One of the biggest football teams in the Netherlands has just revealed that it is holding bitcoin on its balance sheet.

PSV said that it has become the first major football club in the EU to have an entire sponsorship paid in bitcoin from its partner Anycoin Direct.

Rather than exchange the cryptocurrency into fiat, the Dutch club said it plans to “HODL” the bitcoin.

“The possibilities and the future that the world of cryptocurrency offers is very promising,” says Frans Janssen, PSV’s commercial director.

“As a club in the heart of the Brainport region, we are always innovating, cryptocurrency fits well into this picture.”

Just a few weeks after El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law came into effect, officially making the cryptocurrency legal tender in the country, a new poll commissioned by Newsweek has found that a third of voters in US swing states want it to be a legal form of payment.

The poll, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, surveyed voters in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The most enthusiastic states were Texas and Wisconsin, with 37 per cent of respondents keen on making cryptocurrency legal in the next election.

Bitcoin’s price crash this week reached as low $5,402 – at least on one platform.

A network glitch on Pyth, which is used by Wall Street traders, saw the cryptocurrency briefly plunge by around 90 per cent.

The issue apparently prompted a series of liquidation events, which would have actually had a negative impact on bitcoin’s real price, though Pyth is yet to provide any detail about the incident beyond a brief statement.

“Engineers are continuing to investigate the cause and a full report is in the works,” the platform tweeted.

A bitcoin wallet that has lain dormant for almost nine years has shown signs of life.

The BTC address has not been active since around the time bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared.

In that time it has risen in value from $8,000 to more than $26 million thanks to bitcoin’s exponential price rise.

Exactly who controls it is unclear, though it is not the only old wallet to have activated without explanation in recent years.

You can read the full story here.

After falling below $40,000 for the first time in six weeks in the early hours of Wednesday, bitcoin’s value has risen and stabilised around $42,000 in the last few hours.

The cryptocurrency still hasn’t recovered to its value of $47,000 prior to the flash crash on Monday, which took out nearly $200 million from the crypto market.

The overall crypto market is down by about 2 per cent since its values yesterday. Most cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), and Solana (SOL), are still down at varying levels between 1 to 5 per cent compared to their prices 24 hours earlier.

The chart is still all red with marginal signs of recovery to pre-Monday levels.

Amid fears that China’s real estate giant Evergrande Group may default on its debt payments and affect the global financial system, including the crypto market, the main unit of the property developer has said it would make a coupon payment on its domestic bonds on 23 September.

Several experts tied the latest bitcoin flash crash, which wiped out nearly $200 million from the crypto market, to fears surrounding the Evergrande Group’s debt payment situation.

But the latest news may offer some relief to jittery markets, according to a report by Reuters.

The price of Ethereum (ether) has finally fallen below the $3,000 mark after holding on for nearly a day above the milestone figure.

Cardano (ada) is now also threatening to dip below the $2 mark, while dogecoin is hovering dangerously close to the $0.20 mark.

Bitcoin remains above $40,000, though only by a couple of thousand dollars. The latest losses suggest this week’s crash is not quite over, and by the time this downturn does end there may be a lot of key price markers to reconquer.

One of bitcoin’s most prominent backers has described the latest price fluctuations as unimportant when taking into consideration the cryptocurrency’s future prospects.

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who has led the software company to become the world’s biggest corporate investor in bitcoin, tweeted that this week’s price or last week’s price won’t matter “in the long run”, as they will both be just a tiny fraction of its ultimate value.

Last week the firm bought a further quarter of a billion dollars worth of bitcoin to take its total holdings above $5 billion.

Zooming out on the longer-term market may put bitcoin’s current price difficulties in perspective, but it offers little help in predicting its future trajectory.

Analysts remain divided over whether this is the end of a so-called “dead cat bounce” within a bear market, or if it is just a blip on the way to new all-time highs in 2021.

Subscribing to the latter theory is Brad Yasar, CEO of decentralised finance (DeFi) firm EQIFI, who shared his thoughts with us. He believes bitcoin “isn’t going anywhere near” $25,000 and could still hit $100,000 this year. Here’s what he had to say in full:

A common mantra among bitcoin enthusiasts is ‘when in doubt, zoom out’.

The idea is that any short term price movements seem relatively insignificant when taking a broader view of the cryptocurrency market.

The current price of just above $43,000 is still more than twice that of any previous high seen before 2021. The question many analysts are asking this morning is whether this current cycle will mirror that of those seen in 2013 and 2017 – and if so, is it on the way up or down?