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Wavespace, a Bitcoin neobank serving the Eurozone, has announced MiCA compliance of its ‘self-custodial’ debit card. The young fintech company is at the cutting edge of Bitcoin payments technology in Europe, with support for the Lightning Network, and auto DCA to self-custody.

Debit cards in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry have traditionally worked by preloading custodial accounts with bitcoin or stablecoins. The process of preloading was usually on-chain, taking time to settle and requiring manual input from the user to send from self-custody wallets or cold storage. If the preloaded balance ran out on the card, spending would not be possible.

Wavespace’s self-custody debit card solves these problems with a novel Bitcoin technology called Nostr Wallet Connect, or NWC for short. This protocol, documented in NIP-47, allows users to connect a service like this debit card to a self-hosted Lightning node. The user sets a minimum balance, say $200 and every time the user spends from the card via the VISA network, Wavespace pulls sats from the user’s self-custodial wallet to top up the card. This process minimizes custodial exchange risk while maximizing user exposure to the asset and automating away the friction to spend bitcoin.

NWC is a technology developed by the Nostr ecosystem, a high-tech niche within the Bitcoin industry that is branching out into social media and other communication protocols.

As a high-tech neobank, Wavespace gives users a personal IBAN account, which they can send fiat to, to purchase Bitcoin. Their automated DCA services can be set to withdraw bitcoin upon purchase to a selected Bitcoin address.

The company is MiCA compliant, making it one of the few surviving Bitcoin exchanges in Europe, as the complicated crypto regulations came online.

On the privacy front, the deep Lightning network integration of Wavespace lets user get access to the banking system in a clear and compliant manner, without exposing all their payment data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since Lightning payments are off-chain, there is no single public record that leaks user data; instead, transactions move through payment channels between various user services, leaving no obvious public trace. The result is a growing compromise between the high privacy, cypherpunk values that created the Bitcoin and crypto industry, while also unlocking access to the legacy financial system, and compliant integration with regulation-heavy areas like Europe.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Eivydas Račkauskas, Chief Orange Pill Giver at Wavespace, said that 70% of the payments made on the platform use the Lightning Network and that the company is looking into the ARK protocol for further self-custody-oriented payments integrations. He also revealed that the company is integrated with Lightspark and is ready for an expansion into the USA, though he did not reveal further details on the matter.

Wavespace has been almost entirely bootstrapped and self-funded, according to Račkauskas, except for an early Relai angel investor who supported them in 2025. They are currently in the middle of another fundraising round.

French-Canadian day tour operator Roatan.Day has partnered with OpenNode, to accept Bitcoin payments for custom and private tours on Roatán, Honduras.

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The partnerships positions Roatan Day as a leader in innovation and enables customers to make payments via bitcoin including instant Lightning Network transactions, for all tour bookings.

The integration makes Roatan.Day one of the first tour operators in the Caribbean to offer a fully native Bitcoin checkout experience. Travelers can book island excursions using on-chain Bitcoin or Lightning Network payments with near-zero fees and instant settlement. Expensive bank or card fees for international transfers are gone.

“Customers scan the invoice QR code, authorize the transaction and within seconds, the payment is settled and the tour is paid for.” explains Roatan Day founder Patrice...

Last month, Tando, the Kenya-based Bitcoin payments company, announced it had created a service that allows 40 million Kenyans to send and receive Bitcoin using the existing M-Pesa infrastructure. To pull this off, they strung together numerous pieces of technology, including in-house solutions, to make bitcoin’s Lightning Network act as a translation layer for millions.

Launched in 2024, Tando, the Kenyan payments company founded by Jason and Sabina Waithira Gitau, began as an attempt to solve a very specific problem: how do Kenyans spend Bitcoin like they do Kenyan Shillings (KES)? They quickly realized the best way to do that was to leverage the ubiquitous M-Pesa mobile money payment rail to provide a seamless experience.

They built an app that allows anyone with bitcoin to pay an M-Pesa invoice without needing local currency. Once a user enters their M-Pesa phone number and amount, they receive a lightning invoice to pay, and the recipient receives Kenyan shillings (KES). The app soon grew in virality and reach among the growing base of Kenyan bitcoin users.

