Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, February 27th, 2025

News

• The IMF board approved a $1.4 billion loan to El Salvador with further Bitcoin restrictions. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) executive board approved a $1.4 billion loan for El Salvador on the condition that the country will further restrict the government's Bitcoin-related economic activities, including transactions and purchases of bitcoin.
• The U.S. House Committee advanced a joint resolution to eliminate the IRS's broker rules for decentralized 'front-end services.' The Ways and Means Committee voted 26-16 to nullify the IRS's midnight rulemaking requiring decentralized trading platforms offering 'front-end services' to track and report customer information. The proposal needs majority approval in both the House and Senate, plus the President's signature, to become final. The matter moves to the overall House next.
• Tether failed to secure an interim anti-suit injunction against Swan Bitcoin in the UK. The company's request for an injunction to stop Swan's case against six former employees was denied. Judge Bright dismissed concerns about exposing proprietary details, stating Swan was unlikely to misuse any information from the proceedings.
  • Tether filed a lawsuit against Swan Bitcoin in January for alleged contract breaches. Previously, Swan had launched a legal challenge in the United States, accusing former employees of stealing trade secrets and moving operations to Proton Management.
• In the UK lawsuit, Tether also reportedly alleges that Swan had raised money from Ripple Labs without its knowledge, a claim denied by Swan's CEO Cory Klippsten.

• The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency started releasing some of the stopped ASICs. According to a report by Blockspace.Media, some industry players started receiving some of their seized Asian Bitcoin mining ASICs following increased industry lobbying efforts led by Senator Cynthia Lummis and the ties with the Trump administration.

• Oklahoma’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act (HB 1203) moves to the House floor. If passed, HB 1203 would enable the Oklahoma State Treasurer to invest public funds in digital assets with a market cap over $500 billion in the past year.
  • Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Wyoming have recently rejected similar proposals yet there are still 25 Bitcoin-related reserve bills under consideration across 18 U.S. states. So far, Utah's HB0230 is most likely to be passed first.

• MARA's revenues grew by 69% to $656.4 million in 2024. The largest publicly traded miner by market cap increased its energized hash rate by 115% year over year to 53.2 EH/s. MARA mined 9,430 BTC last year, down 27% from 2023. As of December 31, 2024, the company held 44,893 coins.
• Fold added 10 more bitcoin to its corporate treasury. “Fold remains dedicated to integrating bitcoin into our business and treasury strategy,” said Will Reeves, CEO of Fold. The company now holds well over 1,000 BTC on its balance sheet.
• Simple Proof raised a pre-seed round led by ego death capital and Wolf. The investment will speed up the development of Simple Proof's Immutable Proof service, which uses Bitcoin's Timechain and the OpenTimestamps protocol to create permanent, tamper-proof digital file records.
• The GitVenom campaign uses GitHub repositories to deploy malware targeting Bitcoin wallets. According to a report by Kaspersky, threat actors have created hundreds of 'legitimately appearing' repositories on GitHub that contain fake projects with malicious code aimed at stealing cryptocurrency. Be aware.
• The Satoshi Papers Symposium be hosted on UATX campus on April 16, 2025. The University of Austin (UATX) has partnered with the Texas Bitcoin Foundation (TBF), Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), Unchained, and Strive Asset Management to host the Satoshi Papers Symposium, an academic conference celebrating the launch of the TBF’s first book, The Satoshi Papers: Reflections on Political Economy after Bitcoin. 

Use the tools

• Sparrow Wallet v2.1.3 is here. It comes with OneKey hardware wallet support, expanded wallet labels (BIP329) export, and some remaining Lark integration fixes, among other things.
• Lark v1.1.0, a command-line application for interacting with USB hardware wallets in Bitcoin-related functions, comes with support for OneKey hardware signers, enhances integrations with major Bitcoin hardware devices, and delivers various bug fixes.
• Satochip v0.14-0.2 (Beta), an open-source javacard applet implementing a cryptocurrency signing device with full BIP32/BIP39 support, brings Schnorr signature support for Taproot that can used with Sparrow-Satochip wallet, and Schnorr signature support for Nostr that can be tested using a pysatochip v0.15.3 command line interface.
• Nunchuk launched a new and improved end-to-end encrypted group wallet and chat, utilizing Output Descriptors to derive a single, shared encryption key for the group.
• Bitkey launched inheritance feature which focuses on super simple setup and comes with built-in protection against unauthorized claims.
• Some of the latest updates to Theya mobile modular multisig app (currently available on iOS) include custom permissions for collaborative key management, multi-currency support, and AirGap mode for the Foundation Passport device.

