Developers at BitcoinOS (BOS) made blockchain history on Tuesday by successfully verifying the first-ever zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) on Bitcoin mainchain.
This milestone opens the door to truly minimized Bitcoin layer 2 rollup systems, offering limitless scalability and functionality for Bitcoin without needing changes to its underlying consensus code.
Bitcoin Now Has ZK Proofs
According to the BitcoinOS team, the final verification of its first ZK proof occurred at Block 853626.
The cryptographic proof allowed them to successfully emulate covenants on-chain – a type of conditional Bitcoin payment developers once thought would require a base-layer soft fork to execute.
Specifically, the team demonstrated that they could create a UTXO controlled by a ZK smart contract, then

Fold, a popular Bitcoin financial services platform, has confirmed arrangements to become a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
The firm’s entry will add another tally to the growing list of public stocks that keep a large swath of Bitcoin directly on their balance sheet.
Bitcoin Banking Gone Public
Per a press release on Wednesday, Fold said it had entered a definitive agreement with FTAC Emerald, a special purpose acquisition company.
The proposed business combination will allow Fold to become a public company. Though it will first inherit the EMLD ticker from Emerald, Fold will remain on the NASDAQ under a new ticker to be announced later.
“This transaction represents a significant step in Fold’s mission to expand access to premium bitcoin financial

Bitcoin could potentially reach a “mid-term” price level above $1 million thanks to a series of hyper-bullish developments around the asset, according to crypto investment firm Mechanism Capital.
The company’s co-founder, Andrew Kang, wrote to Twitter on Friday explaining why he thinks Bitcoin is performing “stronger than expected” despite several “poor market structure dynamics” that affected it earlier this month.
How Fast Can Bitcoin Reach $1 Million?
According to Kang, the leading potential catalyst for an explosion in Bitcoin’s value is Bitcoin’s adoption as a national treasury reserve asset.
Though no promises or guarantees of the like have been made, several rumors are circulating among crypto’s biggest voices that Donald Trump intends to promise a national Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s price surged back above $66,000 on Friday, reclaiming its highest market value since early June.
The digital asset ripped from $64,102 at 13:27 UTC on Thursday up to $66,472 at 17:00 UTC. It trades for $66,332 at writing time.
This is the highest price Bitcoin has achieved since early June, shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Ethereum (ETH) spot ETFs for listing on national securities exchanges. Experts say the first set of Ethereum ETFs are set to launch early next week.
As Bitcoin surged, ETH is up 2.3% on the day to $3,488, and Solana (SOL) is up 7.9% to $169.According to Coinglass, over $131 million in liquidations have occurred across the crypto market in the last 24 hours. That includes 42,000 affected traders.
The surge

DeFi Technologies (DEFTF) – a rising Canadian fintech company – has acquired another large batch of Bitcoin (BTC) after making the asset a core part of its treasury strategy last month.
The company announced Thursday that it had purchased another 94.34 BTC for its balance sheet, adding to the 110 BTC it first acquired in June. The firm also announced an expansion into altcoins, purchasing 12,775 SOL tokens and 1,484,148 CORE tokens for the first time.
DeFi Technologies’ Bitcoin Treasury
At current prices, the total value of DeFi Technologies’ recently acquired crypto is $10 million.
“Each asset brings distinct advantages and capabilities to our treasury,” said Curtis Schlaufman, VP of communications at DeFi Technologies, to CryptoPotato. “Bitcoin serves as a reliable store

Why are Silicon Valley venture capitalists suddenly supporting Donald Trump? Billionaire Mark Cuban – one of the politician’s staunchest critics – says “It’s a Bitcoin play.”
The businessman’s analysis follows several Trump endorsements from wealthy crypto leaders who explicitly favor him because he promises to protect their industry.
Silicon Valley, Trump, and Bitcoin
According to Cuban, a Trump Presidency would be directly accretive to Bitcoin’s price – an asset that has grown more popular with tech investors over the last several years.
“Not because the former President is a far stronger proponent of crypto,” Cuban noted. The investor said that Trump’s crypto agenda – which includes welcoming Bitcoin miners and ensuring citizens’ right to self-custody – simply makes it

