Bitcoin Standard Treasury Co. (BSTR), a bitcoin

treasury vehicle led by cryptography pioneer Adam Back, sees itself as a company with a mission to accelerate real-world bitcoin adoption.

But it might be setting out on another milestone: becoming one of the biggest corporate bitcoin holders.

The company, which is preparing to go public on Nasdaq by merging with Cantor Equity Partners (CEPO), already has 30,021 BTC on its balance sheet, with plans to grow its stack beyond 50,000 coins.

This will set it on the path of potentially overtaking MARA Holdings (MARA) as the second-largest corporate holder of BTC behind Strategy. MARA has more than 50,600 BTC, according to bitcointreasuries.net. Strategy has just under 629,000.

Currently, MSTR, MARA, and BSTR collectively hold roughly 710,000 bitcoin, which represents about 3.38% of bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21 million.

‘Liquidity, security, and scale’

Unlike some corporate treasuries that sit on bitcoin passively, BSTR intends to use techniques that include selling puts to accumulate BTC at lower prices, using bitcoin-backed revolvers and placing collateral with regulated tri-party custodians.

“We’re not interested in chasing DeFi yield or taking on counterparty risk we can’t manage. This is about liquidity, security, and scale,” Back said exclusively with CoinDesk. “Bitcoin was created as sound money and BSTR is being created to bring that same integrity to modern capital markets.”

The SPAC deal with Cantor combines, for the first time, traditional Wall Street financing with a bitcoin-denominated private placement of equity (PIPE).

In addition to 25,000 BTC contributed by the company’s founders, another 5,021 BTC will be raised from the bitcoin community.

The company is also raising up to $1.5 billion in fiat financing, the largest PIPE ever announced alongside a bitcoin treasury SPAC merger.

• $400 million in common equity at $10 per share.
• Up to $750 million in convertible senior notes (30% conversion premium, $13 per share).
• Up to $350 million in convertible preferred stock with a 7% dividend and a $13 per share equivalent conversion price.

CEPO could add up to $200 million from its trust, subject to redemptions.

“By securing both fiat and bitcoin funding on day one, we are putting unprecedented firepower behind a single mission: maximizing bitcoin ownership per share while accelerating real-world bitcoin adoption,” Back said.

A first for bitcoin treasuries

The in-kind PIPE allows investors to deliver BTC at closing and potentially capture upside before settlement. Back said the approach was designed to appeal to both crypto-native players and traditional managers seeking exposure without waiting for post-close market buys.

The firm’s CIO Sean Bill, who previously helped a U.S. pension fund make one of the first institutional allocations to BTC, said the strategy resonated with traditional investors. “We’re building the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) of Bitcoin, an actively managed Treasury that will pursue yield and alpha strategies, and strategic acquisitions within the Bitcoin ecosystem”.

“We’re flipping the script on Wall Street as we seek to fuse Bitcoin into Finance and Capital Markets, unlike other Treasury companies we’re not coming to Wall Street seeking fiat currency to buy Bitcoin, we’re showing up with a 25,000 Bitcoin commitment and more importantly we issued the first ever Bitcoin in kind Equity PIPE in the United States, raising another 5,021 Bitcoins from OG Bitcoiners. We’re brining the Bitcoin to Wall Street. We believe that the future of finance runs on Bitcoin”,” Bill told CoinDesk exclusively.

Bridging bitcoin and Wall Street

The leadership team sees BSTR as a bridge between the bitcoin ecosystem and institutional capital markets.

“We’re bringing the traders, we’re bringing the bitcoiners to Wall Street,” Back said, noting the potential for the U.S. market’s liquidity to amplify the success of bitcoin-denominated convertibles that have already gained traction in Europe.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, with the company trading under the reserved ticker BSTR. If the raise is fully subscribed, the launch could set a new scale record for corporate bitcoin treasuries and offer a template for others looking to merge sound money with modern market instruments.

The EF is excited to announce the results of the Medalla data challenge, a data hackathon focused on the Medalla testnet

The prompt was open-ended: we asked for data tools, visualizations, and analyses of testnet data; in short, anything that would help the community make sense of all the data.

Over the course of six weeks we received 23 submissions from a wide variety of teams. We were pleased to see high quality submissions for every category.

Prizes are divided into three tiers based on scope, extensibility, and usefulness to the community.

