#bitcoin

Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini has become a sponsor of the English football club Real Bedford, owned by Peter McCormack, host of the popular podcast What Bitcoin Did. The sponsorship deal was paid in Bitcoin, which will be used for club development and the launch of a youth academy.

Donald Trump's committee returned part of the donations from the Winklevoss brothers, which exceeded the legally established limit of $844,600 per person. Each brother donated $1 million in Bitcoin. It is unclear whether the committee returned BTC or an equivalent dollar amount.

BlackRock’s chief investment officer of ETF, Samara Cohen, points out that spot Bitcoin ETFs are progressing slowly due to financial advisors' initial exploration of this investment product. According to the firm, about 80% of all current purchases come from individual investors.

Mastercard has rolled out its new Crypto Credentials system for P2P transactions, initially available to a limited audience on exchanges like Bit2Me, Lirium, and Mercado Bitcoin.

CiberInteligenciaSV, the hacking group behind the security breach of El Salvador's state-run Bitcoin wallet Chivo, has started leaking portions of the app's source code. They had already disclosed the personal information of almost all adult users in El Salvador (5.1 million people) who downloaded the wallet.

Developer Antoine Poinsot and five colleagues have released a letter detailing a new policy for notifying users about vulnerabilities and bugs in Bitcoin Core's code, which is crucial for network node operators.

In the second quarter of 2024, crypto projects lost $572 million to fraud and hacks, more than doubling the $265 million in the same period last year. The two biggest victims were centralized exchanges: Japan’s DMM Bitcoin ($305 million) and Turkey’s BtcTurk ($55 million).

Bloomberg reports that Standard Chartered, a multinational financial corporation, is developing its own platform for trading Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). This new division will operate as part of the bank's global banking sector, with its management hub based in London.

As the UK heads toward an election, the cryptocurrency industry is expressing support for the Labour Party, which leads in all the polls. However, there is uncertainty about what policies to expect, as Labour has not been in power since 2010, a time when Bitcoin was just emerging.

On April 20th, at 0:09 UTC, the Bitcoin network reached a new milestone with the completion of its fourth halving at block 840,000, reducing the mining reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

Shares of top mining companies such as Marathon Digital (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) have plunged more than 35% since the beginning of the year in anticipation of the upcoming Bitcoin halving. Analysts from these firms, however, consider the fears over reduced block rewards to be unfounded and maintain a positive outlook on the miners' activities.