Good Morning, Bitcoin - Friday, August 23rd, 2024

GM. Today is Friday, August 23rd, also know as Segwit Activation Day. Here are some of the latest news and important project updates you may want to check out.

What's happening

• Spiral grants. Nick Johnson is the latest Spiral grantee. He is working on improving privacy with BIP324, a Rust library that enables light client encrypted messages.
  • Spiral also renewed grant for Alyssa Hertig, who is working on LNDK, which aims to implement BOLT 12 functionality externally to LND.
• FinCEN's regular wallet KYC proposal officially dead. In 2020, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed KYC requirements for regular Bitcoin wallets, prompting immense backlash from the industry. The proposal faced a major setback when the comment period was extended by 15 days, ensuring President Joe Biden would be in office instead of Trump/Mnuchin. Although the rule occasionally resurfaced, it was never seriously reconsidered. Finally, on August 19, 2024, the proposal was officially withdrawn.
• Tim Draper leads $2.5m funding round for Ark Labs. Ark Labs announced the completion of a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Tim Draper and his firm, Draper Associates.

• Germany Bitcoin ATM raid. German authorities confiscated $28 million and 13 Bitcoin ATMs in a nationwide operation targeting unlicensed activities.
• Bitfarms to acquire stronghold digital mining. Bitfarms will expand its U.S. bitcoin mining capacity via a $125 million stock-for-stock merger with Stronghold Digital, also assuming $50 million in debt. CEO Ben Gagnon stated the deal follows three years of discussions.
• Riot Platforms nears 20% stake in Bitfarms. The company invested $10 million more since August 15 to acquire 4.5 million additional Bitfarms shares, totaling 19.9% holdings as of August 20, reports The Miner Mag. Bitfarms adopted a "poison pill" strategy, granting shareholders one right per share, exercisable if any entity acquires 20%+ of Bitfarms' shares without a "Permitted Bid."
• Lightning startup TMRW raised $1.3M to develop a social, cross-border payment app leveraging the Lightning Network for speed and low fees for remittances.
• Gryphon Digital Mining acquired ultra low-cost Bitcoin mining operations at ~$0.01/kWh. The company has entered into an agreement to acquire up to 2.9 MW of Bitcoin mining operations powered by ultra low-cost electricity in the $0.01/kWh range in Louisiana, at a cost of $1.5 million.

Use the tools

• Fully Noded - Join Market - a dedicated Join Market native iOS client is now available on the TestFlight. Get it here.
• Fountain v1.1. Fountain, a Lightning-powered value-for-value podcasting app, is now a Nostr client. Your Fountain profile syncs with your Nostr profile, making your activity visible across the Nostr ecosystem.
• RGB v0.11 beta 7 released. This release features many bug fixes and improvements, such as introspection of global contract state from scripts, improved handling of blockchain re-orgs and RBFs, improved Lightning operations, hot Taproot RGB wallets, efficient managing of RGB contract state in enterprise and embedded environments, and support for Mempool API and Testnet4.
• Blockstream Green mobile v4.0.32 for both iOS and Android is here. Both versions update Breez to v0.5.2 and GDK to v0.72.2. The Android version now allows for custom gap limits on personal Electrum servers and adding comments on LNURL payments, while the iOS app comes with improved LNURL auth and withdraw.
• BitAxe Bot. This tool allows you to view stats and overclock or underclock your mining machine remotely via a Telegram bot.
• BlueWallet v7.0.2 fixes several bugs and adds total balance in the overview screen.
• BitBanana v0.8.5 adds BOLT12 support for Core Lightning Nodes, BOLT 12 contact types, Lightning Terminal accounts support for LND nodes, and more.
• Trezor Suite v24.8.3 impleents enhanced protection against counterfeit devices for Trezor Model One and Trezor Model T.
• Multisig bitcoin vault maker Theya has launched a buy bitcoin feature for its US-based users. Additionally, it now supports a QR code-based interaction with Foundation devices.

🚨 Excited to announce that Theya app now supports QR code-based interaction with Foundation devices —no computer or microSDs needed!

🔥 Easily sign transactions and add @FOUNDATIONdvcs to your multisig vault in a seamless, secure manner. Start using it today! pic.twitter.com/PnbJPJhkUT

— Theya Inc (@TheyaBitcoin) August 22, 2024

• Stacker.news integrated a random sort section for posts, as well as support for NWC receive strings for NWC attached wallets.
• Nodeyez v24.08, a tool for producing various display panels based on your Bitcoin node, comes with numerous updates and bug fixes.
• Mostro Web Client v0.0.27, a Nostr-based P2P bitcoin client, implements new color schemes, basic dispute resolution, and improved event management for private messages, among other things.
• Npub.pro launched experimental support for importing content from Ghost to Nostr.
• Coracle v0.4.9 is a maintenance release adds person zaps, restores the delete function, fixes group notifications, and includes other quality-of-life improvements.
• Amber v1.31 now groups multiple events, fixes issues with reject button, and updates project's dependencies.
• The latest Nostur TestFlight update adds early preview of Nostr Nests integration, adds live streams integration with chats, and more.
• GrapheneOS v2024082200 fixes a regression introduced in previous release.

Other stuff

• Rusty Russell joined Brink engineers to discuss the Great Script Restoration proposal.

• The latest issue of the Bitcoin Optech newsletter summarizes a discussion about an anti-exfiltration protocol that only requires one round trip of communication between a wallet and a signing device.
• Check out this small demo of a stock data API using L402 using Replit in less than 100 lines of code by fewsats.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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