As Cointelegraph reported, Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block recently announced a new feature for Square merchants that allows them to allocate a portion of their daily sales to Bitcoin and make on-demand payments through CashApp.

Currently, eligible merchants in the United States can allocate between 1% and 10% of their daily sales to Bitcoin.

According to an article in TechCrunch, fiat funds will be collected at the end of the day, then converted into Bitcoin and deposited into the user’s Cash App account. Merchants will be required to pay a 1% fee for each conversion.

BNB Chain has announced that it will enable native liquid staking on its BNB Smart Chain (BSC) as part of its migration of BNB Beacon Chain functionality to BSC as the former is gradually shut down.

BNB Beacon Chain will be completely shut down in June 2024. However, the company said it will transfer its functions to BSC before the shutdown.

BNB Chain said that enabling liquid staking on BSC will allow ecosystem participants to protect the network while maintaining liquidity of their assets. While the organization did not give an exact date for the launch of the liquid staking feature, BNB Chain said it will take place in April or May.

As Cointelegraph reported, Runes are a new token standard on the Bitcoin blockchain that has accounted for more than two-thirds of all Bitcoin transactions since its launch following the network’s halving event on April 20.

According to the Dune Analytics dashboard shared by blockchain research firm Crypto Koryo, more than 2.38 million Runes transactions have been processed since its launch on April 20, accounting for 68% of all Bitcoin transactions.

The total transaction count includes regular peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions, BRC-20 tokens, ordinals, and Runes.

April 23 was Runes’ busiest day with over 750,000 trades, but the next day the volume dropped to 312,000 trades.

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The European Parliament has approved new rules that formally require cryptocurrency companies to perform due diligence in an effort to combat money laundering.

The European Parliament voted on Wednesday to approve a set of laws, part of which strengthens "due diligence measures and checks on the identity of clients" for so-called crypto-asset managers, among other things. They must also report suspicious activity to authorities. The new laws will affect crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), such as centralized crypto exchanges, as well as a range of other institutions including gambling services.

Patrick Hansen, Circle’s EU strategy and policy director, said in a post on X that the vote was an expected outcome.

The co-founders of the Samourai Wallet cryptocurrency mixing service have been arrested, with prosecutors alleging they were involved in laundering $100 million from Silk Road and other illegal marketplaces.

Chief Executive Officer Keonne Rodriguez, 35, and Chief Technology Officer William Lonergan Hill, 65, were charged with operating Samourai Wallet. Prosecutors allege Samourai was an unlicensed money-transaction business that engaged in more than $2 billion in illegal transactions and helped launder more than $100 million in proceeds from Silk Road, Hydra Market and other computer hacking and fraud operations.

“Rodriguez and Hill allegedly knowingly facilitated the laundering of over $100 million in criminal proceeds from Silk Road, Hydra Market, and a host of other computer hacking and deception operations,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement on Wednesday. “We will work with law enforcement to relentlessly pursue and disrupt criminal organizations that use cryptocurrency to conceal their illegal activities.”

Hong Kong’s spot bitcoin and ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are set to begin trading on April 30, differing significantly from similar products in the United States, where the city’s regulator has already approved their listing.

According to a report by one of the issuers, ChinaAMC, its spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs will track the performance of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's cryptocurrency index. Redemptions will be available using both fiat and cryptocurrency funds. In addition, ChinaAMC's cryptocurrency ETF will be denominated in three currencies: USD, HKD, and RMB. Investment asset management company BOCI-Prudential and cryptocurrency exchange OSL will serve as custodians for the ETFs.

Bitcoin mining pool ViaBTC is auctioning off “epic sats” and keeping 40.75 million ($2.6 million) of the rewards after mining Bitcoin’s fourth halving block on Friday, The Block reported.

ViaBTC posted a message on its official X account early Tuesday: "For Sat 1,968,750,000,000,000 (one of only 4 epic sats in the Bitcoin ecosystem), the auction has officially begun! We are excited to partner with [cryptocurrency exchange] CoinEx Global on this historic event."

The auction is conducted in Bitcoin, with a starting price of 1 BTC and a current high bid of 1.6 BTC ($106,000), with only 8 bids. The auction will end at 4 pm UTC (12 pm ET) on April 25.

According to CoinTelegraph, USDT issuer Tether said it would freeze addresses associated with sanctioned entities in response to reports that Venezuela's state-run oil company used stablecoins to circumvent sanctions.

A Tether spokesperson said the company is committed to blocking payments associated with entities sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC): "Tether respects the OFAC SDN list and is committed to ensuring these addresses are frozen in a timely manner."

The announcement came after Reuters published an exclusive report that Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA has been using cryptocurrencies to facilitate its crude and fuel exports. The United States has reimposed new oil sanctions on Venezuela.

Payments company Block, formerly Square, has announced plans to develop a bitcoin mining system to address the challenges facing mining operators.

Block said in an April 23 blog post that they had completed the development of a three-nanometer chip for Bitcoin mining, which led the company to announce a "complete Bitcoin mining system." Block (then Square) CEO Jack Dorsey proposed a collaborative way to decentralize Bitcoin mining in October 2021.

“We’ve spent a lot of time speaking with various Bitcoin miners to understand the challenges facing mining operators,” Block said. “Based on these insights, and in support of our goal of decentralizing mining, we plan to launch both standalone mining chips as well as complete mining systems of our own design.”

