Bitcoin Bounces Back to $84K

PLUS: A UK boarding school accepts BTC for tuition, Brazil’s Meliuz eyes Bitcoin as a treasury asset, and crypto ETFs are on pace to overtake gold.

Author

Michael Stinson
April 18, 2025

Happy Friday, Maestros!

Welcome to the another chapter of the Bitcoin Renaissance!

This week, Bitcoin rebounds to $84,000 after last week’s dip to $77K, showing signs of growing market resilience even amid post-election uncertainty. Meanwhile, Lomond School becomes the UK’s first boarding school to accept Bitcoin tuition payments. In Brazil, fintech firm Meliuz aims to make BTC its primary treasury reserve asset. And in the U.S., State Street projects that crypto ETFs will surpass precious metals ETFs by year-end, solidifying their place as a top ETF asset class.

Maestro’s just released MCP — our Model Context Protocol-aware server built for agentic interaction with Bitcoin!

PS. Don’t forget to follow us on X here.

🚀 Featured Stories

Bitcoin's price has recovered to approximately $84,000 after dipping below $77,000 last week. This rebound occurs amidst declining crypto trading volumes and investor caution due to trade-related uncertainties following President Trump's reelection. Analysts note that the current downturn is less severe than past ones, indicating increased resilience in the crypto market.

Lomond School in Scotland has become the first UK boarding school to accept Bitcoin for tuition fees. This initiative aims to accommodate international families and mitigate currency risks. The school will initially convert Bitcoin payments into pounds and may consider holding Bitcoin in its treasury in the future.

Brazilian fintech company Meliuz has announced plans to expand its Bitcoin reserves strategy, proposing to designate Bitcoin as the main strategic asset in its corporate treasury. A shareholder meeting is scheduled for May 6 to vote on formally including Bitcoin investments as part of the company's official objectives.

State Street forecasts that cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will surpass the combined assets of precious metal ETFs in North America by the end of the year. This growth positions crypto ETFs as the third-largest asset class in the $15 trillion ETF industry, trailing only equities and bonds.

💡 Spotlight: Lightspark

We are excited to introduce Lightspark, a company building enterprise-grade Bitcoin Lightning Network infrastructure. In this spotlight, we will teach you about Lightspark and their new product line, Spark.

History of Lightspark

Lightspark was founded in 2022 by David Marcus, former Meta executive who led Facebook's digital wallet initiative Novi and was previously president of PayPal. The company was created with the vision of leveraging Bitcoin's Lightning Network to solve real-world payment problems at global scale.

After operating in stealth mode while building their infrastructure, Lightspark emerged as a key player in the Bitcoin Lightning space, focusing on providing enterprise-grade solutions for businesses seeking to implement fast, low-cost Bitcoin payments.

Lightspark Key Features

Connect: Lightspark Connect offers a complete Lightning Network solution that allows businesses to send and receive payments without managing their own infrastructure. It includes instant settlement, low fees, and works worldwide.

UMA (Universal Money Address): UMA enables users to send money to an email or phone number without requiring recipients to have Lightning accounts beforehand.

Grid Switch: A routing service that optimizes payment routes across the Lightning Network, improving payment success rates and lowering costs.

Money Grid: Lightspark's infrastructure provides businesses with enterprise-grade reliability, security, and performance for Lightning Network transactions.

Spark Key Features

Announced at their Spark Keynote 2024, Lightspark's new Spark product is a Layer 2 solution built on top of Bitcoin and Lightning that solves key limitations:

Self-Custody at Scale: Enables billions of self-custodial users without the block space constraints, liquidity limitations, and offline receive problems of traditional Lightning.

Native Stablecoin Support: Allows issuing and transacting with stablecoins directly on Bitcoin's ecosystem, eliminating the need for multiple chains.

Interoperability: Works seamlessly with existing Lightning infrastructure and UMA, allowing payments between custodial Lightning users and non-custodial Spark users.

Wallet as a Service: Coming in Q4, this will enable partners to create and manage self-custodial wallets at scale without seed phrases.

Stablecoin Issuance Platform: Also launching in Q4, this will simplify the process of issuing tokens natively on Spark with regulatory compliance features.

Recent News

In 2024, Lightspark unveiled their Spark product suite at their inaugural Spark Keynote event. This launch marks a strategic expansion beyond infrastructure into complete payment solutions. The company has also been expanding partnerships with payment processors and financial institutions to increase Lightning Network adoption in commercial applications.

The Future

As Lightspark continues to develop their enterprise Lightning solutions, they are positioned to bridge the gap between traditional payment systems and Bitcoin's Lightning Network. By providing reliable, scalable infrastructure, Lightspark aims to enable the next generation of global, instant payments using Bitcoin as the settlement layer.

Learn more about Lightspark here.

📣 Trending on X

Andrew Hohns, founder of $3B New Market Capital, claims the U.S. government could acquire $200B in Bitcoin and save $354B in the process.

Michael Saylor just added another "Truths of Bitcoin"- #21 Bitcoin is an Emerging Start System.

China has sold 15,000 Bitcoin and shifted its reserves into a record-breaking purchase of gold.

Binance is reportedly in discussions with multiple national governments to provide guidance on the creation of strategic Bitcoin reserves, according to the Financial Times.