Over the past three years, we’ve been developing Floresta, a lightweight and embeddable Bitcoin client designed to be easy to run, integrate, and flexible for developers. From the beginning, our goal has been to make it easier for more people to use Bitcoin to its full potential.
When the project started, there was no fully defined roadmap. Development was largely guided by practical needs, ideas, and pain points we encountered during our own experience using and building on Bitcoin.
Today, Floresta has reached a much higher level of maturity. It can download and verify blocks, track wallets, and expose commonly used interfaces, allowing existing wallets and applications to connect to it out of the box.
Floresta runs as a single binary that can be used either as a standalone service or embedded directly into applications. This approach lowers the barrier for users who prefer a single, simple installation.
Alongside feature development, we have invested heavily in overall project quality. This includes expanding test coverage, improving documentation, refining the codebase structure, and formalizing processes around commits, merges, releases, and pull request reviews. While these changes may not be immediately visible to end users, they are fundamental to Floresta's reliability, collaboration, workflow, and long-term maintainability.
What began as a personal side project has grown into an active collaborative effort, with five regular contributors and over thirty contributors overall. As the project evolved, it became clear that Floresta needed a stronger and more consistent identity. To support its next phase of growth, we’re introducing a complete visual identity. While our focus has always been on correctness and reliability, a clear identity also plays an important role in recognition and trust.
We are also launching an institutional website to serve as a clear entry point for newcomers and contributors. This website centralizes documentation, updates, and social channels, and it represents the public face of the project going forward.
As part of this transition, Floresta is moving to its own GitHub organization. The project initially lived under Davidson’s personal account and later under Vinteum’s GitHub organization. While Vinteum continues to play an important role by supporting developers and contributing to non-code efforts such as project management, coordination across communication channels, organizing an in-person retreat for the team, sponsored by the Human Rights Foundation, and sponsoring the new visual identity, Floresta is no longer sponsored by a single organization.
Today, it receives support from multiple groups, making a dedicated and neutral home more appropriate. This change allows us to better organize related repositories and auxiliary tools under a shared namespace.
Looking ahead, we are working on several initiatives to further improve Floresta. These include implementing new techniques to reduce data requirements and speed up initial block download, expanding and refining the interfaces used to communicate with Floresta, completing mempool support, improving wallet user experience, enabling reproducible builds for stronger security guarantees, and continuing to grow our already extensive test suite.
We are also seeing new projects being built on top of Floresta, reinforcing its flexibility and its role as a foundation for higher-level Bitcoin applications.
With these developments, Floresta is becoming a versatile tool for bitcoiners who care deeply about sovereignty and privacy. We would like to thank everyone who has been part of this process, including contributors, reviewers, and those who provided valuable feedback and criticism along the way. We are especially grateful to our main contributors, who improve Floresta every day, to Vinteum for the consistent and foundational support since the early days, and to OpenSats for its continued support over the past years. We have high expectations for Floresta’s future, and hope that everyone joins us in this journey!