Gold ($15k prize)

• Jim McDonald — chaind, a tool for extracting data from a running eth2 client and storing it in a PostgreSQL database. Notably, this tool was used by multiple other teams who submitted to the data challenge.
• Pintail — a series of blog posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) comparing client performance, studying network behavior, and discussing validator effectiveness.

Silver ($5k prize)

• Sid Shekhar and Elias Simos — a wide-ranging study of eth2 data.
• Evgeny Medvedev of Nansen — an extension of the ethereum-etl tool to eth2, as well as a BigQuery database dump of eth2 data.
• Nate McKervey of Splunk — a blog post and dashboard studying Ethereum network health.

Bronze ($1k prize)

Looking forward

The aims of this contest were to welcome new minds into the Ethereum community, encourage them to pore over eth2 data, make it easier to parse and analyse, and provide valuable insights to both developers and the community at large. To that end, the competition has been a great success, and we suspect that many of the tools and analyses produced will be useful as mainnet goes live.

If you’re interested in picking up where any of these submissions left off, please consider applying for a staking community grant!

Achievement badges are a funny thing. You know they’re just a simple little bit of visual flair, they don’t even do anything, and yet for some reason you just have to collect them. Gamification can be a great motivator, and the achievement badges for the activity tracking on the Apple Watch have inspired many users to get more exercise.

If you want to maximize your badge count, you’re going to want to chase down as many activity achievements as you can. Most are available year-round, but there are also some time-limited special events to grab, too. Here’s a list of all the activity achievements for the Apple Watch and how to unlock them.

Updated April 15, 2025: Apple has announced a special Global Close Your Rings award on April 24 in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Apple Watch, and the Earth Day badge will be available on April 22.

Standard achievements

Most of the achievements can be earned year-round. If you open the Activity app on your iPhone, then head over to the Achievements tab, you’ll see some of them listed even before you earn them (in which case they will be represented by a grey outline).

However, there are some achievements that are not shown until you earn them. Past and future monthly challenges, for example, won’t show up, nor do all the various individual exercise workouts.

Here is a list of all the standard badges you can get.

First [exercise] Workout

The first time you perform a new exercise for at least 5 minutes, you’ll get a achievement badge. Every workout type that does not fall under the “Other” category is eligible for this badge: from walking to yoga to HIIT to hiking and more.

Activities with both indoor and outdoor variants, like Cycling and Walking, are bundled together; you can do either activity to get the badge, and can only get it once.

[exercise] Workout Record

Every time you beat your previous best record for calories burned in any of the exercises listed above, you get this badge.

There is one caveat: You must complete five workouts of that type first. If you want to game the system, make sure your first four workouts of each type are short and easy, so it won’t take much effort to beat them.

7-Workout Week

Simply complete any workout of at least 15 minutes every day of the week. Note that the week is Monday-Sunday, and you have to do a workout on each of those days (you can’t simply do any seven days in a row). If you start a walking workout whenever you walk outside, you can achieve this easily.

New Move Record

Any day that your Move ring goes further than ever before (meaning you burned more calories in a day), you’ll earn this award. There’s one catch: you have to use your Apple Watch for 10 days before you can complete this.

New Exercise Record

This is just like the Move Record achievement, only for the green ring. This one is based on minutes of exercise, not calories burned, so it’s really easy to get. Just like the Move Record achievement, you have to use your Apple Watch for 10 days first.

Move Goal 200%, 300%, 400%

You earn this when you exceed your calorie target (the red Move ring) by 2x, 3x, or 4x, respectively. In other words, it’s given for making the red activity ring go around two, three, or four times in a day. It’s easy to get if you just set your Move goal very low.

New Move Goal

Every time you change your daily Move goal, and then exceed that new goal, you get this achievement. You can change your Move goal by opening the Activity app on your Apple Watch and force-pressing the screen.

Longest Move Streak

When you hit your Move goal (close the red ring) several days in a row, that’s a “streak.” You get this award when your streak finally ends, if it’s longer than your previous best streak.

Perfect Week

This is given out for four categories: Move, Exercise, Stand, and All Activity. For the first three, simply close the rings (red, green, or blue) every day of the week. To get the Perfect Week (All Activity) badge, close all three rings every day for an entire week. You can earn this multiple times, though it only shows one badge.

Remember, one week in the Activity app is from Monday-Sunday!

