News Roundup
Seven items from the past month, one slide each
INDOPACOM · APR 21
US Military Runs a Bitcoin Node
Adm. Paparo confirms it in Senate testimony — framed as "a computing tool", not currency.
IRAN · APR 9–10
Strait of Hormuz Bitcoin Tolls — and a Hashrate Collapse
Tehran approves $1/bbl BTC-or-yuan toll; meanwhile Iran's hashrate drops 77%.
SOLO MINER · APR 9
Solo Miner Wins Block 944,306
CKpool solo at ~70 TH/s finds block 944,306 — claims full 3.128 BTC reward.
SQUARE / BLOCK · MAR 31
Bitcoin Lightning Auto-Enabled for Millions of Sellers
Block enables US merchants by default — Lightning settlement, instant USD, zero processing fees through 2026.
LITECOIN · APR 25
13-Block Reorg via MWEB Bug
Privacy-layer DoS exploited; ~3hr resolution; "zero-day" framing contested by GitHub timeline.
LIGHTNING · APR
CLN Splicing GA, LDK Zero-Fee, Onion-Msg DoS Mitigations
Three threads converging — splicing leaves experimental, jamming work formalises.
VEGAS MONEY · APR 29
Tether-Proposed 3-Way Merger: XXI + Strike + Elektron
A combined treasury + lending + mining co. Tether's BTC stack now 97,141 BTC.
"We Have a Node on the Bitcoin Network"
First public confirmation that a US combatant command runs a node
"We have a node on the Bitcoin network. We are conducting a series of operational tests..."
— Adm. Samuel Paparo, Commander, US Indo-Pacific Command (Senate Armed Services, 2026-04-21)
FRAMING
A "computing tool" — cryptography + blockchain + PoW. Positioned as peer-to-peer, zero-trust value transfer, not currency or investment.
STRATEGIC ANGLE
Researching whether PoW "imposes greater security costs than conventional algorithmic protections" for military networks. PoW as a defence primitive vs. well-resourced peers.
CONFIRMED
A node exists, on the public network, run by INDOPACOM.
UNKNOWN
Implementation, location, reachability, mempool policy, inbound vs. outbound only.
CONTEXT
A military node has no special consensus power — it's just a node. But state-actor traffic analysis and peer-graph mapping at scale is now plausible, which lines up with the Bitprojects Sybil disclosure and the increased-outbounds work covered on the BIP-110 deck.
Iran: Hormuz Tolls vs. Hashrate Collapse
Tehran approves a $1/bbl Bitcoin-or-yuan toll on Hormuz tankers; Iran's mining hashrate falls 77%
THE TOLL
Iran's security council approved a $1/barrel toll on tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, payable in Bitcoin or yuan. A fully loaded supertanker = ~$2M for safe passage.
THE HASHRATE
Iran's mining hashrate collapsed 77% last quarter. ~427,000 rigs went dark, shedding ~7 EH/s at an all-time-low hashprice of
$27.89/PH/day. Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, Laos, Finland all grew YoY.77%
Iran hashrate Q-on-Q
7 EH/s
capacity offline
$2M
per supertanker toll
FOLLOW-UP · APR 28
Blockchain firms and intelligence sources can find no on-chain data confirming tolls being paid at scale. By late April, reports surfaced of scammers targeting stranded ships in the Strait with fake "Bitcoin transit fees".
NOTE
"Censorship-resistance" usually frames Bitcoin as resisting state coercion against users. Here a state wants to use Bitcoin to coerce others — the network can't refuse such use. The hashrate move tracks economics: rigs left at the prevailing hashprice.
Solo Miner Wins a Block
A 70 TH/s solo miner solves block 944,306 and claims the full 3.128 BTC reward
BLOCK 944,306 · APR 9
A CKpool solo miner with just ~70 TH/s (comparable to a 2019 Antminer S17+) solved block 944,306 and claimed the full 3.128 BTC ($222K) reward. Con Kolivas put the odds at roughly 1 in 100,000 per day at that hashrate.
~70 TH/s
solo hashrate
3.128 BTC
full block reward
1 in 100K
odds per day
CONTEXT
A small solo setup can still occasionally claim a full block. PoW isn't weighted by operator size.
Square Flips Bitcoin On — at Scale
Block makes Lightning the default payment rail for millions of US merchants
WHAT HAPPENED · MAR 31
Square auto-enabled Bitcoin payments for millions of eligible US sellers. A customer who chooses to pay in BTC over Lightning settles instantly to the merchant's account in USD, with zero processing fees through 2026. The merchant does not need to interact with Bitcoin to receive the payment.
WHY IT MATTERS
First instance of a major payments processor setting BTC payments to on by default across its merchant base. Sellers don't opt in — they'd have to opt out.
WHAT'S NEXT
A customer-side toggle is reportedly planned — buyer taps "pay in sats", merchant still receives USD.
