Good Morning, Bitcoin - Friday, January 24th, 2025

What's new

• President Trump issues executive order to create a working group on digital assets. The order is intended to set the direction of the White House digital asset policy, focusing on protecting and promoting digital asset users and developers without unlawful censorship, supporting the development of dollar-backed stablecoins, ensuring fair and open access to banking services, providing regulatory clarity based on technology-neutral regulations, and prohibiting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

"The Working Group shall evaluate the potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile and propose criteria for establishing such a stockpile, potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the Federal Government through its law enforcement efforts," the order states.

• US SEC rescinds Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) 121. The SEC issued Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) 122, which revokes the contentious SAB 121, and permits financial institutions that hold bitcoin and other digital assets for their customers to decide if the held digital assets should be reported as a liability. This should enable US financial institutions to offer bitcoin and cryptocurrency services with fewer regulatory hurdles.
• Trump orders US withdrawal from OECD. The US President directed the Secretary of the Treasury, the US Trade Representative, and the Permanent Representative to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to inform the OECD that commitments made by the previous administration "with respect to the Global Tax Deal have no force or effect within the United States absent an act by the Congress adopting the relevant provisions of the Global Tax Deal."
• Senator Lummis to lead the Senate Banking subcommittee on digital assets. Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott has appointed Lummis as the inaugural chair of the newly established Senate panel focused on digital assets.

• US Federal Court rules backdoor searches of Section 702 data unconstitutional. A federal judge has ruled that the federal government's method of searching through information incidentally collected on US-based individuals violates the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. The landmark ruling comes from the criminal case United States v. Hasbajrami, following more than a decade of litigation.
• Breez raises $5M to bring bitcoin payments to every app. The company has announced raising a $5 million funding round from Entrée Capital, ego death capital, Plan ₿ Fund, and Timechain.
• Blockstream launches Blockstream Asset Management (BAM). The company announced the launch of Blockstream Asset Management and two Bitcoin-based investment funds, the Blockstream Income Fund and the Blockstream Alpha Fund, set to open in Q1 2025. These funds target institutions and accredited investors seeking secure Bitcoin investments. Additionally, the Blockstream Yield Fund will be released later this year, offering consistent, low-risk returns for Bitcoin holders, per blog post by Blockstream.
• Rumble announces Rumble Wallet. The CEO of the video sharing and cloud computing platform, Chris Pavlovski, confirmed the development of Rumble Wallet, adding that it is "a massive internal project which creates a new way for creators to transact" with BTC and USDT. Rumble raised $755M from Tether last month, and has started purchasing bitcoin for its reserves. Besides, the company recently signed a Cloud Agreement with the Government of El Salvador.

• Block Inc. hit with $255 million in back to back fines. Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered Block, the parent company of Cash App and Square, refund up to $120 million for fraud losses and pay a $55 million fine to the CFPB's victims relief fund. Earlier, Block also agreed to pay $80 million to state regulators over anti-money laundering issues.
• Ledger co-founder and his wife freed after ransom kidnapped. David Balland, co-founder of Ledger, and his wife, were kidnapped from ther home in France early Tuesday and released Wednesday night following a police operation. According to the prosecutor’s office, the kidnappers demanded a large ransom in cryptocurrency.
  • According to sources close to the case, the kidnappers accepted ransom in Tether (USDT), which was quickly seized and frozen. Eight people have been arrested thus far in connection with the kidnappings.

• Phemex exchange reportedly hacked of $29M. The Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange has halted withdrawals after reports of a hack. One of its hot wallets was reportedly drained of $29 million worth of cryptocurrencies.
• Kansas Senator proposes bill to invest public pension funds into Bitcoin ETFs. Kansas Republican Senator Craig Bowser has introduced Bill No. 34, a proposal that would allow public pension funds to allocate up to 10% of their assets to spot Bitcoin ETFs.
• Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town 2025 kicked off in South Africa today. Tune into the event livestreams and check out its agenda here.
• The Baltcoin Honeybadger 2025 conference is set to take place on August 9-10, 2025. More details are coming soon.
• OP_NEXT 2025 to take place on April 11-12, 2025. OP_NEXT is a Bitcoin scaling conference that brings Bitcoin stakeholders together to discuss new ideas how to bring Bitcoin to the next billion users. It will take place at the MicroStrategy HQ in Tysons, VA.

Use the tools

• Plebeian App launches new and update Plebean.market site.

"The Plebeian app is proud to announce the launch of its Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a decentralized marketplace and community builder that empowers individuals to sell their value in a peer-to-peer open marketplace. After four years of development and multiple pivots, the Plebeian app has settled on NOSTR to demonstrate a proof of concept that is poised to disrupt traditional commerce," the team said in a press release shared with No Bullshit Bitcoin.

• Blixt Wallet v0.7.1, an open source Lightning Bitcoin Wallet for Android and iOS, powered by LND and the Bitcoin SPV client Neutrino, updates LND to v0.18.4.
• Blockstream Green Desktop v2.0.18 reverts Qt to 6.8.0 to fix crash on macOS Intel, and prevents overflow in the unit selector.
• MullvadVPN has reportedly started experimenting with accepting Lightning payments. The feature is currently in beta.

• Boltz Client v2.3.7 is a patch release that fixes an issue with the version of the binaries. It now also allows for querying submarine swaps by their payment hash in the client's gRPC interface.
• Taproot Assets v0.5.1-alpha RC is now available for testing.
• Amber v3.1.9, a Nostr event signer for Android, adds missing logs for relay errors and changes the listen for new connections button text and icons.
• Citrine v0.7.1, a local Nostr relay for Android, now listens for Pokey broadcasts, brings back the restore follows button, and adds a notification when backing up the database.
• Burak shared a demo for NOIST. It's a non-interactive, single-session (t)-of-(n) threshold signature scheme where multiple untrusted entities jointly produce digital signatures in constant time. A disruptive signer can't force a session restart, and the output is a single 64-byte BIP-340 compatible Schnorr signature.
  • Learn why it matters for Brollup here. Code, test vectors and formal spec are available here. "Please note that there is currently no formal security proof, and the spec is subject to change," added the developer.

Other stuff

• Dustin Dannenhauer shared an update on the performance of DVMDash, a monitoring and debugging tool for Data Vending Machine (DVM) activity on Nostr.
• Matt Crosby published a deep dive into Bitcoin’s on-chain metrics, market sentiment, and macro perspective.
• Hashrate Index released the 2024 Bitcoin Mining Year review. Read the full report here.

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