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Many of the raw numbers reported by Silvergate over the years reveal an institution that may have peaked in 2021, well before the dramas of 2022 shook the crypto sector. The volume on its Silvergate Exchange Network, for instance, hit a high in the first half of 2021, with $406 billion in transfers, which slid to $230 billion by the second half of 2022. A traditional, regulated depository institution can’t make it without a deposit base, and Silvergate’s coffers were drawn down quickly as major crypto clients dealt with their own collapses, bankruptcies and legal disputes that required an instant vacuuming of their liquid cash last year.

"If the central bank says «The sun rises in the West», it makes sense for you to just believe that. Because you’re going to get paid to repeat that, and you’re going to make a good career out of it. It doesn’t matter how wrong or how destructive it is for the world. As long as the central bank is paying people to behave, the sun rises in the West, and the rational smart thing to do is to believe that the sun rises in the West. Your job as an economist is to justify what central banks are doing." - Saifedean

According to a Bloomberg report, Nationwide and HSBC are the latest U.K. banking giants to impose new limits on their customer’s cryptocurrency purchases via debit cards and end purchases with credit cards. “Nationwide is applying daily limits of £5,000 ($5,965) on debit-card purchases of cryptoassets, the building society informed customers on Wednesday, while its credit cards can no longer be used to buy crypto. HSBC said it barred customers from making crypto purchases via its credit cards from last month,” reads the report. HSBC states that the decision is due to alleged financial risk to customers.

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The only Bitcoin spending conditions in widespread use today are simple single-sigs and simple multisigs, even though Bitcoin Script, the language used to encode spending conditions in Bitcoin transactions, is much more powerful than that. The reason for this is that Bitcoin Script, while appearing to be a simple stack-based language on the surface, is actually very difficult to use in practice. For every new spending condition a developer might want to create, a lot of time has to be spent making sure it is correct and sound under all circumstances, which can be hard to reason about.

TBD, a Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Jack Dorsey’s Block, has announced a new Lightning Network business called c=. The purpose of the company is to “provide infrastructure using bitcoin from Block’s treasury to make bitcoin’s Lightning Network more usable and reliable for developers, businesses (such as merchants that accept Lightning payments), and those businesses' end consumers,” according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. The release explains that the Lightning Network is still growing, and that transactions often fail due to liquidity shortfalls. In order to address that, “c= will build infrastructure using the bitcoin it is committing to the network so that businesses and wallets can make their Lightning transactions more reliable and dependable.” c= will be available for connection immediately for those seeking to operate a Lightning node and benefit from TBD and Block’s infrastructure.

The 15-year-old cryptocurrency has filled many roles - from source of speculation to hedge against inflation - but has struggled to find a clear identity. Now there are growing signs it's edging towards its intended purpose: payments. The amount of bitcoin stored on the Lightning Network - a payment protocol layered on top of the blockchain - has jumped by two-thirds over the past year to hit an all-time high of 5,580 coin, according to crypto data firm The Block.

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The recent economic cash crisis in Nigeria, caused by the naira redesign, political climate, and economic conditions, has increased bitcoin's value proposition for average Nigerians. In Africa, bitcoin offers an indispensable financial safe haven. Bitcoin remains a lifeline for Nigerians when economic uncertainty, political unrest, and unemployment are at record highs. For those in the diaspora, it has become the only medium to remit from the hard work they've put in abroad, not fractions reduced by high fees, as is the case with traditional rails such as Western Union.

Creditors are expected to receive early repayments from March 10 onward, while the deadline for such payments to be completed is September 30, according to a January statement. This is for the first tranche of repayments — including early lump sum payments and intermediate payments — with further amounts set to come later. Payments will be made in a mix of crypto — bitcoin and bitcoin cash — and fiat money. The first 200,000 yen worth of each creditor’s claim will be paid in yen. If their claim is greater than this amount and they choose crypto and cash, they will receive a mix of around 71% crypto and 29% cash after the initial payment, according to a moderator of the MtGoxInsolvency subreddit and confirmed by another creditor.

Australia’s central bank is set to launch a “live pilot” of a central bank digital currency “in the coming months,” according to a joint statement from the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, an Australian financial research institute. The RBA said on March 2 that it was collaborating with the DFCRC on a research project to “explore potential use cases and economic benefits of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Australia.” The RBA said the initial stage of the research project involves the selection of several financial industry participants to demonstrate potential use cases of the CBDC.

