Michael Saylor Announces $299 Million 'Bitcoin Gift' to MSTR Holders, RLUSD Stablecoin Gets Listed on Major Exchange, Shibarium Hits Epic Transaction Milestone on Christmas: Crypto News Digest by U.Today

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Michael Saylor announces $299 million "Bitcoin gift" to MSTR holders

In a recent X post, MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor shared a significant net benefit for the company's Bitcoin shareholders. Saylor called this benefit a Bitcoin "gift," highlighting that the company's treasury operations yielded approximately 3,177 BTC last week; this equates to around $299 million (at a BTC price of $94,000). Thus, the MicroStrategy’s founder emphasized the company's commitment to enhancing shareholder value through strategic Bitcoin accumulation and yield-generation initiatives. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy made headlines by acquiring $561 million worth of BTC on Monday, Dec. 23. Currently, the company owns 444,262 BTC valued at roughly $27.7 billion bought at $62,257 per BTC on average.

Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin gets listed on major exchange

According to a recent announcement by Bullish, an institutional crypto exchange backed by investor Peter Thiel, it officially added the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin on Tuesday, Dec. 24. From now on, Bullish users can trade a total of seven markets with the hotly anticipated stablecoin. These markets include RLUSD/USDC, BTC/RLUSD, XRP/RLUSD, ETH/RLUSD, USD/RLUSD, EUR/RLUSD and SOL/RLUSD. The stablecoin went live last week, on Dec. 17, following regulatory approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), and is now generating significant interest. Earlier, RLUSD was also listed on other exchanges such as Independent (LON:IOG) Reserve, Bitso and Uphold. Per CoinGecko data, the stablecoin's current market cap stands at $73.5 million, ranking as the 672nd largest cryptocurrency.

Shibarium celebrates Christmas with epic transaction milestone

Yesterday, when the world celebrated Christmas, Shiba Inu's layer-2 solution, Shibarium, achieved a significant milestone by surpassing 700 million transactions. According to the Shibariumscan data, the total number of recorded transactions now stands at 708,006,911, with an average of 4.74 million transactions per day across 2,027,311 wallet addresses. This achievement is particularly noteworthy given that the ecosystem was officially launched in August 2023, indicating strong community engagement in a short period. Apart from this achievement, Shibarium can boast other notable developments, including launching a new user interface to improve compatibility with renowned self-custody wallets such as Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) Wallet, Trust Wallet and MetaMask.

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