Senator Lummis is back with her strategic Bitcoin reserve bill, the “Boosting Innovation, Technology and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act,” or BITCOIN Act. This legislation, which aligns with a recent executive order from President Trump, aims to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to fortify the American balance sheet. The bill had initially been proposed in July 2024 and has undergone minor alterations since. The plan includes the creation of a decentralized network of Bitcoin vaults managed by the U.S. Treasury and a program to acquire 1 million BTC over a predetermined period. This would approximate a 5% stake in the total Bitcoin supply, mirroring the amount of gold reserves held by the United States.

Blockchain scaling company StarkWare is also making waves in the crypto sphere by setting up its own “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve”. CEO and co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson did not disclose the exact amount of Bitcoin that the company holds or plans to acquire, but emphasized, “we put our money where our mouths are”. StarkWare, the main contributor to Ethereum’s Layer 2 Starknet, has in recent years increasingly invested time and resources into Bitcoin research.

Meanwhile, Crypto asset manager Bitwise has launched its Bitcoin Standard Corporations ETF (OWNB). This tracks companies holding at least 1,000 BTC in their treasury. Additionally, Cboe BZX Exchange has filed a form with the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking permission to allow staking in Fidelity’s spot Ethereum ETF (FETH).

Lastly, Taproot Wizards, the Bitcoin Ordinals project, is set to hold its first public sale of its Wizards NFT collection on March 25. The sale will include 2,121 NFTs, and will exclude 13 honorary Wizard images that resemble notable figures in the crypto world.

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On September 15, at 06:42:42 UTC, at block 15537393, the long-awaited Merge occurred, bringing together Ethereum’s main net execution layer and the Beacon Chain’s consensus layer. In other words, the network will stop using the PoW consensus method.

TradingView shows that in hourly measurements, the price of Ethereum (ETH) has risen somewhat after the Merge. The current market price is about $1,635.

The Ethereum Foundation estimates that the Merge will boost the Ethereum network’s efficiency in terms of the amount of energy it uses by around 99.5%. This paves the path for potential future scalability methods like sharding.

Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum’s co-founders, expressed his joy:

And we finalized!
Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.

StarkWare’s president and co-founder, Eli Ben-Sasson, said that the Merge’s massive effect on energy consumption had its most immediate importance.

In addition, according to Ben-Sasson, this event is the first step in a chain reaction that would ultimately result in the very widespread adoption of Ethereum.

There will be a chain reaction of subsequent changes as a result. The result will be extensive use of Ethereum’s processing capabilities and widespread acceptance of blockchain-based apps across a wide variety of human activities.

What’s Next After the Merge?

Since its inception, the Ethereum Foundation has worked tirelessly to provide the groundwork for the Merge.

After the successful conclusion of the Merge stage, the Ethereum development team will go on to the subsequent “Surge,” “Verge,” “Purge,” and “Splurge” phases.

A major change in blockchain history was confronted with opposition, but it finally prevailed. Just after the Merge, the group ETHW Core, which speaks for proof-of-work miners, said that it plans to execute a hard fork within the next twenty-four hours.

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