Bitcoin Arena 2026.1.9.24

Bitcoin Arena 2026.1.9.24

Bitcoin Arena is a set of games and prediction markets played for bitcoin, with no central server. The nodes are the arena:

• they hold the rounds;
• they check every run or outcome;
• they sign the results;
• their federations keep the players' stakes.

This release lets anyone run a node on testnet4.

What changed

The project has a new home

• The main site is bitcoinarena.io. Links from a node, the owner page and the installer go there; the old addresses forward with the path kept.
• The source is at github.com/bitcoinarena.

New nodes reach the chain again

• A node's built-in Electrum, Esplora and faucet addresses work again. In 2026.1.9.23 they did not answer, so a node whose first chain server failed had to wait for the next public one.
• The node dashboards list, the guardians page and the wallet link work again.

A lighter node

• GET /reserves answers from a kept body instead of reading everything again for each caller.
• The retry for a closed paid round reads from the locks, not from all rounds. Before, this could hold a node for seconds on a large store.

Paid rounds

• A node signs no empty liquidity seating, and reads an empty one again until a full one stands. Before, a restart at the wrong moment left the seating empty and paid entries failed for that epoch.

Everything in 2026.1.9.23 is included.

Install it

• macOS: bitcoin-arena-node-2026.1.9.24-darwin-arm64.dmg (Apple silicon) or -darwin-x64.dmg (Intel). Open it, drag Bitcoin Arena to Applications. Before you open it the first time, run this in Terminal:

  xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Bitcoin Arena.app"
  

  The app is not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS blocks a downloaded copy ("Apple could not verify..."); on macOS 15 and later right-click → Open no longer gets past that. The command removes the quarantine mark the browser puts on downloaded files, so macOS opens the app. Only do this for the DMG from this release page, after checking it against SHA256SUMS. Without Terminal: try to open the app once, then System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

• Windows: bitcoin-arena-node-setup-2026.1.9.24-windows-x64.exe.

• Linux and by hand: bitcoin-arena-node-2026.1.9.24-<os>-<arch>.tar.gz / .zip, or the .deb.

• A node updates by itself (2026.1.9.8 and older look for a new release every 6 hours, 2026.1.9.9 and later every 30 minutes), or right away with arenanode update (from 2026.1.9.8 on: bitcoinarena update).

Commit 986fd44. SHA256SUMS is signed with the Bitcoin Arena release key (SHA256SUMS.sig).

Custody binaries of the fork 7e8caa9fd3a

gatewayd, fedimintd and fedimint-cli for every release system, built on the MacBook by tools/release/custody-build.sh from the patched fork 7e8caa9fd3a (kanban #576: a new guardian's default broadcast round delay is 50 ms, fedimint's own). Only fedimintd changed from custody-76012ad9; gatewayd and fedimint-cli are the same files. Checksums: SHA256SUMS.custody.

Custody binaries 5fa01c5d

gatewayd, fedimintd and fedimint-cli of the patched fork 5fa01c5d7e6 (upstream v0.12.2 with the LNv2 gateway fixes + the BLWP commits of 7e8caa9fd3a), built by tools/release/custody-build.sh (kanban #584). SHA-256 in SHA256SUMS.custody.

Custody binaries (fedimint fork 76012ad9119)

gatewayd, fedimintd and fedimint-cli of the patched Fedimint fork 76012ad9119 (branch blwp/testnet4-v0.12.1), built on the MacBook by tools/release/custody-build.sh: stripped, no jemalloc, Linux against glibc 2.31. The node release build fetches them by pinned SHA-256 (build-release.sh step 3b). Not for direct use.