Dr. Craig S Wright – the man who claimed for years to be Satoshi Nakamoto – has formally admitted that he is not, in fact, Bitcoin’s creator.
“Dr. Craig Steven Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto,” wrote the computer scientist in a Wednesday tweet.
Wright followed with a summary of the England and Wales High Court ruling about his identity earlier this year, during which UK Judge James Mellor said the evidence against Wright’s claims was “overwhelming.”
He also highlighted the court’s finding that he’d “lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly” and forged documents “on a grand scale” in order to bolster his claims.
“In advancing his false claim to be Satoshi through multiple legal actions, Dr Wright committed “a most serious abuse” of the process of the courts of the UK,

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink spoke on Monday on why he was wrong to be a skeptic on Bitcoin and crypto before properly studying the asset class.
His firm’s newly published Q2 earnings showcased a record $10.65 trillion AUM for the investment manager, in small part thanks to inflows to its Bitcoin ETF product launched in January.
Larry Fink’s Bitcoin Awakening
“As you know… I was a proud skeptic,” said Fink during an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday. “I studied it, learned about it, and I came away saying, ok, my opinion five years ago was wrong.”
Back in 2017, Fink referred to Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering,” considering it Bitcoin’s only real use case. SkyBridge Capital co-founder Anthony Scaramucci has claimed he met Fink back in 2021, who still called

Germany’s on-chain Bitcoin wallet balance has officially reached zero, according to Arkham Intelligence, meaning sell pressure from the European economic powerhouse is likely at or near its end.
The wallet’s latest outflows bring an end to a bearish narrative that’s hung over the crypto market for weeks, at a time when on-chain indicators are signaling that a local bottom is near.
Germany’s Last Bitcoin Sale
As of late Thursday, Arkham said that the government had just 4925 BTC ($282.45 million) left sitting in its wallets. That’s down from the 50,000 BTC the state-owned as recently as recently as June 19, as officially seized from the movie piracy website Movie2kin January.
Early on Friday, the government received back 4169 BTC from exchanges including Kraken, Coinbase,

Bitcoin’s correction this month may be short-lived as institutions appear to have taken the drawdown as a juicy buying opportunity, according to on-chain data.
The findings arise alongside other blockchain-based signals suggesting that Bitcoin’s price is at an appetizing entry point.
Institutions Just Bought The Dip
As shared by market intelligence platform CryptoQuant on Thursday, “institutions” – loosely defined as Bitcoin wallets holding between 1000 BTC and 10,000 BTC – have been accumulating coins at their second-fasted rate this year since the start of July.
Last week, alone, these entities gathered 101,600 BTC to their blockchain addresses. Notably, this occurred during a period of low volume and inflows to U.S. Bitcoin ETF products, meaning such “institutional”

Shares in Bitcoin development firm MicroStrategy popped 3% on Thursday after the company’s executive chairman, Michael Saylor, announced that it will soon undergo a 10-for-1 stock split.
The action will make it far more affordable for smaller investors to gain minimal exposure to MSTR, which left them in the dust during its early-year rally alongside Bitcoin.
Making MicroStrategy More Affordable
Per a Thursday press release from the company, the action will apply to all holders of MicroStrategy’s Class A and Class B common stock. For every share they already hold as of August 1, 2024, they’ll receive another nine shares after trading closes on August 7.
The split will “make MicroStrategy’s stock more accessible to investors and employees,” the company wrote in a Thursday

Paxos – the blockchain infrastructure platform behind the Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin – announced on Thursday that regulators have forfeited their investigation into the firm concerning its dollar-pegged tokens.
The result represents a major legal victory for crypto at large, where thick fog has surrounded the legal classification and regulatory treatment of stablecoins.
Paxos Prevails Over The SEC
After beginning its investigation of BUSD in February 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sent a formal termination notice to Paxos on July 9 stating that it would not pursue further enforcement action.
“Paxos Trust Company has always maintained that its USD-backed stablecoins are not securities under federal securities laws and that the Wells Notice was