For the first time since 2001, investors can make more money holding cash than a traditional stock-bond portfolio. Returns for the classic portfolio of stocks and bonds are taking hits as traders react to the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes and speculate on the US central bank's next move. Meanwhile, returns on short-term Treasury bills are also sensitive to increases in the fed funds rate and climb alongside the benchmark. The shift in the 60/40 portfolio's performance versus short-term T-bills comes as the Fed continues its fight against stubbornly high inflation.

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Mi Primer Bitcoin, a Bitcoin education program based in El Salvador, has announced a new and improved diploma program in English. According to Dalia Platt, head of curriculum for Mi Primer Bitcoin, the “aim is to change the way people learn about Bitcoin. The goal is to make the course interactive, fun, creative, accessible and easy to understand for all, using examples that can reach and impact every corner of the world.” Bitcoin education is an essential part of adoption throughout the world. Without proper knowledge both in relation to the current workings of the monetary systems of the world, and the new protocol that Bitcoin offers, one cannot properly make the decision to adopt Bitcoin. Only after learning about money as it is, and money as it could be, is the full potential of Bitcoin unveiled. Programs like Mi Primer Bitcoin offer this education and learning in order to unlock that potential.

Bitcoin is an open-source project that is permissionless, meaning anyone can join the network and become part of the network. While Running a bitcoin node can help secure the network for all users, ensure faster transactions, and contribute to a decentralised economy that exists without a centralized server, it does require some operational and security practices. This article is essential if you plan on running a node or run one and want to ensure you’re plugging some of the possible gaps for an attack.

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"I am unbelievably sorry for my role in all of this," Singh said, adding that he knew by mid-2022 that Bankman-Fried's hedge fund, Alameda Research, was borrowing FTX customer funds, and customers were not aware. He has agreed to forfeit proceeds from the scheme. Singh, 27, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud, three counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States by violating campaign finance laws.

Whether or not Bitcoin “should” be used for this NFT-like activity is a hotly-contested issue and the data coming from the effects of this mini Bitcoin collectives craze is intriguing. Inscriptions could be a short-lived fad, but several early data sets from the first weeks of inscription activity show tremendous interest in this new use case for the Bitcoin network. Diving in, this article provides an overview of six sets of data from the inscription mania.

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BIP-300, which enables a feature called Drivechains on the Bitcoin network. Normally, one would hope that the author of a BIP is not very central or relevant to whether or not it gets attention, but as Sztorc seems to be the major voice continuing to push for Drivechain after being essentially rejected or ignored on the forums and mailing list, it might be worth knowing this brief background & motivation. Sztorc is no intellectual slouch, and he's very open about his conviction that the success of Bitcoin is fully dependent on its adoption of Drivechain. Drivechains fundamentally change the transaction validation mechanism from “all spends must provide cryptographic proofs” to “some spends do not require cryptographic proofs”. It fundamentally changes the ability to attack the network from “the attacker must acquire 51% of the hash rate” to “the attacker must propose a transaction and fight out ownership in meatspace”. It fundamentally changes attack response from “move hash away from the bad actor” (e.g., out of a pool, or by adding more honest hash) to “convince all the miners or nodes to do a UASF in favor of one party over another”.

Bitcoin has been compared to a decentralized clock because of the way it keeps track of the order of transactions as they happen around the world. The nature of inscriptions on Bitcoin uses this ordering to number the inscriptions as they are written onto the blockchain, aka timechain. As the inscription count approached 100,000, people rushed to get their inscriptions confirmed before or exactly at that number. We saw the largest increase in fees around this time. After this monumental inscription number, the rush to create NFTs on Bitcoin has drastically decreased. While there is still a backlog of transactions in the mempool, the fees required to get a transaction confirmed in the next block have dropped considerably and the daily total fees spent on creating inscriptions is “down only.”

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Group of 20 (G20) nations have some disagreements over restructuring debt for distressed economies, the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva said on Saturday, adding that banning private cryptocurrencies should be an option. "We have to differentiate between central bank digital currencies that are backed by the state and stable coins, and crypto assets that are privately issued," Georgieva said. "There has to be very strong push for regulation... if regulation fails, if you're slow to do it, then we should not take off the table banning those assets, because they may create financial stability risk."