Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) disclosed on April 20, 2026, that it acquired 101,627 ETH in the prior week—the largest weekly purchase since mid-December 2025. This brought its total holdings to 4,976,485 ETH (about 4.98 million), or roughly 4.12% of Ethereum’s total supply of around 120.7 million ETH.

Bitmine, chaired by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, continues its aggressive Ethereum accumulation strategy and has staked a significant portion of its holdings through its MAVAN platform. The company also reported broader crypto and cash holdings exceeding $12 billion.

This update aligns with the firm’s long-term “Alchemy of 5%” target for Ethereum supply ownership. Multiple sources, including the company’s press release and major crypto outlets, confirm the figures.

Aven has introduced a bitcoin-backed credit card that allows users to borrow against digital assets without selling holdings, marking a shift in crypto-linked consumer finance, according to statements shared with Bitcoin Magazine. 

The Aven Bitcoin Visa Card, unveiled today at the Bitcoin Conference 2026 in Las Vegas, provides a credit line of up to $1 million secured by bitcoin collateral. The product targets long-term holders seeking liquidity without triggering taxable events tied to asset sales.

The card combines a revolving credit line with fixed-term loan options, offering repayment periods of up to 10 years. Interest rates for both structures start at 7.99% APR, which…

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SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Mike Selig used back‑to‑back fireside chats on the Nakamoto Stage at The Bitcoin 2026 Conference to signal a reset in Washington’s approach to digital assets, tokenization, and market structure. 

Atkins described it as “a new day at the SEC,” while Selig said regulators are “turning over a new page” and need to harmonize their efforts.

Atkins said the SEC is taking a new approach to digital assets and wants that activity onshore rather than pushed to foreign jurisdictions. He said the SEC and CFTC are now working together on digital assets and aim to set a new benchmark for inter‑agency collaboration.

That cooperation…

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Paystand announced the launch of USDb, a stablecoin designed specifically for commercial-scale business finance, including accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and treasury operations, on the Bitcoin network.

Paystand is a Bitcoin-powered B2B payments network that processes accounts receivable and accounts payable for more than one million businesses across North America and Latin America. The company has handled over $20 billion in payment volume and built a full-stack CFO platform through acquisitions of Yaydoo, Teampay, and Bitwage, covering AR automation, spend management, LATAM compliance, and cross-border payroll. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Santa Cruz,…

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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel used a Bitcoin 2026 Conference panel to signal a shift in how the U.S. government approaches digital assets, stressing support for developers and a focus on crime rather than code.

Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, moderating the virtual discussion, opened by asking Blanche and Patel for their Bitcoin origin stories. 

Blanche said his son pushed him toward Bitcoin and called him a “clown and idiot” for not investing, while also noting that his government role bars him from owning assets. Patel framed Bitcoin and other virtual assets as economic infrastructure, saying they are assets “just like…

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Speaking at The Bitcoin Conference U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis opened her keynote by recalling her first encounter with Bitcoin, describing it as an unfamiliar concept of owning an asset that exists on a blockchain, before purchasing three tokens at roughly $300 each.

Lummis told the audience that Bitcoin first struck her as “free money” because it removes the need to trust a third party to hold or move value. 

She linked that realization back to her early purchases of three bitcoin at about $300 each, when the idea of owning an asset that lives on a blockchain still felt strange.

Lummis referenced periods of war, noting that bitcoin often serves as a refuge from poor…

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Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is starting to turn iGaming payouts into a native Bitcoin use case, as operators look to escape card fees, chargebacks, and slow settlement that no longer fit a real-time betting market. 

A new benchmark report from Voltage frames Lightning as the next major phase of Bitcoin’s evolution, shifting it from a passive store of value to the backbone of instant, global gambling withdrawals. 

The study opens with a 30-day pilot at a single iGaming operator that routed a slice of its customer base through the Bitcoin Lightning Network. In that window, the platform pushed 88.2 bitcoin through Lightning, processed 237,000 payments, and recorded a 99.94%…

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OpenAgents, an open-source artificial intelligence lab building Bitcoin-native infrastructure for machine learning, today announced its graduation from the BitcoinFi accelerator and the close of $1.3 million in pre-seed funding.

The company is using the capital to expand Pylon, its distributed compute node that lets people sell spare compute for Bitcoin, and to accelerate work on Psionic, its Rust-based machine learning framework for inference, fine-tuning, embeddings, image generation, and distributed training.

“America needs an open-source AI lab that can compete at the frontier without recreating the closed, centralized incentives of the biggest labs,” said Christopher…

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