Rostin Benham – Chairman of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – says that an Illinois court has formally ruled both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) to be commodities, all but settling the CFTC’s crypto turf war with its sister agency.
“In its decision, the court re-affirmed that both Bitcoin and Ether are commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act,” said Benham in prepared remarks during a U.S. Senate committee hearing on Wednesday.
Ethereum A Commodity, Court Confirms
The chairman referenced a July 3 summary judgment delivered by Judge Mary Rowland in a U.S. district court in Illinois, finding that defendants in a crypto-related case had committed fraud and failure to register under the Commodity Exchange Act.
Specifically, defendant Sam Ikkurty of

The Republican National Committee has released its 2024 GOP Platform ahead of this year’s federal election, adopting several stances aligning with Donald Trump’s “America First” policies instead of traditional GOP social issues.
That includes a specific policy dedicated to protecting Bitcoin and crypto – an industry that Trump has tightly aligned himself with this year.
Republicans Are Officially Pro-Crypto
The party’s dedication to crypto is included in chapter 3 of the platform, which promises to “build the greatest economy in history” by championing innovation, among other things.
“Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency [CBDC],” the party wrote.
The promise comes as no surprise

The government of Germany began readying for its biggest Bitcoin dump yet on Monday, sending $900 million worth of the digital currency to trading venues.
On-chain data from Arkham Intelligence shows that over 16,000 BTC left the exchange’s wallet on July 8, leaving 23,787.7 BTC ($1.35 billion) remaining in its coffers.
Germany’s Biggest Bitcoin Sale
Arkham first flagged signs of a continued selloff at 8:32 am ET on Monday.
It stated the government sent 2738.7 BTC ($155.3 million) to “likely exchanges and market makers” including Kraken, Cumberland, an unidentified address, and an address likely related to an institutional or over-the-counter (OTC) trading service. Cumberland and the unidentified address were first-time recipients of government coins.
Less than 2 hours

With Bitcoin trading sideways over the past few months, traders are waiting for their signal to re-enter the market before crypto reclaims its bullish momentum from earlier this year.
In a Wednesday memo, an analyst from CryptoQuant highlighted one signal worth looking at: stablecoin liquidity.
Stablecoins: The Key To Driving Bitcoin Higher
“The bottom line is that in order for #Bitcoin to rally in earnest, we need to see an increase in stablecoin liquidity and circulating supply” wrote analyst Mac.D to CryptoQuant.
According to the author, Bitcoin hasn’t been able to break new highs above $73,700 since mid-March 2024 due to tightening monetary policy conditions in the United States for the preceding two years.
Higher interest rates around the globe harmed liquidity across

Historical economic trends suggest Bitcoin is fated for another massive leg up this market cycle, according to BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes.
While Bitcoin has traded mostly flat over the past several months, Hayes says he’s confident that the leading crypto asset will “regain its mojo” thanks to the overwhelming U.S. government spending and money printing of the modern era.
The Local Inflationary Period
The popular crypto essayist broke economic history down into two basic periods: local inflationary periods, and global deflationary ones. Since 2008, he claims the United States has been steeped in the latter after the nation turned to quantitative easing to quell the financial crisis.
“In a local period, the authorities financially repressed savers to fund past and

The crypto market has broadly retraced its momentary gains since the start of the week on Tuesday, though XRP has managed to retain some bullish momentum.
Part of the reason is due to a major court ruling regarding the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s lawsuit against Binance, which Ripple has now leveraged in its ongoing battle with the regulator.
In a letter to Judge Analisa Torres, Ripple’s legal counsel Michael Kellogg argued that the recent Binance ruling supports Ripple’s case that its illegal sales of XRP do not warrant “harsh remedies” as the SEC claims.
Last week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed SEC claims that secondary market sales of Binance’s BNB token constituted securities transactions.
The dismissal specifically called out the SEC for its

