v25.02 release candidate: NAME-GOES-HERE

This release was named by XXX

Highlights for users:

• Channel backup turns our peers into watchtowers by now allowing your node to generate penalty transactions!
• blacklisted runes can now be restored via relist.
• xpay has many, many bugfixes, and is now almost seamlessly compatible when xpay-handle-pay is used.
• lightning-cli has neater help output, and doesn't crash occasionally on xpay notifications.
• setconfig does more safety checks and uses a separate "config.setconfig" file for runtime changes: you can also now set transient=true if you don't want the config files changed.
• Fixed a bug where we would fail to collect our own funds if we force closed a channel we had leased with --experimental-dual-fund.

Highlights for the network:

• BOLT12 offers now use a blinded path if the node has no advertised address.
• Splicing: stricter checking for better interoperability with Eclair.

Highlights for developers:

• clnrest is now a rust plugin.
• listpeerchannels now contains fields their_max_htlc_value_in_flight and our_max_htlc_value_in_flight to better calculate channel limits.
• New notifications plugin_stopped and plugin_started.
• fetchinvoice now has BIP353 DNS payment instruction support.

Since 24.11.1, we had 242 commits in 68 days from 21 different authors, including three new ones:

• Nishant Bansal
• gudnuf
• Erick λ

Thank you from the Core Lightning Team:
@endothermicdev, @rustyrussell, @cdecker, @nepet, @ShahanaFarooqui, and @niftynei.