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Asset manager Fidelity has refiled with the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) paperwork for its Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), weeks after BlackRock submitted paperwork for its iShares Bitcoin Trust, also a spot Bitcoin ETF. Fidelity had originally applied to launch the Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust in 2021, but that effort it was rejected by the SEC in 2022.

MicroStrategy may need to post additional collateral for a Bitcoin-backed loan as the Bitcoin's price tests a key price level of $21,000 flagged by the company. The software firm controlled by Bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor had used its vast Bitcoin holdings to secure a $205 million loan in March to buy even more cryptocurrency. But as the value of that collateral initially worth around $820 million falls to about half that, the company may need to provide more capital to back the loan. According to Bloomberg, Microstrategy owns about 130,000 Bitcoins purchased at an average price of  $30,700. With Bitcoin now trading around $22,000, Microstrategy is probably about $1 billion in the hole.

The CFTC has approved Bitnomial's application for a bitcoin derivatives exchange. Initial products will be bitcoin futures, mini bitcoin futures, and bitcoin options. All contracts will be physically settled in bitcoin.

Following the recent bitcoin price pullback, the latest Skew data now indicates that the premium rate on Grayscale's GBTC is under 10%. Institutional and accredited investors who placed an arbitrage trade on the premium (short the underlying bitcoin and buy GBTC) having to close out their positions (buyback bitcoin and sell GBTC) causing downwards pressure on the premium. Also, retail demand may be leveling off after the recent bitcoin dip, and competition is increasing (e.g., 3iq and Osprey's bitcoin Trust).

The survey shows that from 2016 to 2018, both the share of Canadians who are aware of Bitcoin and who own Bitcoin increased. But the share of past owners also increased, suggesting an influx of Bitcoin owners who sold their holdings after 2017. The main reason for owning Bitcoin continued to be for store of value or investment purposes, though this decreased slightly from 2017. Finally, Bitcoin owners differed from the overall population in two ways: they were less financially literate and more likely to say they plan to stop using cash.

Bitcoin is something you hodl. Ethereum is something you build on. At least that has long been the official narrative, with projects favoring dedicated smart contract networks over Bitcoin for spinning out dapps and second layer solutions. Like all crypto narratives, however, this one has started to shift, as projects reappraise the benefits of crafting censorship-resistant applications anchored to Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash.

New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) joined the crowd and registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). The firm, a Bitcoin-centric subsidiary of Stone Ridge Asset Management, joins Valkyrie Digital Assets and Vaneck that have already submitted their Bitcoin-based ETF filings. Morgan Stanley would act in the capacity of an initially authorised participant and the Delaware Trust Company would be the trustee. However, the SEC is yet to approve a Bitcoin ETF on concerns around Bitcoin's volatility, and its high potential for price manipulation.

The European Central Bank (ECB) published a paper that analyzes the drivers of Bitcoin transactions against 44 fiat currencies in the largest peer-to-peer crypto exchanges. The empirical results reinforce the hypothesis that Bitcoin trading is driven by speculative motives. However, Bitcoin seems to offer transactional benefits, in particular in emerging market and developing economy (EMDE) countries. The depreciation of the domestic currency of EMDEs - notably not of the currencies of AEs - induces more Bitcoin trading. This suggests that Bitcoin, despite its wide price fluctuations, might have been appreciated also as a store of value or medium of exchange in countries which experienced a loss in the the purchasing power of their domestic currency.

According to a Chamber of Commerce and Industry of El Salvador, 91.7% of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) surveyed in January said that bitcoin implementation has been indifferent for their business, and 86% report that they have not made sales using the crypto-asset. These percentages are compared with only 3.6% of those surveyed who said that bitcoin has contributed to increasing their sales, and 13.9% who report having made sales in bitcoin. In September 2021, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as a legal tender and gave away $30 in bitcoin to everyone who signed up for the Chivo ("Cool") wallet app in an effort to encourage adoption.

JP Koning provides some advice on whether to buy bitcoin at current levels (around $38,000). He offers three visualizations of the future path for the price of bitcoin to help with that decision. If it's slowly becoming money then buying and holding, ignoring its diminishing (proportional) volatility is a good strategy. If bitcoin is a bubble, buying could be disastrous because eventually it'll be worth zero. If bitcoin is a game, it depends if you're getting into the game early (when bitcoin is a good buy) or late (bad). I'm intrigued by the "game" scenario, which implies that bitcoin's price will never stabilize. There will always be big downward and upward spikes, which make it such an exciting game. And new game players will re-enter to play after every downward spike, re-anchoring bitcoin's price and setting the stage for the next ramp up. Also, for the foreseeable future, bitcoin's price will continuously hit a terminal ceiling ($50,000? $200,000?) dictated by its maximum participation rate (5%? 15?)

