It's January 3rd as I'm writing these lines. Genesis day. Bitcoin's 17th birthday. It's curious that Bitcoin's birthday lines up with the start of a new year: a time to reflect, a time to look back at the year that has passed.

The little thing that Satoshi launched into the world is not so little anymore. Not fully grown up, but also not a kid anymore. A teenager. More successful than most teenagers, but still a teenager.

So: where are we in terms of Bitcoin's development? There's the obvious part and the not-so-obvious part. Let's do the obvious first: Nation states hold BTC on their balance sheets. Serious people with serious suits and serious companies talk about it on TV, in a non-dismissive (serious) way. If you bring it up in conversation you don't get laughed out of the room anymore. While most people have heard of Bitcoin by now, it is probably fair to say that for the vast majority contact was peripheral and understanding superficial. Consequently, only a small percentage use it in a self-sovereign way. In absolute terms, however, the number is growing. The mainstream association now seems to be squarely in the "asset" and "digital gold" quadrant, as opposed to "speculation" a couple of years ago, or gambling and shady internet money used exclusively for questionable things before that.

Now to the not-so-obvious part: Bitcoin is still alive. It has operated for seventeen years, mostly quietly, mostly in the background. A new block has been mined every 10 minutes. Over 900,000 blocks since genesis, moving trillions of sats in the process. The cumulative hash rate of the network hit an all-time high: a number so unfathomably large that it's almost impossible to put into perspective. Lightning liquidity hit an all-time high too, and so did the number of merchants accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. It's now easier than ever to live on a bitcoin standard, thanks to countless open-source projects and the services that build upon them. Bitcoin gets more efficient, resilient, and useful by the day. From basic research to fuzz testing to Stratum V2 to Silent Payments to Splicing to open-source tools for merchants and users, OpenSats is funding a myriad of efforts across the stack to support Bitcoin through its teenage years.

Each month, over the last 18 months, we've sent roughly $1,000,000 USD worth of sats to grant recipients in 40+ countries. During the course of 2025 we supported more than 150 active grantees at any point in time: small teams, large teams, educational efforts, and—most importantly—individual developers.



When we reach out to our grantees about progress, we ask three simple questions: How did you spend your time? What are your plans for next quarter? How did you use the funds? We also follow it up with a fourth: Is there anything we could help with?

As we look back at 2025, it is now our turn to answer these questions.

• Announcements
• Allocation
• Donations
• Outlook

...read more at opensats.org