Good Morning, Bitcoin - Wednesday, February 5th, 2025

News

• David Sacks, House and Senate leaders say Bitcoin Reserve, market structure bill, and stablecoin legislation are priorities. Sacks highlighted that maintaining innovation within the country is essential for the U.S. to remain a global leader in financial technology. To support this goal, he announced the formation of a joint working group between the House and Senate focused on cryptocurrency legislation. Speaking of Bitcoin, he said that it's one of the administration's priorities:

"We're in the initial phases currently. One of our priorities will be to assess the feasibility of establishing a Bitcoin Reserve," Sacks said, adding that the sovereign wealth fund recently announced by President Trump is a separate matter.

• Senator Bill Hagerty has also introduced a stablecoin bill titled "The GENIUS Act." Senator Tim Scott aims to prioritize passing it through Congress before addressing a broader cryptocurrency market bill. The intention is to have both bills ready for the President within the administration’s first 100 days.

• U.S. SEC announces Crypto Task Force priorities, scales back enforcement division. The task force, led by Commissioner Hester Peirce, will focus on identifying which crypto assets are securities and aims to classify some tokens as "non-securities." This could alter registration processes for firms and clarify exchange-traded product approvals. Meanwhile, the agency is downsizing by relocating some staff members, including key lawyers, to other SEC departments, reports the NY Times.
• Swiss banking authority FinMa overstepped its authority in implementing new KYC rules. A leaked email revealed that FinMa instructed independent regulatory bodies to impose a 1,000 CHF monthly limit on no-KYC Virtual Asset Service Providers. A lawsuit claims FinMa abused its authority by secretly attempting to regulate the Swiss cryptocurrency market, reports The Rage.

• Semler Scientific buys additional 871 BTC. Semler Scientific bought 871 BTC for $88.5 million, averaging $101,616 per coin. The company now holds 3192 BTC at a total cost of $280.4 million.
• Genius Group added $2 million more worth of bitcoin to its treasury. The firm now holds a total of 440 BTC acquired for $42 million, at an average price of $95,519 per bitcoin.
• Taproot Wizards raises $30 million to advance the OP_CAT functionality. The Ordinals project raised additional funds, similar to its previous $7.5 million round, to enhance efforts in "making Bitcoin magical again," according to the project's co-founder Udi Wertheimer. The funding round was led by Standard Crypto, an early Taproot Wizards supporter, with contributions from Cyberfund, Geometry, Collider Ventures, and others.
• Fold expands relationship with Visa. The company is expanding its collaboration with Visa to introduce innovative bitcoin rewards card programs. This includes Fold’s flagship debit card and upcoming credit card products, using Visa’s shared services and incentives to enhance rewards.
• Blockstream opens new office in Tokyo. The company announced the opening of a new office in Tokyo to expand its global presence. It will partner with Diamond Hands and Fulgur Ventures in the region. The move aims to promote the adoption of Bitcoin Layer-2 solutions and self-custody technologies in Japan, as well as the tokenization of real-world assets.
• Bitdeer acquires 101 MW natural glass plant in Alberta, Canada, for $21.7M. The firm plans to energize its facilities by Q4 2026 through a partnership with an engineering and construction company. It also intends to build a 99 MW data center for Bitcoin mining on the site. Bitdeer views this as a key step toward becoming the first fully integrated Bitcoin mining firm, managing proprietary ASIC chips, data center infrastructure, and power generation capacity.
• Northern Nigeria Bitcoin seminar and Lightning development bootcamp will take place on May 5-9 at the Kaduna State University. It is a free 5-day event for individuals who want to level-up their Bitcoin skills and gain hands-on experience. Register here.
• Mining Disrupt 2025 conference is set to take place on March 25-27 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is said to be the world's largest Bitcoin mining conference and expo. Get your tickets here.

Use the tools

• SeedSigner v0.8.5: En Español is the project's first multilingual release, now available in both English and Spanish. This version also enables basic P2TR (Pay-to-Taproot) address verification and includes a light refresh of some UX elements.
• Sparrow Wallet v2.1.1 is a bug fix release that addresses a technical issue when scanning for USB hardware wallets on certain macOS devices. It also fixes error parsing responses from Jade DIY devices with additional firmware version information.
• Bisq v2.1.3 pre-release is now available for testing. It introduces new reputation requirements for traders, adds a new profile card, improves the offer wizard, and more.
• Tribe RGB v0.2.7, a mobile Bitcoin wallet for managing Bitcoin and RGB assets, adds the ability to issue non-fung assets with unique characteristics, send assets instantly as donations, optional registry listing, UTXO overview, improved UI, and more.

• jamesob wrote a standalone BIP-32 library in C with minimal dependencies.
• Blockstream Green Android v4.1.5 enables fee discount for confidential Liquid transactions.
• Dana wallet v0.3.0, an Android wallet for accepting bitcoin donations via Silent Payments, is now available. It now displays available balance above the amount field, adds 'reset to default' option, implements simple automatic coin selection, and more.
• Nunchuk Android v1.9.60 pre-release brings support for Android 15.
• Vortex v1.1, a Raycast extension that allows you to control any Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) wallet or node on macOS devices, adds the ability to receive bitcoin via ecash tokens and claim LNURL-withdraw invoices, implements fiat amounts and fiat denominated invoices, and improves the view of transactions list and details.

• bullishNuts v2.0.0 makes cashuB tokens the only format for sending ecash, while users can still receive cashuA tokens into the wallet.
• Cashu Dev Kit v0.6.1 and cdk-mint v0.6.2 are now available.
• Bitcoin financial services firm River introduced a Zero Fees plan for open-source Bitcoin contributors and members of non-profits that aid the funding of Bitcoin developers. Eligible participants must be based in the United States.
• The privacy-focused search engine Kagi has switched to a fair pricing mode, among some other service improvements and enhancements.
• SimpleX Chat v6.3.0-beta.2 is now available for testing. It adds mentions-only notifications mode for groups, fast group deletion, supports on-device message expiration per chat, and more.
• GrapheneOS v2025020500 is a full February security patch release.

Other stuff

• Today's Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting will discuss cluster mempool and TxGraph. It will begin at 17:00 UTC in the #bitcoin-core-pr-reviews IRC channel on libera.chat. Notes and other details are available here.
• Atlas21 has written a guide on how to start using the Liquid Network.
• Lighspark Engineering has published a case study on building Sparknodes using the Lightning Dev Kit (LDK).

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