This week’s newsletter describes a proposal for providing DNS-based human-readable Bitcoin payment instructions, summarizes a post with thoughts about mempool incentive compatibility, links to a thread discussing the design of Cashu and other ecash systems, briefly looks at continuing discussion about 64-bit arithmetic in Bitcoin scripts (including a specification for a previously proposed opcode), and gives an overview of an improved reproducible ASMap creation process. Also included are our regular sections describing updates to clients and services, new releases and release candidates, and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.

According to Glassnode data, since mid-March 2020, the amount of Bitcoin stored in exchange wallets has significantly decreased, marking a significant shift in investor behavior. At that time, more than 17% of the total Bitcoin supply was held on exchanges, reaching a historic high. However, the trend of decreasing exchange balances has continued, even during the 2021 Bitcoin bull market and is expected to continue until 2024. The amount of Bitcoin held on exchanges has continued to decline this year. From January 1st to February 19th, the amount of Bitcoin in exchange wallets decreased from 2.356 million BTC to 2.314 million BTC, the lowest level since April 2018.

According to OKX market data, Bitcoin fell below $51,000 and is now priced at $50,942, with a 24-hour decline of 1.89%.

VanEck's HODL, a BTC ETF, saw a surge of over 2,200% in trading volumes on Tuesday, with individual traders driving the move. The ETF traded over $400 million, a 22-fold increase from its daily average of $17 million. The surge in volumes came ahead of a planned fee cut on Wednesday, with VanEck reducing its offering fees from 0.25% to 0.20%. The ETF now holds nearly $200 million worth of bitcoin, with the surge in volumes contributing to the highest volume day for bitcoin ETFs since their launch in January.

According to Coingecko data, BTC's market value has returned to $1 trillion, currently valued at $1,026,205,886,144, setting a record for the past two years.

Bitcoin's recent surge above $52,000 has been followed by a rebound and pullback frenzy, causing some concern about a potential sell-off. Over 840,000 new Bitcoin addresses that bought BTC during the rally have incurred significant losses, which could lead to increased selling pressure. Crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe predicts a potential correction before the Bitcoin price peaks between $53,000 and $58,000. Despite this, TradingView has given Bitcoin a "Strong Buy" indicator and the cryptocurrency currently boasts a market capitalization of $1.01 trillion.

On February 20th, it was reported that earlier in the day, Bitcoin rose to a total value of $539 million in buy and sell orders within a 2% market depth (meaning within a 2% range of the market price) across 33 centralized exchanges. Data tracked by Kaiko shows that this is the highest level since October of last year and represents a 30% increase since the launch of the spot ETF on January 11th.

According to IntoTheBlock data, 848,390 addresses bought 481,710 BTC (worth $25 billion) at an average price of $52,125. These addresses are currently in a loss position and may create selling pressure when their positions reach breakeven.

According to a report by CryptoQuant on February 20th, a whale withdrew over 18,000 bitcoins (worth about $1 billion) from Coinbase last weekend. These bitcoins were then distributed to multiple new wallets, each with a balance ranging from $45 million to $171 million. This move caused Coinbase's bitcoin reserves to drop to 394,000 BTC, worth about $20.5 billion, the lowest level since 2017.

According to Coinglass data, as of January 19th, the current open interest of Bitcoin futures is $24.211 billion, with a 24-hour increase of 1.83%. This number is approaching the historical high point of $24.268 billion in mid-April 2021.