Bitcoin Core 31.0 Released
Bitcoin Core 31.0 was released with substantial mempool and node-policy changes, including continued movement toward cluster-mempool architecture rather than a routine maintenance-only version increment.
Bitcoin Core 31.0 was released on April 19, 2026. The release continued a significant redesign of transaction and mempool handling, including work associated with cluster mempool and package-aware policy, alongside networking, wallet, RPC, and performance changes.
Cluster mempool is historically important because it changes how Bitcoin Core reasons about groups of related unconfirmed transactions. Traditional ancestor-and-descendant limits can become difficult to manage as transaction relationships grow more complex; grouping related transactions into bounded clusters provides a more systematic foundation for fee-rate comparison, eviction, and future relay-policy improvements.
No consensus rules changed simply because users installed Core 31.0. The importance of the release was architectural: it moved an important transaction-policy redesign further into the production node software used across the Bitcoin network. That clears the timeline’s technical-significance threshold more convincingly than an ordinary point release.