Bitcoin Core v32 feature freeze nears; rebase blocks v1 patches

Bitcoin Core will enter a v32 feature freeze on Aug. 20. After that date, the project will prioritize bug fixes, translations and release preparation rather than new features.

The project’s milestone tracker shows 79 closed items and 17 still open as of Aug. 17, about 82% complete. The open entries include feature pull requests, bug reports, build and logging work, testing failures and release-administration tasks. The raw count reflects unfinished work rather than a ranked list of blockers.

Maintainers plan to freeze translation strings on Aug. 20, cut the 32.x branch and publish v32.0rc1 on Sept. 10, and tag v32.0 on Oct. 10. New development for v33 is expected to resume on the master branch after the branch split. Bug fixes may still be reviewed before the release candidate is issued; feature pull requests that miss the Aug. 20 cutoff will follow the v33 track.

Two open changes in the milestone carry a “Needs rebase” label. One would allow node operators to refuse unencrypted v1 outbound clearnet connections. The other would cap the number of simultaneous HTTP clients. “Needs rebase” indicates the patches no longer apply cleanly to the current codebase and require updates before maintainers can assess them, leaving their inclusion in v32 unresolved.

A wallet compatibility fix in the milestone addresses a case where a recomputed descriptor identifier differs from a stored record for Miniscript descriptor wallets. The change aims to preserve access to existing wallets after an identifier mismatch. A single upgrade-related load failure was reported when moving from v29.2 to v31.1; the broader prevalence and root cause of that error have not been established in the milestone notes.

Other active items include a fee-estimation proposal that would use mempool data only to lower the existing block-policy recommendation, intended to reduce overpayment while retaining the estimator’s higher safety bound. Work on private-broadcast seeks to limit state growth tied to rebroadcast behavior. A separate v1 retry test failure also remains listed.

The documented v32 schedule covers software packaging, testing and release administration. Changes to consensus rules are not part of the v32 plan. The Aug. 20 freeze will determine which feature pull requests remain on the v32 path and which must wait for v33, while qualifying bug fixes may still be merged during the release-candidate cycle.