Bitcoin is trading below $60,000 for the first time since early May as the MtGox exchange announced that it will begin distributing approximately $9 billion worth of the cryptocurrency and $50 million of Bitcoin cash to its long-suffering creditors. The defunct Tokyo-based platform, once the largest spot Bitcoin exchange in the world, shut down in 2014 after a series of hacks. Of the 950,000 Bitcoins lost, approximately 140,000 were recovered after MtGox declared bankruptcy, leaving thousands of creditors around the world stranded. Nine years later, authorities identified the hackers, with two Russian nationals charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for conspiring to launder around 647,000 Bitcoins from the exchange.

"By visiting this Mexico City bar, I was struck by how little things have changed since I started covering the technology in 2011. Over the last eight years, the bitcoin community-and bitcoin's price-has grown by orders of magnitude. The bitcoin economy has much more sophisticated infrastructure for storing and trading bitcoins. But practical applications for bitcoin-beyond trading it, holding it, and hoping to get rich-seem almost as elusive today as they were eight years ago."

Bitcoin mixers, or tumblers, have been around for years. The way they work is you send Bitcoin to a service and the service scrambles your Bitcoin with other Bitcoins, so that in the end, it's difficult to know the source of the funds-even though the transactions are visible on the blockchain.

A number of Morgan Stanley's institutional funds may gain exposure to bitcoin in the form of cash-settled futures or a Grayscale's bitcoin Trust. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing names twelve funds considering some kind of bitcoin investment or exposure strategy. The filing also indicates that as much as 25% of their respective assets could be put towards bitcoin products. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/836487/000110465921044979/a21-8652_27497.htm

LSE Economist Jon Danielsson argues that most of us would not want to live in a society where bitcoin succeeds, although the internal contradictions and perverse consequences of crypto-asset success mean that they are destined for failure. The value proposition for bitcoin is that it will displace fiat money, and Danielsson argues that there can only be either full displacement or no displacement, but full displacement is not desirable or feasible. If it succeeds (full displacement) the big holders ("whales") will become the wealthiest people in the world, and this would lead to greater inequality, social division and populism. However, if bitcoin becomes that successful, national authorities will jump in to protect their fiat currency monopolies, at which point the value of bitcoin heads to zero.

French insurer AXA's Swiss arm announced that its customers are now able to pay their non-life policy premiums in bitcoin. Life insurance products do not carry this option for "regulatory reasons." AXA will not be holding any bitcoin on its balance sheet. bitcoin paid goes to broker bitcoin Suisse, which will convert them into Swiss francs minus a 1.75% fee.

The price of Bitcoin has fallen back into the low $30,000 range amid news that US federal authorities have recovered some of the Bitcoin paid by Colonial Pipeline to resolve a ransomware attack that shut down the East Coast oil pipeline for nearly a week in early May. Colonial paid $4.4 million in Bitcoin to take back control of its systems. Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate said the bureau seized the money from a Bitcoin wallet that DarkSide ransomware actors used to collect the payment from Colonial Pipeline.

A supermajority of El Salvador's legislature voted in favor of President Nayib Bukele's proposal for the nation to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. The bill will mandate all businesses to accept bitcoin for goods or services, but the government will act as a backstop for entities that aren't willing to take on the risk of a volatile crypto-asset. The government will set up a $150 million trust fund at the Development Bank of El Salvador to instantly convert bitcoin to U.S. dollars to assume merchants' risk. The Development Bank's trust fund would sell some of the bitcoin it receives for dollars to replenish the fund.

Bitcoin is censorship-resistant. That's why ransomware gangs like it. This very same feature also prevents democratic societies from modifying the Bitcoin protocol to exclude ransomware gangs. Bitcoin may be censorship resistant, but the venues where it is traded are not. Section 311 and other tools that allow for leverage over these venues remain one of the best ways to attack Bitcoin-based ransomware.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group launched micro Bitcoin futures at one-tenth the size of one Bitcoin. The original CME Bitcoin futures contract, launched in December 2017, is worth five Bitcoin. Micro contracts appeal to retail traders priced out by the original offering, and institutional users who wanted more wiggle room in their trading strategies.