As Gitau underscored in her panel at this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, people can test out Tando using less than a dollar, without paying fees, or KYC, making it quick to validate and easy to adopt.

However, as Jason put it in an interview for this article, though the app resonated with many, “they still need a separate bitcoin wallet to use Tando.” To curb that, they again went back to the tried-and-true formula: combining and building on existing infrastructure. In this case, M-Pesa phone numbers and what are known as lightning addresses—a payment spec that lets users to receive bitcoin payments via email addresses.

They unveiled their novel approach last May, in which any bitcoin wallet that supports lightning addresses can instantly send bitcoin to a Kenyan phone number via M-Pesa. To achieve this, users claim their phone-number-prepended lightning addresses. This new service also gives the recipient, once they claim their address and pay a fee, a way to set up a non-custodial bitcoin wallet, enabling them to send and receive bitcoin.

Tando’s technique is reminiscent of a cousin project in South Africa called Machankura, which enables users to send and receive bitcoin offline over the Lightning network using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes.

While there are privacy implications to linking phone numbers to payment infrastructure, the Tando team plans to continue iterating to strike a better trade-off and provide a more balanced experience.

Over the last few years, Africa has become home to projects looking to cement Bitcoin’s use as money, from circular economies and solutions like Machankura and Tando to infrastructure-led companies like MavaPay. The focus is not on price action but on utility and freedom money. This has fueled the ‘spend not sell’ movement, in which builders seek to familiarize users with earning and spending their bitcoin rather than trading and falling for get-rich-quick schemes.

More importantly for the Tando team, bitcoin is for everyone, so there should be no gatekeeping; from the president and office workers to the farmers, the bitcoin network treats them all equally.

Tando makes it possible to live entirely on Bitcoin in Kenya, an idea now promoted as the African way to use bitcoin. In the past few weeks, as bitcoin builders and leaders from Africa and beyond met for the first Bitcoin++ Nairobi conference, many on social media expressed surprise at seeing this in action, how easy the experience was, and how groundbreaking the idea of living on Bitcoin really is.

As Tando has shown, the combination of mobile money and freedom money is growing evidence that where there is a need, Africans will build, and where there is technology, they will pioneer and adopt.

African bitcoin builders continue to demonstrate that you do not need mass adoption or permission to live in the future.

Bitcoin mining pool DMND has mined the first known Bitcoin block produced using the Stratum V2 protocol, a technical milestone that shifts control over block construction from pools to individual miners. The block — number 955,318 — was mined through DMND’s pool for GoMining*, which became the first miner to use Stratum V2’s Job Declaration feature to select its own transactions and build its own block template, according to a note shared with Bitcoin Magazine.

*Note: this is in no way an endorsement of GoMining, I personally this it is a scammy company, fleecing their own customers but the achievement is IMHO still Bitcoin history books worthy.

Real estate investor Grant Cardone is positioning his Cardone Capital to challenge the traditional real estate investment trust (REIT) sector by integrating Bitcoin directly into large-scale multifamily deals. With roughly $5 billion in real estate assets under management across about 15,000 units, Cardone claims the hybrid approach can deliver superior returns while onboarding new investors to Bitcoin.

In a recent interview at Consensus 2026, Cardone laid out his strategy for disrupting the multi-trillion dollar Realestate Investment Trust sector, also known as REITs, companies that own, operate, or finance income-producing real estate. Established under U.S. law in 1960, they must distribute at least 90% of taxable income as dividends to shareholders, providing investors with liquidity and yields without direct property ownership. According to Cardone, publicly traded REITs and the broader industry control over $4.3–4.5 trillion in U.S. real estate assets.

Cardone highlighted a key structural constraint during his Consensus Miami 2026 appearance: traditional REITs like Camden, AvalonBay, and others “can never ever hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet.” This limitation, rooted in the industry’s 1960s-era rules focused on real estate assets and income, creates what he calls a “glitch” in the market, a competitive opening.

Cardone first encountered Bitcoin when he was paid 115 BTC for a speaking engagement in Las Vegas, which he still holds. He has since evolved this into a hybrid model at Cardone Capital. Rather than tokenizing real estate on the blockchain, the firm acquires institutional-quality, cash-flow-positive multifamily properties at significant discounts and pairs them with Bitcoin inside a dedicated LLC.