Perfect Month

Unlike Perfect Week, there are not multiple different Perfect Month badges for the different color rings. The lone Perfect Month achievement is for closing the red Move ring every day of the month.

There’s a separate Perfect Month badge for every month and every year, though. So you can earn this in February and again in March, and again in February in the next year.

Monthly Challenge

Each month has its own unique fitness challenge. If you have notifications set for the Activity app on our Apple Watch, you’ll see the goal presented at the beginning of the month, but you’ll also see the current month’s challenge in the Achievements tab of the Activity app on your iPhone. It will be a grey outline before it’s completed, but you can tap on it to see what the challenge entails.

The monthly challenge may task you with burning a specific number of calories, working out a number of times, or traveling a certain distance. There’s no telling what each new month will bring, you just have to look!

100, 365, 500, 1,000 Move Goals

When you hit your daily Move goal (close the red ring) 100 times, you get an achievement badge. You get another for hitting it 365 times, 500 times, and 1,000 times. These do not need to be in a row; it’s just the total number of times you’ve ever hit the goal.

Limited Achievements

Apple offers multiple one-off challenges per year that are only available for a limited time. Often, they’re only around for one day or one weekend. Some are limited to the U.S. because they’re based on U.S. holidays.

You’ll get a notification on your Apple Watch when one of them is coming up (make sure you have notifications enabled for the Activity app, using the Watch app on your iPhone).

Global Close Your Rings Day (April 24, 2025)

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of the first Apple Watch. Users who close all three Activity rings will earn a limited-edition award, plus 10 animated stickers and an animated badge for Messages.

Earth Day (April 22, 2025)

On April 22, celebrate Earth Day and win this award with any workout of 30 minutes or more. Try to get outside for it!

Heart Month challenge (February 14, 2025)

Show your heart some love! Close your Exercise ring this Valentine’s Day, February 14, to earn this award.

New Year’s 2025 challenge (January 2025)

Let’s start 2025 off right. Earn this award by closing all three rings for seven days in a row in January.

Mental Health Day challenge (October 10)

Let’s bring awareness to all the ways we can take care of our mental health. On October 10, record 10 mindful minutes with any app that adds to Health to get this award.

National Parks challenge (August 25)

In the U.S., the National Parks Service was founded on August 25, 1916. Apple has a National Parks challenge around that time each year to celebrate National Parks all over the world.

To get this badge, just record a workout of 20 minutes or more on August 25 with any app that adds workouts to the Health app.

Global Running Day (June 5)

Hit the road, trail, track, or tread for Global Running Day! Record a running workout and go at least 5 km on June 5 to earn this special badge.

World Meditation Day (May 21)

To complete this new challenge, you’ll need to record five or more mindful minutes using the Mindfulness app or any app that adds mindful minutes to Health app on May 21, 2024.

Earth Day (April 22)

Let’s get moving for the planet. On April 22, do any workout for 30 minutes or more to earn this award. Record it with the Workout app or any app that adds to Health.

Heart Month (February 14)

This Valentine’s day, it’s all about heart. Close your Exercise ring on February 14 to get this award.

Veteran’s Day (November 11)

Earn this special award on November 11 by doing any workout for 11 minutes or more. Record your time with the Workout app or any app that adds workouts to Health.

The Ethereum Foundation is excited to announce the winners of the Merge Data Challenge .

The challenge ran for ~9 weeks surrounding the Merge, allowing for data analysts to gather and review information both before and after the big event. Participants submitted a treasure trove of data and analysis in 45(!) different blog posts.

Enjoy combing through the many insights and, as everything is open source, feel free to open things up and extend/modify the analysis!

Prizes

Prizes are divided into three tiers, based on the overall quality, scope, extensibility, and usefulness to the community.

Gold ($30k prize)

Silver ($10k prize)

Bronze ($2.5k prize)

Looking Forward

The Merge Data Challenge produced excellent new tools, analyses, and visualizations. That said, there is ongoing work to do in monitoring and understanding Ethereum’s proof-of-stake network — especially in the Beacon Chain consensus-layer.

If you’re interested in digging deeper or productionizing the tools and techniques found in these submissions, please consider applying to the Ecosystem Support Program!

In March 2024, the Ethereum network underwent a significant upgrade with the implementation of EIP-4844, an essential part of the Dencun hardfork, aimed at bolstering Ethereum’s role as a data availability layer. This upgrade introduced “blobs” of data, dramatically enhancing the scalability of Layer 2 solutions by increasing data availability by approximately 100 times. As with any major upgrade, it’s crucial to evaluate its impact, understand its implications, and refine our approach moving forward.