Major stablecoin issuer Tether has integrated with Telegram, bringing USDT payments to one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, The Defiant reported.

“This just popped up on my app,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino wrote in an April 19 post, along with a photo of Telegram announcing USDT’s availability on the app. “Tether and Telegram working hand in hand. An entire ecosystem at your fingertips. Unstoppable solidarity.”

Now, users can send USDT for free within Telegram, and can also withdraw stablecoins without any fees in the app.

After years of development, the Stacks blockchain is about to undergo a massive upgrade. The rollout of Stacks, the popular Bitcoin extension layer, began at Bitcoin block 840,360 in a two-step process that will be completed by the end of May.

The upgrade is called "Nakamoto" in honor of Bitcoin's anonymous creator. This upgrade will decouple the Stacks block production schedule from Bitcoin. Although Stacks has a higher transaction throughput than Bitcoin (about 7 transactions per second), when it was originally designed, Stacks produced blocks at the same rate as Bitcoin, which caused congestion problems.

According to The Block, at first glance, ZKasino looks like any other crypto project. It announced its Series A funding at a valuation of $350 million, with support from $2.6 million investors including crypto exchange MEXC. Its smart contracts have been audited by well-known security company Certik (previously, it had been preliminarily audited by ChatGPT). The project's testnet is also already operational.

As a result, at the time of the project’s launch, more than 10,000 participants had deposited more than $33 million in Ethereum into ZKasino’s network in the hope of receiving additional $ZKAS tokens when the protocol launches. After all, the project promises that users can withdraw Ethereum upon request.

According to data from mempool.space, average Bitcoin fees have fallen significantly after reaching an all-time high of $128 on average on April 20, the day of Bitcoin’s fourth halving.

As of April 21, the average transaction fee for a medium-priority Bitcoin (BTC) transaction has dropped to $8-10.

Just the day before, Bitcoin’s total transaction fees reached $78.3 million, 24 times more than Ethereum’s, according to data from Crypto Fees.

In the halving block at height 840,000, Bitcoin miner ViaBTC paid a staggering 37.7 Bitcoins ($2.4 million) in transaction fees, setting a record for the highest single transaction fee in Bitcoin’s 15-year history.

Avail, a high-profile blockchain data availability (DA) project, has confirmed details of its upcoming token airdrop after a leaked screenshot of the eligibility criteria circulated on social media platform X last week.

According to a blog post from the Avail team, 354,605 ​​wallet addresses are eligible to claim 600 million tokens in their "unified airdrop." The beneficiaries are widely distributed, but the team says they must be blockchain ecosystem developers, testnet contributors, Rollup users (Polygon, zkSync, Starknet, Optimism, and Arbitrum), Polygon PoS stakers, or Avail community members who have made significant contributions to the ecosystem.

Tether, the operator of the eponymous stablecoin Tether and the largest stablecoin by market cap, is undergoing a restructuring that is introducing new business units in addition to stablecoin development.

According to an official announcement on April 18, the stablecoin giant launched a new framework that introduced four new business units, including Tether Data, Tether Finance, Tether Power, and Tether Edu.

Through these new business units, Tether aims to expand its mission to provide a range of new infrastructure solutions, investments, and services.

Under the Tether Data division, the firm will focus on strategic investments in technology, including artificial intelligence and peer-to-peer platforms such as Holepunch, Keet, and Pear Runtime.

Ethereum staking protocol Lido Finance has implemented a technology designed to increase the diversity and number of node operators on the Ethereum blockchain, The Defiant reported.

Six months after the Lido Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) approved the Simple Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) module, the infrastructure has been built to welcome community members to participate in staking, including independent stakers.

The reason this is important is that DVT should alleviate concerns about too much concentration of staked ETH on Lido by diversifying node operators. According to Dune Analytics, Lido holds 29% of staked ETH.

According to Cointelegraph, Bitcoin Runes, a new protocol for issuing fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network, will go live after Bitcoin’s halving this week.

However, according to a decentralized finance (DeFi) researcher who goes by the pseudonym Ignas in an April 17 X article, the real market opportunity for runes may not emerge until several months after the first wave of investor hype subsides:

“Runestone, RSIC, and PUPS are already rising fast, promising holders shiny new rune token airdrops. And the FOMO posts keep coming. But, like the NFT frenzy following the JPEG reveal, the market may soon cool down.”

According to Cointelegraph, Worldcoin, an identity coin startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is further advancing its "people-centric" approach in the Web3 field through its new blockchain network World Chain.

On April 17, Worldcoin announced the launch of World Chain, a new blockchain initiative designed to prioritize human users, increase efficiency, and promote real-world utility in Web3 applications.

Worldcoin recently surpassed 10 million World IDs created and completed 75 million transactions, demonstrating that the project is expanding rapidly. Its proprietary network has been designed to scale as a second layer on the Ethereum network to meet the needs of the project.

With the upcoming Bitcoin halving on April 19-20, 2024, a large number of cryptocurrency enthusiasts are eagerly preparing for the Runes protocol. The concept of Runes was developed by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, and has received considerable hype since its announcement in September 2023.

Six months ago, Casey Rodarmor, the creator of the Bitcoin Ordinal theory, unveiled the Runes protocol on his blog. He expressed uncertainty about whether it was a good idea to develop a new protocol on Bitcoin that could create fungible tokens, but acknowledged that it could generate a lot of transaction fee revenue, attract developer interest, and increase Bitcoin's user base.