Full stack Bitcoin software

About

Current team Slack mirror with full history.

Libbitcoin Time 2026: the development history of the libbitcoin repositories.

History

Libbitcoin was announced on the Bitcoin forum in July 2011, two and a half years after the genesis block. The plan was to "rewrite bitcoin" as a library anyone could build on, pluggable and configurable at every level, under a lesser AGPL license drafted for the project.

In 2013 the libbitcoin manifesto made the case for why it mattered: a Bitcoin of many implementations has no single point of failure, and no single party controls its standard. The same year brought obelisk, a query server, and sx, a command line toolkit, the ancestors of Bitcoin Server (bs) and Bitcoin Explorer (bx).

From 2014 the code was divided into the six repositories it has today, from system primitives to the server, and versions 2 and 3 followed in 2014 and 2017. Version 4 is the first major release since 2017, the result of a decade of R&D by a small team of dedicated volunteers.

Scope

	system	database	network	node	server	explorer	build	website	Total	bitcoind
First commit	2011	2014	2011	2014	2013	2013	2014	2014		2009
Contributors	63	17	38	19	23	37	10	11	98	821
Commits	10,395	4,789	4,152	4,317	3,464	2,745	1,693	290	31,845	31,480
Library lines	109,317	35,329	50,290	14,451	32,318	34,131			275,836	154,044
Test lines	121,795	28,621	44,758	9,642	25,020	7,743			237,579	89,539
Words								654,760	654,760	286,710
Runtime tests	7,911	1,341	2,815	528	1,935	679			15,209	903
Compile-time tests	7,552	111	279	6	54	0			8,002	41
Python tests					222				222	212
Classes	394	308	246	86	84	370			1,488	648
Public methods	2,795	1,480	1,427	225	145	2,018			8,090	3,635
Protected methods	971	139	377	292	573	2			2,354	101
Private methods	339	86	420	114	151	0			1,110	345
Public functions	1,032	69	143	4	76	17			1,341	1,105

bitcoind is included for context.

How these are counted

The six libraries and libbitcoin-build at their current master (November 2026). Each commit is counted once, in the repository it first appears in: network shares 3,246 commits of early history with system. Contributors are distinct people, across names and email addresses. The website column is this site and its public discussion forum, and its words are their text. History of the archived repositories (blockchain, protocol, client and consensus) is included only where it was carried into a current repository.

bitcoind is Bitcoin Core at its master (October 2026) with its secp256k1, without its wallet application, its GUI, its other executables or its other embedded dependencies (leveldb, crc32c, minisketch, univalue, ctaes and libmultiprocess). Wallet functionality that bitcoind itself uses, such as addresses, keys, descriptors and PSBT, is included, as is libbitcoin's. Its contributors and commits are those that touch its code or its functional tests, and those of secp256k1 (to August 2026). Its secp256k1 lines exclude 18,235 lines of precomputed tables, and its functions and structs are those of the secp256k1 public headers. Its Python tests are the functional tests, excluding those of the wallet application, and its words are those of the bitcoincore.org website, meeting notes included.

Lines are non-blank lines of C++ in the library (include and src) and in its tests (test). Library lines exclude 60,969 lines of data tables in system (word lists, Unicode tables and the embedded GPU kernels). The server's embedded web interface, which can be compiled out, is excluded, as is bitcoind's GUI. Runtime tests are C++ test cases, compile-time tests are static_assert statements in the tests, and Python tests are the server's endpoint tests (3,894 lines of Python, not in the test lines). Classes, methods and public functions are counted from the compiler's view of the public headers: class and struct definitions, their member functions by access, and free functions.