Q: Which major operating system secretly shipped a full copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper for years?

Franklin Templeton asked the SEC on June 19 to launch two ETFs that route dividends from a stock portfolio into bitcoin. Each fund tracks an index that is 95% equities and 5% BTC, so the bitcoin position builds from incoming dividends rather than fresh investor inflows. The firm wants to start trading as early as September 1, pending approval. It is the latest in a run of crypto moves from the $1.7 trillion manager, which already runs a spot bitcoin ETF and last week lined up tokenized versions of its funds with Ondo Finance to trade onchain around the clock.

Microsoft's threat intelligence team disclosed a Windows crypto stealer, tracked as CryptoBandits, that has been spreading through infected USB drives since February. It hides on the drive as a fake document shortcut, and once clicked, it runs quietly in the background and checks the clipboard about twice a second. When it spots a seed phrase or private key, it ships the data out over the Tor network. The nastier trick: when you copy a wallet address to send funds, it silently swaps in the attacker's address, so the money lands in the wrong place with nothing on screen to tip you off. It targets Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Monero users, and can also open a backdoor for remote access. Microsoft's advice is basic but worth repeating: disable USB AutoRun, block shortcut files from removable media, and always double check an address post paste.

Governor JB Pritzker signed the Digital Asset Tax Act on June 16 as part of Illinois' $55.9 billion fiscal 2027 budget, making it the first state to tax crypto by transaction rather than by gains. On January 1, 2027, brokers will begin collecting a 0.2% tax on the value of digital assets exchanged, transferred, or stored for Illinois customers, covering any firm based in the state or serving its residents with at least $100,000 in annual receipts. The measure is projected to raise about $60 million a year. The pushback was immediate: the Crypto Council for Innovation, which had urged a veto, called it "the most punitive digital asset tax in the country," and a16z's Miles Jennings likened the levy to charging someone extra for getting an email instead of a paper letter. The recurring complaint is that no state taxes stocks, bonds, or derivatives this way, so the law penalizes an asset for how it moves rather than what it is, and with Chicago home to firms like Jump Crypto and Bitnomial, several groups expect builders to start eyeing the other 49 states. Critics also flagged that the provision was buried in a 1,624-page revenue bill with little industry input, a precedent they worry other states could copy.

A hardened release for op-geth is in internal testing and should ship by the end of the week. It will go out as a recommended upgrade for anyone running nodes. No hard deadline, but updating once it lands is advised.

Progress continues on the op-geth to op-reth transition. The current build lets node operators choose their Bitcoin indexer, with both TBC and Oxygen supported. TBC will be the officially supported option at the op-reth launch, with Oxygen available as an experimental beta. Over time Oxygen moves to an equal peer and eventually the required indexer, which is what unlocks the ZK features in the pipeline.

Work on the ordinals indexer continues, now tracking near the Bitcoin tip. The path to enabling ordinals on Hemi runs through new precompiles that let smart contracts query ordinal data directly, moving the HVM from phase 0 to phase 1. Ordinals are the top near-term developer-facing addition, with more non-ordinals precompiles and a ZK-capable Bitcoin indexer to follow.

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The first NFT marketplace, built by community member Alpha, is now live.

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A: The operating system that quietly shipped the Bitcoin whitepaper for years was macOS. A complete PDF of Satoshi's paper was bundled into every release from Mojave in 2018 onward, tucked away as a sample document inside a hidden Image Capture tool called Virtual Scanner II. Almost nobody noticed until it went viral in 2023, at which point Apple quietly removed it.