The crypto market, led by Bitcoin, is recovering from a weekend bloodbath amidst geopolitical tensions between Iran and Israel. While that conversation is taking place, the crypto market is preparing for the Bitcoin halving that is set for this week, April the 19th. Here is a market catch up to bring you up to speed with present happenings.

Bitcoin halving takes market center stage

Hong Kong has recently joined the growing list of countries offering spot crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for Bitcoin and Ether. Bitcoin miners may potentially sell up to $5 billion worth of Bitcoin in the four to six months following the halving, potentially impacting altcoin markets.

Several offshore Chinese asset managers, including the Hong Kong units of Harvest Fund Management, Bosera Asset Management, and China Asset Management, are preparing to launch spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in the near future.

As per the report, Harvest and Bosera in Hong Kong have received conditional approvals from the SFC, which will enable them to launch the ETFs. Furthermore, a market analyst suggests that there may be a significant decrease in the amount of Bitcoin being mined in the months after the halving, similar to what has occurred in previous cycles.

According to calculations by Markus Thielen, the head of research at 10x Research, Bitcoin miners may have the potential to liquidate around $5 billion worth of BTC after the halving. Bitcoin prices stayed within a specific range of $9,000 to $11,500 for the five months after the 2020 halving event.

With the halving set to happen around April 20, which is only 5 days from now, it’s worth noting that historical patterns suggest that we may not witness any substantial upward movement in the markets until around October.

Meet Solana’s mainnet beta update v1.17.31

Developers have recently released a mainnet beta update, v1.17.31, in response to the ongoing Network congestion on the Solana blockchain. After undergoing three days of rigorous testing, the update, which was released on April 12, is now being recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators.

This update includes improvements that address the current network congestion issues and will be followed by additional enhancements in the upcoming v1.18 release.

The current version aims to address network congestion and resolve any issues related to the sudden increase in open interest. Here are some of the significant upgrades:

• Show staked vs. non-staked packets sent down/throttled
• Quic: use smallvec to aggregate chunks, save 1 alloc per packet
• BankingStage Forwarding Filter
• Tighten the minimal streams per 100ms for staked node
• Treat super low staked as unstaked in streamer QOS
• Default staked client in LocalCluster

In the midst of a surge in network activity and the frenzy surrounding memecoins, the Solana network experienced significant congestion issues for almost a week, resulting in a staggering transaction failure rate of up to 75%. As the developers were addressing the issue, a co-founder of Solana pointed out that the Ongoing Network Congestion problems were simply a bug and not a fundamental network issue.

Anza, the Solana developer, has requested validators to install the latest patch, but only if the delinquent stake is below 5%.

On Solana, delinquency pertains to validators that are inactive, while the percentage represents the total stake for offline validators. Therefore, it is recommended that validators only install the updates if the network has less than 5% of inactive validator stakes.

Crypto hacker set to serve prison sentence

Shakeeb Ahmed, a computer engineer, has been sentenced to three years in prison, along with three years of supervised release. This comes as a result of his involvement in flash loan attacks on two decentralized exchanges.

The sentence was issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with U.S. Attorney Damian Williams asserting that it marked the inaugural conviction for a smart contract hack. Ahmed was also instructed to surrender $12.3 million and a significant portion of his crypto holdings. The proceeds will be used to make a $5 million restitution payment to the affected exchanges.

Ahmed was responsible for the flash loan attacks on Crypto Exchange and the Nirvana exchange in 2022. During that period, the value of Nirvana’s NIRV stablecoin became unlinked from the U.S. dollar, resulting in a significant 85% drop in the price of its native token, ANA.

The court additionally alleged that Ahmed engaged in the laundering of the hacked funds through the utilization of Monero, international cryptocurrency exchanges, and crypto mixers.