Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, February 25th, 2025

Good morning! Today is Lightning Pizza Day, commemorating the second most well-known pizza purchase by Laszlo Hanyecz, this time using the Lightning Network.

News

• Custodial Lightning wallet LifPay temporarily suspends operations. As part of the wind-down process for the wallets, LifPay users are urged to withdraw their bitcoin within the next 60 days by submitting a withdrawal request.

"After thorough evaluation and in aligned with regulatory requirements, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend LifPay’s operations," said the project.

• OKX will pay a $505 million settlement over unlicensed money transmitting charges. The U.S. Department of Justice announced that the company will pay $84 million in penalties and approximately $421 million in forfeited fees earned from U.S. customers because it did not secure the proper license to operate as a money transmitter.
• Bybit's CEO said the exchange has filled the gap in its ETH reserves following a record $1.4 billion hack, adding that the platform will publish an audited proof of reserves report for full transparency.
• (Micro)Strategy buys 20,356 BTC for $1.9 billion. The firm now holds 499,096 BTC acquired for about $33 billion, with an average purchase price of about $66,357 per coin.
• Metaplanet buys additional 135 BTC. The company now holds 2,235 coins purchased for approximately $182 million. The firm aims to hold 10,000 BTC by the end of 2025 and 21,000 BTC by the end of 2026.
• Onramp and Arch have launched a bitcoin-backed lending service, offering bitcoin-collateralized loans. This service allows borrowers to use their bitcoin holdings as collateral while receiving cash or stablecoins in return.
• BitCare Forum 2025 is an Italian Bitcoin conference taking place in Brescia on May 10. Check out its website here.
• Learning Bitcoin conference is set to take place in Vancouver, Canada on August 16-17, 2025. It is a Bitcoin education conference for individual, families, and businesses. Click here to learn more.

Use the tools

• Bitcoin Keeper v2.0.2 now supports External Key and Specter DIY signing devices for Miniscript vaults, introduces a redesigned manage subscription screen, improves COLDCARD NFC integration, and more.
• Bit.Spenda is a no-KYC Bitcoin payments app for paying fiat merchants via fiat rails in Ghana.

• Frostr a simple t-of-n remote signing and key rotation protocol for Nostr, powered by FROST. Contributors, testers, and reviewers are welcome to test it, identify vulnerabilities, and provide feedback.
• Iris.to implemented double ratchet messaging. It hides message metadata and keeps users' past and future message history safe in case main Nostr private key is compromised. A Typescript library of the implementation is available.

"Thanks to Human Rights Foundation for supporting the project!" said Martti Malmi.

• Fountain app v1.1.17 is now available on iOS and Android. This version rebuilds the authentication flows, addressing issues with accessing the app.
• Coop v0.1.3-alpha, a Nostr direct message client for desktop, is a hotfix release that shows all chats from unknown contacts, improves startup loading speeds, and more.
• Reorg Calculator by The Bitcoin Dev Project computes the probability that an attacker with a given percentage of the total network hashrate could successfully reorganize z blocks.
• Parman launched ParmaDrive, an encrypted data storage device integrated with Parmanode Bitcoin node.
• Orange Pill App integrated a Lightning wallet for fast and low-cost transactions.

• Core Lightning v25.02rc1 is now available for testing.
• LNbits v1.0.0-rc8 is now available for testing.
• SimpleX Chat v6.3.0-beta.6 is now available for testing. This version comes with improved link previews and UX fixes.
• Rdsys v1.0 by the Tor Project has been released. It is a distribution system for circumvention proxies and related resources.

"We now consider Rdsys stable, but our work is far from finished. We are committed to improving Rdsys and fixing issues as they arise, and to adapting quickly to censors' evolving tactics," said the project.

Other stuff

• Click here to view all projects presented at the Bitcoin++ Hackathon at Floripa 2025.
• nAuth by Tim Bouma is a decentralized two party authentication and secure transmittal protocol.
• Here's a tutorial for creating a fresh LNbits install with Phoenixd on a VPS. Until LNbits v1.0 is released, you can test it with LNbits v1.0.0-rc8.

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