• Phoenixd (Server) v0.5.0 packages a major rework of the internal payments database, addresses issues with Linux native builds, and fixes a memory leak in the TCP reconnection logic. It also includes a rolling log file, a new --seed-path configuration option, and the ability to look up outgoing payments by payment hash.
• Lightning-kmp v1.9.0, an implementation of the Lightning Network in Kotlin, is now available.
• Fedimint v0.6.0 has been released with many updates and improvements. Notably, this version enables on-chain deposits for end users as interacting with the on-chain wallet is no longer considered to be in 'expert-only' mode.
• SideSwap v1.7.0, a Liquid Network wallet offering a convenient way to hold, send, receive, and swap assets on the Liquid Network, introduces a next-generation Swap Engine. This enables a suite of advanced features, including asset-to-asset swaps, market orders, instant swap orders executed as market orders, and much more.

• Core Lightning v25.02 is now available for testing.
• umbrelOS v1.4 beta 3 is now available for testing.
• B2P Central, an aggregator of Bitcoin peer-to-peer offers, now allows users to create subscriptions and receive new offers matching their criteria by email or Nostr.
• Boltz Web App v1.6.2 brings additional transaction broadcasts via public APIs, adds integrations for Tropykus and Speed Wallet, and other improvements.
• Ditto v1.2, a Nostr server for building resilient communities online, comes with a revamped onboarding experience, enhanced community features, advanced search and translation, zap splits, a database overhaul, and performance improvements.
  • Upcoming updates for Ditto include public groups (NIP-29) support, Cashu Nutzaps, and post streaks.
• Primal iOS v2.1.26 delivers improved feeds, deep linking for threads, articles, and profiles, as well as bug fixes and stability improvements.
• Coracle v0.6.6 now shows complete website/LNURL, scans images for sensitive content, implements stricter muting on feeds, and fixes list editing.
• KeyChat app v1.27.2+6328 is a bug fix release that adds a safe area to the browser page to prevent the bottom input area from being hidden, displays relay status when a message fails to send, and changes the color of Cashu buttons.
• Amber v3.2.3 adds a translation string for the sign_message method, logs when encryption/decryption fails, and includes some fixes.
• Grain v0.3.0, a Nostr relay implementation written in Go, introduces Nostr login and profile page, allowing users to manage their relay data, experimental user sync functionality for syncing user events from their outboxes, and bug fixes and related improvements.
• NostrDVM v1.1.2, a framework for building and running NIP-90 Nostr DVMs in Python, is a bug fix release addressing the absence of extra_tags.
• Saving Satoshi v1.10.5, an interactive science fiction story and technical game for developers of all ages who want to learn how Bitcoin works, has been released with chapter 10 improvements and includes an add_entry for NIP-05 support.
• NerNos a compact, energy-efficient expansion board that transforms NerdMiners into ASIC miners capable of 80–130 GH/s while consuming just 7–8W of power and running off a simple USB-C connection.
• Unleashed.chat is now dataMachine.ai, highlighting the project's focus on becoming a fully-fledged AI playground rather than just a chatbot.
• ObscuraVPN v1.118 ships with a major protocol rework to get around more firewall situations and includes WireGuard Key caching with rotation to make connecting faster and more reliable.
• GrapheneOS v2025022700 release adds an opt-in GrapheneOS network location client for location detection based on nearby Wi-Fi networks using a local trilateration algorithm run on the device. It fetches a list of nearby Wi-Fi networks from Apple's location service either directly or through a GrapheneOS proxy.

Other stuff

• River released a comprehensive report exploring Bitcoin adoption in 2025.

• Blockstream published a report on the risks of expressive smart contracts, recapping the lessons from the latest Bybit Ethereum exploit.
• John Carvalho wrote an open letter to Michael Saylor.
• 0xtr compiled a list of Nostr relays exposed as onion services.
• Matthew Mezinskis shared the latest Base Money Update #27.

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