Good Morning, Bitcoin - Saturday, February 1st, 2025

News

• The first-ever Bitcoin telehash fundraiser has successfully found a block. Block 881,423, mined by the 256 Foundation during the Telehash event, marks the first time a fundraiser has been conducted through Bitcoin hashrate. It raised 3.146 BTC in rewards to advance free and open-source Bitcoin mining software, firmware, and hardware solutions.

• The 256 Foundation also partnered with Block's mining team, Proto. The team has donated "up to 256K BZM2 ASIC chips to the foundation," allowing them to allocate these resources to emerging mining projects at their discretion.
• Tether and Lightning Labs have teamed up to bring USDT to Lightning Network. The integration will utilize Taproot Assets, a protocol that enables interoperability between stablecoins and a range of other assets issued on Bitcoin and moved via the Lightning rails.
• Tether reports $13 billion in net profits for 2024. According to a Q4 and year-end attestation published on Friday, the stablecoin issuer generated $13 billion in net profits for 2024, including $6 billion in Q4 alone. Tether also saw its direct and indirect exposure to US Treasuries reach a record high of $113 billion, and its excess reserves soared past $7 billion, marking a 36% year-over-year increase. The firm also increased its bitcoin holdings to nearly 84,000 BTC valued at ~$7.8 billion at the end of 2024.
• Czech National Bank (CNB) approves proposal to further explore investing in bitcoin. The Bank Board will decide on further steps based on the analysis results. Any changes to reserve portfolios will be disclosed in the CNB's quarterly international reserves information and annual report, was stated in a press release.
• South Dakota and Missouri lawmakers introduce Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bills:
  • South Dakota Representative Logan Manhart introduced two new legislative proposals to incorporate Bitcoin (BTC) into the state’s investment strategy. HB 1202 would allow the state to allocate 10% of its public funds to bitcoin, while HCR 6006 urges the State Investment Council to explore bitcoin as a hedge against inflation.
  • Missouri Senator Travis Fitzwater introduced SB614, which would permit the State Treasurer to allocate up to 10% of public funds to bitcoin, and includes provisions to protect the rights to self-custody and mining.
• Arkansas state Senate rejects mining ban near military facilities. The state's governors have voted against a proposal to restrict Bitcoin mining operations within a 30 mile radius of military facilities, including hospitals and military clinics, reports Atlas21.
• Grayscale launches an ETF tracking public Bitcoin miners. The fund offers investors exposure to the broader Bitcoin mining sector, with holdings in 23 companies involved in proprietary Bitcoin mining or hosting businesses, as well as chip giants Intel and Nvidia.
• Trump's executive order sideswipes freedom tools - EFF. The executive order, called Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, has led the State Department to immediately suspend contracts with hundreds of organizations supported through its programs, including those from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. This impacts many freedom technologies that use cryptography to fight censorship and protect freedom of speech, privacy, and anonymity. While limited waivers have been issued, they do not appear to cover open source internet freedom technologies, reports the EFF.

Updates and releases

• Joltz has launched Joltz Wallet (beta) on iOS TestFlight, with an Android release expected in about a week. It is the first self-custody wallet for Taproot Assets. Users can already test sending USDT tokens, though developers are currently using wrapped USDT on Taproot Assets, backed 1:1 by USDT issued Ethereum, until USDT is formally issued on Taproot Assets protocol by Tether.

👀A quick demo for how to receive and send on-chain Taproot Assets in the Joltz Wallet! pic.twitter.com/vy8JOlj9uI

— Joltz (@Joltz_btc) January 31, 2025

• Tribe RGB v0.2.6 is a variation of the Bitcoin Tribe wallet, focused solely on issuing, sending, and receiving assets issued on the RGB protocol. It is currently available on Android and iOS for testing RGB assets on testnet/regnet. The latest update brings a revamped home screen, ability to invalidate RGB transactions, adds a registry implementation, and invoices now include Asset ID and Amount, making transaction tracking easier and more efficient.

• BlueWallet v7.0.9 has been released with several bug fixes and improvements.
• Notedeck v0.3.0 Alpha 2 by Damus marks the first Notedeck release available to the general public. This release includes media uploads, post hashtags, profile editing, an enhanced command-line interface for user interactions, and various improvements and bug fixes.
• Rust-nostr v0.39.0 is now available. It is a Nostr SDK that helps developers build fast and secure Nostr protocol apps for desktop, web, and mobile. Rust crates can be easily integrated into environments like Swift, Kotlin, Python, and JavaScript, offering versatility for development.
  • v0.39.0 adds NIP-96 support, NIP-22 helpers, NIP-01 adjustments, improved connection handling methods, custom WebSocket client support (Rust, Python, Kotlin, Swift), new JVM bindings, reduced UniFFI bindings binary size, and various cleanups, refactoring, and performance enhancements.
• Freeflow is a proof-of-concept for a TitTok-like app running on the Nostr protocol. Try it out here.

• Pinja.in is a simple pinboard app built with Osty, a free and open-source framework for building web apps on the Nostr protocol.

• Stratum v2 Benchmarking Tool v0.1.1 is a patch release that fixes some recently discovered bugs and introduces significant improvements for running benchmarks on the mainnet.

• Coinos.io, a free and open-source Bitcoin web wallet with Lightning and ecash support, announced that an attacker was able to retrieve password reset codes for a certain number of users. About 80 accounts had their passwords reset, but only few had their funds stolen. The vulnerability has been patched, although some users might be missing recent transactions.

"We'll be reverting unsolicited withdrawals and covering all losses ourselves to make all our users whole. Thankfully we caught the attack relatively quickly and managed to take corrective action before the attacker had time to fully drain our wallets," said the project.

Other stuff

• Bitvocation has released its 2024 Bitcoin Job Market data report. Get it here.

• Bitcoin Optech #339 newsletter describes a vulnerability affecting older versions of LDK, examines a newly disclosed aspect of a vulnerability originally published in 2023, and summarizes renewed discussion about compact block reconstruction statistics.
• HRF's Financial Freedom Report #59 is now available. Check out the latest stories on how currency plays a critical role in civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes.

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