In one prominent example, Cardone Capital purchased a 366-unit property at 101 Via Mizner in Boca Raton from a Blackstone-related lender for $235 million in cash. The property, described as irreplaceable and valued at approximately $400 million replacement cost, was combined with about $100 million in Bitcoin, creating a total ~$335 million investment vehicle.

Replacement cost refers to the expense of building a comparable property today. Cardone targets assets trading at significant discounts to this benchmark. Instead of simply capturing the real estate discount, the firm allocates Bitcoin to “stuff it into the discount gap” and move the overall cost basis of the property higher. In the Boca deal, Cardone says this structure generated a $50 million tax write-off.

Commercial real estate of this sort should provide stable cash flow. Cardone suggests the Boca property is expected to return 4% per year, alongside depreciation benefits, and periodic refinancing opportunities every 7–10 years. Bitcoin adds upside potential and liquidity characteristics. He stated, “We believe by combining real estate and Bitcoin and having time… I’ll end up with somewhere between a 22 and a 32% return on an asset class that has been boring, consistent, and ancient.” The investment horizon of real estate properties of this sort is often in decades, a long-term mindset that gives Bitcoin plenty of time to grow past its short-term volatility.

In turn, this vehicle exposes new investors to Bitcoin in a risk-controlled and novel way. According to Cardone, about 80% of investors in the Boca fund reportedly had zero prior Bitcoin exposure, aligning with Cardone’s goal of “onboarding people into Bitcoin that have had zero exposure.”

Real estate is, of course, a complicated business with known trade-offs such as long hold periods typical of institutional real estate and execution risks in scaling retail participation via crowdfunding. Cardone says he has completed road shows with banks but prefers direct-to-consumer raises leveraging his audience.

Cardone claims to have assembled roughly $1 billion in real estate and around 2,000 reported Bitcoin, accumulated over the last 17 months, with six deals currently in contract. He aims to disrupt the REIT sector, noting that even capturing 5–10% of the market could create significant value. Plans include a potential public listing of the hybrid structure, relying on his roughly 20 million online followers, with about 20,000 current investors.

This approach builds on Cardone Capital’s earlier Bitcoin activity, including purchases during market dips and cash-flow-backed accumulation.

Cardone views the current environment as “the greatest time in the history of the world to make money,” with Bitcoin as a beneficiary. “People gotta live someplace. You cannot live in your Bitcoin account,” he said, underscoring the enduring need for real assets alongside digital ones.

This hybrid model represents one prominent effort to bridge traditional real estate with Bitcoin treasury strategies, potentially expanding access and returns for investors. Further developments will depend on execution, market cycles, and regulatory considerations for such structures.

Just came across this site, not sure how up-to-date the info is. Does anyone have a better source? Also how is the US Federal Bitcoin Reserve going? Thanks.

Bitcoin mining giant MARA (formerly Marathon Digital) has purchased 1,000 BTC, valued at approximately $66.7 million.

The transaction has been executed through the institutional platform FalconX. This comes following the company's aggressive streak of selling that took place during the first quarter of 2026. During that specific period, MARA sold a staggering 20,880 Bitcoin for roughly $1.5 billion.

Early in the year, the company amended its digital asset management policy for 2026, making it possible to sell the coins that it holds on its balance sheet. This was a significant departure from its 2025 policy, which only permitted the sale of newly mined Bitcoin. On Feb. 6, MARA transferred 1,318 BTC, worth nearly $87 million at the time, to institutional custody and liquidity platforms, including Two Prime, BitGo, and Galaxy Digital.

Between March 4 and March 25, 2026, the company had sold a staggering 15,133 Bitcoin for an aggregate sale price of roughly $1.1 billion. The proceeds from the March sales were allocated to fund a $1.0 billion privately negotiated repurchase of the company's outstanding 0.00% Convertible Senior Notes due in 2030 and 2031. MARA captured approximately $88.1 million in cash savings before transaction costs. MARA Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel explained that the goal was to de-lever the balance sheet and avoid future shareholder dilution. MARA was not the only mining firm dumping Bitcoin. Publicly listed Bitcoin miners collectively sold more than 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026. This was a new record for single-quarter miner sales.