SCALE
Square processes card and Cash App payments for an estimated 4M+ US sellers across food, retail, and services. Default-on means the long tail is plumbed in even where the merchant has no Bitcoin literacy.
Litecoin's 13-Block Reorg
A bug in Litecoin's MWEB privacy layer caused a 13-block reorg on Apr 25
WHAT HAPPENED · APR 25
A bug in Litecoin's MWEB privacy layer (MimbleWimble Extension Block) let a denial-of-service attack push invalid transactions past nodes that hadn't updated. Result: a 13-block reorganisation across blocks
#3,095,931–943, taking ~3 hours to resolve. NEAR Intents initially reported ~$600K in exposure to swap protocols; most of it was reversed when the longest valid chain corrected.THE DISCLOSURE CONTROVERSY
Litecoin's official line: "zero-day attack". But GitHub commit history tells a different story — the consensus bug was privately patched between Mar 19 and Mar 26, roughly four weeks before the exploit. A separate DoS bug was patched the morning of Apr 25, with both fixes rolled into
0.21.5.4 the same afternoon, after the attack had begun. Researchers (and CoinDesk) flagged the gap.WHY THIS MATTERS FOR BITCOIN
Bitcoin doesn't have an MWEB-style privacy layer, so the specific bug doesn't transfer. The general points: privacy features add validation surface; any optional layer increases the cost of correctness; and "zero-day" framing can obscure what was, by then, a known-and-patched vulnerability.
Lightning Briefs
CLN 26.04/26.04.1 splicing GA · LDK zero-fee commitments to production · onion-message DoS work
CORE LIGHTNING 26.04/26.04.1 — SPLICING GA
Splicing — adding/removing channel funds without close+reopen — graduated from experimental in CLN. Headline upgrade: multi-channel splices in a single command (e.g. splice out of five channels and into two), which makes large-node rebalancing dramatically cheaper.
LDK — ZERO-FEE COMMITMENTS PROMOTED
LDK moved zero-fee commitment channels from the experimental feature bit to production: the commitment tx itself carries no fee, so force-close fee-bumping happens at broadcast time via anchor outputs (CPFP) rather than via a fee reserve negotiated up-front under uncertain future fee markets. Cheaper, simpler force-close behaviour, less dust held by routing nodes for fee bumping.
ONION-MESSAGE DOS — JAMMING WORK
Onion messages let nodes coordinate without an on-chain anchor — payment-less packets used for BOLT 12 offers, async payments, and route-blinding handshakes. They're also a DoS vector: senders pay nothing (no fee, no HTLC, no liquidity lockup) while every hop pays CPU and bandwidth — asymmetric cost makes flooding cheap. Erick Cestari outlined four mitigations at Optech:
• Upfront fees per message
• Balance-based forwarding
• Bandwidth-metered payments
• Backpropagation rate limits
LND has an open mitigation PR with per-peer and global token-bucket limits, plus onion-message forwarding work awaiting release.
• Upfront fees per message
• Balance-based forwarding
• Bandwidth-metered payments
• Backpropagation rate limits
LND has an open mitigation PR with per-peer and global token-bucket limits, plus onion-message forwarding work awaiting release.
Vegas Money — A Three-Way Merger
Tether, XXI, Strike, Elektron Energy — proposed merger announced at Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas, Apr 29
THE PROPOSAL · APR 29 · BITCOIN 2026 VEGAS
Tether Investments proposed merging Twenty One Capital (NYSE: XXI), Strike, and bitcoin miner Elektron Energy into a single public Bitcoin company. If it lands, the combined entity would unite treasury, financial services, lending, capital markets, and mining under one ticker.
XXI — TREASURY
Twenty One Capital (Mallers, backed by Tether + Bitfinex) — currently holds ~43,514 BTC. Went public Dec 2025 via SPAC.
STRIKE — RAILS & LENDING
Mallers' BTC financial-services platform. NY BitLicense (Mar). $2.1B credit facility. New "volatility-proof" BTC-backed loans built with Tether (no liquidation).
ELEKTRON — HASHRATE
Mining company led by Raphael Zagury (proposed President of merged co). ~50 EH/s — about 5% of the global Bitcoin network. All-in production cost <$60K/BTC.
TETHER ITSELF
• April purchase: another $70M of BTC under its 15%-of-profits policy.
• Total holdings: 97,141 BTC (~$7.16B).
• Broader corporate position: reported around 140K BTC.
• USDT supply: all-time high of $188B on Apr 21.
• Total holdings: 97,141 BTC (~$7.16B).
• Broader corporate position: reported around 140K BTC.
• USDT supply: all-time high of $188B on Apr 21.
CONCENTRATION
If it completes: a single public co. with a top-3 corporate BTC stack, a major BTC-native lending platform, ~5% of network hashrate, and Tether backing. The Strike + Tether "volatility-proof" loan mechanism (no liquidation) hasn't been published. Cross-ref: Governance for the Bitcoin 2026 Vegas stage politics.