tool that identifies dust attack UTXOs and sweeps them away — without revealing address linkage.
Rust implementation of the Secure Fountain (SeF) architecture for slashing blockchain storage costs using Luby Transform (LT) fountain codes. Full nodes store only a small fraction of coded droplets per epoch instead of the entire blockchain, enabling lightweight chain reconstruction via error-resilient peeling decoders.
High-performance bitcoin mempool query engine with real-time fee estimation over gRPC and shared memory.
CLI tool that detects dust attack UTXOs in your wallet and sweeps them safely using PSBTs
Sphinx packet construction and visualization tool for per hop changes and seeing how the secret is constructed as per BOLT #04 onion-routing in lightning network.