Free speech champions across the world celebrated earlier this week as Julian Assange – founder of WikiLeaks – was finally released from a UK prison after five years behind bars.
During his more than decade-long legal battle to escape persecution from multiple national governments, Assange often leaned on crypto to drive global fundraising campaigns to secure his freedom. A newly resurfaced video from years before Assange’s arrest shows him praising cryptocurrencies as a powerful tool for freedom.
What Julian Assange Thinks of Bitcoin
In the September 2014 clip shared by MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor, Assange calls Bitcoin the “most interesting intellectual development on the internet” since the network’s inception in 2009.
“A lot of people who have heard

Crypto market intelligence provider IntoTheBlock published a report on Thursday comparing the best risk-adjusted methods to earn yield in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Despite the “nearly infinite number of composable strategies” the firm claims its most optimal to stick to “straightforward strategies,” that boil down to “only a handful of different primitives.”
The Best Way to Earn In DeFi
The first strategy highlighted by the firm is AMM Liquidity Provisioning.
An AMM is an automated market maker. To earn yield, DeFi users can deposit their assets into AMM pools for various trading pairs, where they help provide liquidity to enable trades. Depositors earn yield from trading fees every time a user swaps between two assets using that pool.
AMM yields tend to

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ethereum infrastructure provider Consensys on Wednesday for allegedly failing to register key services offered within its MetaMask software wallet.
The SEC’s lawsuit comes two months after it issued a Wells notice to Consensys voicing the agency’s intent to sue regarding the popular Ethereum wallet, which its website claims its “trusted by over 100 million users worldwide.”
The SEC’s Next Target: Consensys
In a press release on Wednesday, the SEC claimed that Consensys engaged in the “unregistered offer and sale of securities” through its MetaMask Stakng service. That includes “tens of thousands of unregistered securities” on behalf of both Lido and Rocketpool – the liquid staking providers with which Lido is

CleanSpark (CLSK) – one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining firms – announced on Thursday that it had acquired one of its smaller competitors, GRIID Infrastructure, in an all-stock deal.
The $155 million deal immediately brings 20 megawatts (MW) of additional power to CleanSpark to bolster its mining operations. Another 400 MW of power is expected to be added in Tennessee over the next two years.
CleanSpark Acquired GRIID For $155 Million
The merger agreement required CleanSpark to assume all debts and other obligations from GRIID. It also required CleanSpark to provide GRIID with a $5 million working capital loan, and to pay down a bridge loan of $50.9 million to satisfy other obligations from the smaller miner.
“This acquisition would give us a clear and steady

Julian Assange’s Bitcoin wallet received $500,000 worth of Bitcoin from a mystery donor on Tuesday, on-chain data shows.
The donation follows the whistleblower’s release from the United Kingdom’s high-security Belmarsh prison on Monday, after reaching a plea deal with U.S. authorities following five years behind bars.
Bitcoin Brings Assange Home
According to blockchain data, a donation of 8.2 BTC ($492,254) was transferred from a multisignature wallet to Assange’s Bitcoin donation address, as displayed on the freeassange.org website.
Early on Wednesday, the WikiLeaks founder’s wife Stella Assange called on followers for a final show of financial support, seeking $520,000 to pay debt to the Australian government. Assange was barred from taking commercial flights for his

Ethereum spot ETFs will accumulate over $15 billion in net inflows within their first 18 months of hitting the U.S. market, predicted crypto asset manager Bitwise on Wednesday.
The firm’s year-and-a-half-long forecast would roughly match the net haul from Bitcoin ETFs ($14.4 billion) since their launch five months ago – from which excitement has helped drive BTC to new all-time highs.
Calculating Ethereum’s ETF Flows
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan based his estimate on Bitcoin’s ETF figures and compared Ethereum to the overall size of Bitcoin’s market.
At present, Bitcoin’s market cap is $1.26 trillion, compared to Ethereum’s $432 billion market cap – implying a 3:1 asset ratio. Of said Bitcoin, $56 billion is locked within U.S. Bitcoin ETFs, which Hougan expects will rise to