To that end, we launched a dedicated data collection round, inviting researchers and developers to delve into the empirical impacts of EIP-4844. The response was overwhelming, with submissions exploring everything from consensus layer security to rollup economics. Today, we are thrilled to announce the winners of this round, who have provided critical insights into how this pivotal upgrade is reshaping the Ethereum ecosystem.

Gold

Seongwan Park – Decipher_SNU: Assessing the Empirical Impacts of EIP-4844
Seongwan’s work offers a comprehensive empirical analysis of EIP-4844’s effects on consensus security, Ethereum usage, and rollup transaction dynamics. His research highlights both the enhancements and challenges introduced by this upgrade, providing invaluable data to guide future improvements.

Silver

Kofi Kufuor: Impact of EIP-4844 on Rollup Economics
Kofi’s ongoing work on an open-source Dune dataset has expanded to include blob fee data, offering a granular view of rollup costs and revenues post-EIP-4844. His dashboard simplifies the analysis of rollup economics, making it accessible to the broader community.

Isaac Samuel : EIP-4844: Empowering Ethereum’s Scaling Future with Blob Transactions
Isaac’s project dives deep into the metrics and significance of blob transactions. His mega-dashboard on Flipside Crypto tracks on-chain metrics and offers a detailed analysis through articles, helping the community understand the broader impacts of EIP-4844.

Victoria Tran – Blocknative: Blob Adoption and Utilization – Insights from the first 85 days
Blocknative’s submission sheds light on the early adoption and utilization of blobs through their innovative Blob Archive API. This tool, alongside their Mempool Data Archive, offers unparalleled insights into Ethereum’s data availability landscape post-EIP-4844.

Yijing Yuan: 4844 Insights
Yijing’s analysis focuses on block propagation times, Layer 2 posting patterns, and network stability following the Dencun hardfork. Her timely submission, despite the tight deadline, provides essential insights into how EIP-4844 is reshaping Ethereum’s data infrastructure.

Bronze

Evan Kim – Primev: Censorship, Latency, and Preconfirmations in the Blob Market
Evan’s research explores the emerging blob market introduced by EIP-4844, examining its similarities to EIP-1559 gas pricing and potential challenges like transaction latency and censorship. His work proposes innovative solutions, such as “preconf bids,” to enhance the blob market’s efficiency and reliability.

Guillaume Michel – ProbeLab: A Deep Dive into the P2P Layer of the Dencun Hardfork
Guillaume’s blog post analyzes the impact of the Dencun hardfork on Ethereum’s P2P networking layer, focusing on the public DHT of discv5 and the gossipsub protocol. His study offers critical insights into the network’s performance and areas for improvement.

Leonardo Bautista Gomez(https://x.com/Miga_labs): A Study of the first 3 Months of Blobs in Ethereum
Leonardo’s in-depth study covers the behavior of blob data in the first 12 weeks following the Dencun hardfork. His analysis includes the frequency and distribution of blobs per slot, as well as the challenges and potential for future scalability.

Leonardo Bautista Gomez(https://x.com/Miga_labs): Ethereum Hardware Resource Analysis Update
In a second submission, Leonardo updates a previous study on the hardware resource consumption of Ethereum clients, comparing performance before and after the introduction of blobs. His findings are crucial for understanding the infrastructure demands of the network’s latest upgrade.

Evan Kim – Primev: Slot Inclusion Rates and Blob Market Combinatorics
Evan’s final submission delves into the combinatorics of the blob market, analyzing slot inclusion rates, competition, and potential censorship. His work lays the groundwork for optimizing the blob market, ensuring fair and efficient transaction inclusion.

Looking Ahead

The insights gained from this data collection round are invaluable as Ethereum continues to evolve. EIP-4844 represents a critical step forward in Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, and the work of these researchers will help ensure that the network remains secure, efficient, and scalable. As the blob market continues to grow, it is approaching a point of congestion, which will undoubtedly provide even more interesting insights into how Ethereum’s infrastructure handles this increased demand. We extend our gratitude to all participants for their contributions and look forward to furthering collaboration and innovation within the Ethereum community.

Stay tuned for more updates and future rounds as we continue to explore the frontiers of Ethereum’s development.