Mining company MARA, formerly known as Marathon Digital, lent out 7,377 Bitcoin to third parties in 2024, according to a Jan. 3 announcement from the Bitcoin miner. Vice president of investor relations at MARA Robert Samuels provided more information about MARA’s Bitcoin lending activity but did not cite specific numbers. According to Samuels, MARA’s Bitcoin…

A Donald Trump-led Bitcoin rally — expected to occur in the days leading up to his Jan. 20 US presidential inauguration — could wane toward the end of the month as the Federal Reserve publishes its first interest rate decision of the year. In a Jan. 5 report, 10x Research’s founder Markus Thielen predicted a “positive start”…

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says a temporary “pause” to worldwide available compute could be a way to “buy more time for humanity” in case of a possibly harmful form of AI superintelligence. In a Jan. 5 blog post following up his November 2023 post advocating the idea of “defensive accelerationism” or d/acc, Buterin said super intelligent AI could be…

Former United States prosecutor and crypto advocate John Deaton has offered the incoming Trump administration to lead a probe into Operation Chokepoint 2.0 — an unconfirmed initiative that allegedly attempted to cut crypto companies from the traditional banking system. “If these actions go unchallenged, it creates a dangerous precedent where regulatory bodies can quietly suppress…

Solana developers have created a quantum-resistant vault on the Solana blockchain to protect user funds from potential threats posed by quantum computers. The “Solana Winternitz Vault” solution achieves this by implementing a complex hash-based signature system that generates new keys every time a transaction is made, explained cryptography researcher and Zeus Network chief scientist Dean Little in…

More than $19 trillion in transactions settled over the Bitcoin network in 2024 — more than double the $8.7 trillion settled over the network in 2023 — reversing two years of declining transaction volume since 2021. According to data from vice president of research at Riot Platforms Pierre Rochard, Bitcoin transaction volume peaked during the…