Bitcoin’s price took a steep tumble early this week, driving over $300 million in crypto market liquidations in a single day. Why the sudden volatility?
Gayatri Choudhury, Quantitative Research Analyst at Bitwise, says there have been two key drivers of the selloff – and neither relates to the Bitcoin ETFs.
Miners Are Dumping
The analyst first noted on Tuesday that the activity of Bitcoin miners – a cohort “often overlooked” by market watchers. Since the fourth Bitcoin halving in April, the network’s miners have been consistently selling their BTC amid much lower revenues and historically high competition from global competitors.
“On June 9, >3000 BTC were transferred from mining pools to Binance, marking a two-month peak,” Choudhury said. Citing a CryptoQuant dashboard,

A popular Republican congressman introduced legislation that would require the United States Treasury to accept tax payments in bitcoin.
Pay Taxes With Bitcoin
The bill, authored by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), would order the Treasury Secretary to “develop and implement a method to allow for the payment with bitcoin of any tax imposed on an individual.”
The legislation marks the first official national-level efforts from a U.S. politician to bring bitcoin closer to being a form of legal tender. The state of Colorado already has the use of crypto for tax payments.
The other half of that equation would involve scrapping capital gains taxes on BTC sales – something Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made one of his campaign promises.
According to Gaetz,

Famous investor and author Robert Kiyosaki said on Monday that he was eagerly waiting to buy more Bitcoin after the asset’s price fell to $61,000 to start the day.
But The Bitcoin Dip, Says Robert Kiyosaki
The man behind the best-selling finance book Rich Dad Poor Dad asserted that selling in times of market turmoil is a sign of an “employee” mentality – one that he does not share.
“Bitcoin is crashing. Most people should sell. I am waiting to buy more,” Kiyosaki wrote to Twitter. “If crashes terrify you, sell and hang on tight to your job, which is what most “employees” should do.”
Kiyosaki has praised Bitcoin repeatedly for being a scarce and finite asset similar to previous metals like gold and silver, making it resistant to the inflationary pressure of fiat currencies

The world’s fourth-largest asset manager has promised to seed its upcoming Ethereum ETF with $4.7 million ahead of launch, according to a regulatory filing.
“Total proceeds to the Trust from the sale of the Seed Baskets were $4,749,975.00,” read Fidelity’s S-1 registration form for its “Fidelity Ethereum Fund” filed on Friday.
Fidelity Buys Its First Batch Of Ethereum
The proceeds were used to buy ETH on June 4, securing 1,250 ETH at the time. They were bought by FMR Capital – an affiliate of Fidelity – securing the asset manager 125,000 shares for $38 each.
When launching an ETF, asset managers seed it with funds to provide liquidity for its initial buyers, while also demonstrating the sponsor’s confidence in the fund. When launching its Bitcoin ETF in January, Fidelity

With spot Ethereum ETFs on the horizon in the United States, should existing Bitcoin ETF holders split their crypto holdings into ETH?
In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan offered three reasons for why this might be a good idea.
Why Bitcoin Holders Should Buy Ethereum
The first, Hougan wrote, is for the sake of diversification. Since predicting the future of crypto is difficult, holding a stake in both leading assets can provide investors relief in case one asset falls out of favor, or gobbles up the other over time.
“Ask any investor from the dot-com boom who bought AOL Pets.com,” Hougan said. “They got the overall bet right—the internet is going to be big!—but the specifics wrong. Sad!”
As of writing, Bitcoin’s market cap accounts for 55% of the

Crypto exchange Kraken says it got its money back from the “security researchers” that took $3 million from the platform this year.
“Update: We can now confirm the funds have been returned (minus a small amount lost to fees),” tweeted Nick Percoco, Chief Security Officer for Kraken, on Thursday.
Kraken Gets Its Money Back
Though Kraken first refused to identify the culprits, blockchain security experts at CertiK outed themselves on Wednesday as the ones behind the hack.
Earlier that day, Percoco revealed that Kraken had recently patched a bug that let technically sophisticated individuals artificially inflate their balance on the platform, effectively letting them steal any amount of money from the exchange since January.
CertiK experts notified them of the vulnerability