BITCOIN CORE 32.0RC2 IS /sessions/rcw-019fqds6kj8u9tsyrwfdy1sq/mnt/Mempolitics/_state/queue_desk_2026-09-29.json FOR TESTING — DEFAULT PEER SLOTS GO FROM 125 TO 200 — A NEW EXPORT BUILDS A WATCH-ONLY WALLET WITH NO PRIVATE KEYS — A PRIVATE-BROADCAST TOR LEAK IS FIXED

Bitcoin Core posted the second test build of version 32.0 on September 29, 2026. It is a release candidate, not the release. The announcement from maintainer fanquake says it will be tagged 32.0 only when no critical problems are found.

The change most node runners will notice: the default cap on automatic peer connections goes from 125 to 200. The extra room is meant for block-relay-only peers. Peers that relay transactions can take at most half of the inbound slots unless you change it. To keep the old behavior, the release notes say to set -maxconnections=125 and -inboundrelaypercent=100.

For self-custody, a new command, exportwatchonlywallet, writes a copy of a wallet with its public descriptors, transactions and address book, and no private keys. The offline signing tutorial now uses it. Your online node can watch the coins while the keys stay on a machine that never goes online.

Two fixes are worth knowing. With private broadcast turned on, a failed v2 connection could retry over plain IPv4 or IPv6 without Tor and expose the sender's IP address. That is fixed. And on non-Windows systems, an RPC user allowed to create wallets could run commands on the machine through a crafted wallet name when -walletnotify was set. Also fixed. Test it on a node you can afford to break. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,023.