Bitcoin Infrastructure Update: Fedimint Upgrade, LAB Rebrand
This week brought a Bitcoin infrastructure update from two different directions, one technical, one commercial.
Fedimint ships v0.12.0
Fedimint, the open source project that lets communities run shared Bitcoin custody through a federation, released version 0.12.0, named “Second Nature.” A federation spreads control of Bitcoin funds across a group of trusted guardians instead of leaving it with one person or company, an approach often described as diversifying the multisig rather than trusting a single key holder.
According to the release announcement, the update carries over 300 commits from more than twenty developers. Newly created federations now run on the next generation of Fedimint’s core modules for Lightning, e-cash, and on-chain wallet functions by default, though existing federations keep their current setup and Fedimint does not force them to move.
The team also cut Lightning payment latency across the system, using a method called long polling that checks continuously for a result instead of waiting on a fixed schedule, which Fedimint says makes payments feel close to instant. It upgraded the guardians’ peer to peer layer to a new version of the networking tool built by iroh, a move that needs careful coordination across guardians, and it reworked wallet recovery so a client keeps working while it restores funds. The release also adds developer support for Kotlin and Swift, and fee tools that show costs upfront. Fedimint repeated its warning that anyone upgrading from v0.10 should go straight to v0.11.2 or v0.12.0, never through v0.11.0 or v0.11.1.
Let Africa Build rebrands
In Nigeria, Let Africa Build, known as LAB, announced a shift in its identity and scope. LAB began as a community effort training African developers in Bitcoin and Lightning, built by founder Eniola Samuel into what a Stacks Foundation profile called Africa’s first Bitcoin development hub and incubator, running a twelve week academy, a builders incubator, and an infrastructure research track.
LAB said that work put African builders on the Bitcoin map, but it has now grown into something bigger. The organization calls itself Africa’s venture engine for digital financial infrastructure, a model where the same ecosystem that trains developers also produces the founders who build companies. LAB said it has raised $ 140,000 under this new direction, and its focus has shifted to building founders who ship payment, savings, credit, and remittance systems and connecting them to capital and markets. It pointed people to its relaunched website, letafricabuild.com, for more details.
Both stories are about the plumbing underneath Bitcoin. Fedimint’s update makes shared custody faster and more resilient. LAB’s rebrand bets that Africa’s Bitcoin talent pipeline can produce companies, not just developers.