BITCOIN CORE 32.0 IS TAGGED — 29.X LOSES SUPPORT AND FLAWS FIXED IN 30.0 GO PUBLIC TWO WEEKS AFTER RELEASE — 47% TO 56% OF CORE NODES RUN 29 OR OLDER

Bitcoin Core tagged version 32.0 final at 13:27 UTC on October 21, 2026. The release notes say that with this major version, 29.x and older are at “End of Life” and will get no more updates. They also say that in two weeks the project will disclose the medium and high severity vulnerabilities fixed in 30.0: “There are 3 of these.” As of 15:00 UTC, bitcoincore.org had test builds for rc2 through rc4 but no final 32.0 binaries and no release page, so the formal release is still to come.

The project's security policy explains the timing. Medium and high severity bugs are disclosed “2 weeks after the last affected release goes End of Life.” Read together, the notes and the policy say the last line still waiting on those three disclosures is 29.x. Once 32.0 ships, that wait ends.

So who still runs 29 or older? You can count it yourself. A Bitnodes snapshot at 14:41 UTC on October 21 found 21,813 reachable Bitcoin Core nodes, and 10,259 of them, 47.0%, reported version 29 or older. Luke Dashjr's crawl data, updated at 14:02 UTC, has 2,351 of 4,741 listening Core nodes, 49.6%, on 29 or older, and 56.1% once his estimate of unreachable nodes is added. Knots nodes are left out of both. Version strings are self-reported, so this is a range, not a census.

The notes also fix a privacy leak. With private broadcast on, if a v2 connection failed, the v1 retry could skip Tor and connect directly over IPv4 or IPv6, exposing the sender's IP. None of this asks you to trust anyone. The tag is signed, the notes are public, and the bug details follow in two weeks. A node still on 29 by then runs code whose holes are written down for everyone to read. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,627