A new integration allows South Africans to spend Bitcoin, stablecoins and other crypto directly at more than 650,000 merchants nationwide. South Africans can now pay with cryptocurrency at thousands of retail stores nationwide, following a new partnership between QR payments provider Scan to Pay and Bitcoin payments company MoneyBadger. According to a Tech Central report, the integration allows users of major exchanges, including Binance, Luno, Blink and VALR, to pay using Bitcoin (BTC), stablecoins and other crypto assets at over 650,000 Scan to Pay-enabled merchants. Crypto holders can pay for their purchases through QR codes at checkout counters, while the merchants will receive their settlements in rand. The system works through the MoneyBadger platform, linking payments to users’ exchanges or Bitcoin Lightning accounts. Read more
In one of their first moves in two months, the Bitcoin whale returned to short Bitcoin and Ether for hundreds of millions of dollars, betting on their short-term price decline. A large cryptocurrency investor who surfaced two months ago with about $11 billion worth of Bitcoin has opened almost $900 million in short positions against Bitcoin and Ether, signaling expectations of a market correction despite widespread optimism for October. The whale returned to trading on Thursday with a $360 million Bitcoin (BTC) transfer that piqued the interest of cryptocurrency investors, Cointelegraph reported. On Friday, the whale opened a $600 million 8x leveraged short position on Bitcoin and a leveraged short worth over $300 million on Ether (ETH), according to blockchain data platform Onchain Lens. Read more
Romania's economy inched 0.3% higher in unadjusted data and grew by 2.3% in seasonally adjusted data in the second quarter (Q2) of 2025 compared to the second quarter of 2024, provisional estimates (2) from the country's statistical office INS showed on Friday (October 10).
Discover how Bitcoin mining runs in 2025: From halving rewards and ASIC rigs to mining pools, hashprice shifts and power use. Bitcoin mining is the process that keeps the BTC network secure and operational. Bitcoin (BTC) miners collect pending transactions, bundle them into blocks and repeatedly perform hashing attempts (trial and error) until they produce a hash that meets the network’s difficulty target. Read more