The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), informally known as the UK’s fourth emergency service, has announced it is accepting bitcoin donations. The RNLI says it is the first major charity in the UK to accept bitcoin. It also happens to be one of the oldest charities in the country, as it was founded in 1824.

According to 2013 statistics, the charity’s 400-strong fleet rescue an average of 23 people per day. Since its inception, the RNLI has saved approximately 140,000 lives. The pilot programme is already available online. The RNLI donations website now has a bitcoin section, complete with a wallet address and QR code.

The RNLI says it decided to run the trial because it wants to lead the way in accepting and benefiting from all forms of digital currency. It chose bitcoin as a well-established and widely-recognised digital currency.

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Leesa Harwood, RNLI Deputy Director of Fundraising and Communications, said the charity has a long history of innovation in fundraising, having held its first street collection in 1891. “Bitcoin is an innovative new kind of currency and we believe that accepting bitcoin will result in donations we may not otherwise receive, as well as connecting us with new types of supporters,” she said.

Harwood added: “This is a pilot scheme and we are looking forward to seeing how it will proceed as part of our interest in cryptocurrencies and how they may work in the future. We will of course closely monitor how much money is donated. We already have safeguards in place to monitor donations, however we receive them.”

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Pantera Capital, an investment fund that focuses on bitcoin, has announced an index it says will allow investors to track the cryptocurrency over a medium-term timeframe. Dubbed the BitIndex, it takes into account seven different factors that Pantera believes accurately charts bitcoin’s overall progress.

What’s interesting is Pantera Capital is not including price in the BitIndex, instead tracking other data sources that it believes lends to bitcoin’s technological progression. Pantera states unequivocally in its letter that the BitIndex gives people a longer-range view of bitcoin than what price indexes offer.

In the fund’s monthly report for June, Pantera stated: “While some other indices also offer guidance (such as trade in USD), we chose not to include them because of unreliable data, limited availability, or other statistical problems.”

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Pantera’s letter does not indicate how it calculates the merchant adoption metric, although statistics for hashrate, user adoption by wallets and transaction volume are publicly available from a number of different data sources. Information from websites such as GitHub for developer interest, as well as Wikipedia and Google to identify mainstream interest and popularity, is also readily available.

BitIndex offers a different look at technological aspects of bitcoin rather than infatuation with the cryptocurrency’s valuation. In fact, the firm says that it is value distortions that influenced the creation of BitIndex, specifying, “price manipulation at Mt. Gox and/or the Chinese and in the first quarter of 2014 due to the collapse of Mt. Gox”, as problems defining bitcoin’s true worth.

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Open-source online encyclopedia Wikipedia is now accepting bitcoin through a new partnership with Coinbase. With the integration now active, all users have to do is go to Wikipedia’s donation page and opt to pay in bitcoin. Like with any option, users can choose to make either one-time or recurring donations to the free encyclopedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns and curates Wikipedia, announced on its official blog that it is now accepting donations in the digital currency. The organization cited grassroots community support for the integration, saying that demand for bitcoin support led to discussions on the leadership level.

The announcement is notable given the Foundation’s past apprehension toward the idea of accepting bitcoin. In March, the organization announced that it was beginning to discuss bitcoin donations, but co-founder Jimmy Wales later commented that Wikimedia was taking a “cautious” approach.

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In the blog post, Wikimedia chief revenue officer Lisa Gruwell said that the discussion process was in-depth, but with more clarification available on the legal status of digital currency, Wikimedia was able to move forward. She wrote: “Currently, we accept 13 different payment methods enabling donations from nearly every country in the world, and today, we’re adding one more: Bitcoin.”

In a separate email sent to Wikipedia supporters, the organization said that the goal is to offer “flexible” payment options to those who donate to keep the online encyclopedia running. With bitcoin, the Foundation declared, Wikipedia supporters can enjoy greater versatility in their donation options.

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Travelers to Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague can pay for hotel bookings in bitcoin at any of the Holland’s three easyHotels. The easyHotel Holland website offers a ‘pay in bitcoin’ option upon checkout that generates a BitPay invoice, QR code and wallet address included, to settle the payment.

The easyHotel brand has become increasingly popular in Europe, following the success of UK-based easyGroup’s airline and airport transfer brands, easyJet and easyBus.While the easyHotels in the Netherlands have embraced bitcoin as a payment option, other members of the hotel family in Europe and the UK have not as yet.

The easyHotels integration highlights the continuing growth of bitcoin into the hotel and travel industries.

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Last month online travel giant Expedia also began accepting bitcoin payments, but for hotel reservations only. The company has since announced that its bitcoin profits have exceeded expectations. Travel agency CheapAir, which initially began accepting bitcoin for flight bookings, began integrating bitcoin payments into its booking system this February, making the service available to 200,000 hotels and Amtrak rail reservations.

Although the easyHotels franchise is not an intermediary site like Expedia or CheapAir, it is a prominent and trusted name in low-cost travel options in the UK and Europe, and the company could see a lot of the same customers paying in bitcoin. Whether easyJet and the other easyGroup brands will follow suit remains to be seen. The Benelux region easyHotel franchisee acts under the holding company DanZep Hotels.

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US-based company CoinSafe says its new mobile and desktop apps can turn any local business into a ‘bitcoin ATM’, or face-to-face bitcoin exchange. The CoinSafe apps are free to use and allow businesses to trade bitcoins directly with walk-in customers.

After registering their business name for inclusion in CoinSafe’s directory, owners then link the app to a Blockchain, Coinbase or Bitstamp account and can start trading bitcoins face-to-face.

CoinSafe says the software is “designed to be used by someone who has no idea what bitcoin is”, and that a staff member merely needs to confirm that funds have been received before releasing the payout amount in either bitcoin or cash.

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CoinSafe co-founder and CEO Michael Flaxman said the software provided business owners with a less risky, more flexible option for getting bitcoin into their customers’ hands without having to purchase or maintain ATM hardware. He further said that CoinSafe would provide a map on its website showing the locations of businesses who had signed up to the service.

The company will not have access to any user’s private keys and will encrypt all customer information in transit to its services, its website says. It also recommends that businesses keep larger amounts of bitcoin in cold storage. Businesses paying out cash for bitcoins only do not have to give API access to CoinSafe at all, so long as they provide a bitcoin address by which the transaction can be confirmed. The service uses standard transaction fees of approximately 0.0001 BTC (about 6 US cents).

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Following Apple’s controversial removal of iOS bitcoin apps in January, the first of the big-name wallets relaunches on the App Store today. Blockchain, which already provides hugely popular wallets for both desktop computers and Android devices, has unveiled its new-from-the-ground-up iOS wallet, which it hopes will bring bitcoin to users across the globe.

Prior to Apple’s removal of all apps offering cryptocurrency transactions in January 2014, Blockchain was the most downloaded bitcoin wallet for iOS devices. Blockchain’s announcement will likely come as welcome news for the bitcoin community, which protested loudly at Apple’s ban – with some users even shooting their iPhones in an unlikely show of support.

However, for reasons known only to Apple insiders, a new, more open policy was announced at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference in early June, paving the way once more for bitcoin wallets and other apps that transact using cryptocurrencies.

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The App Store has seen the addition of several bitcoin apps, including an unofficial wallet for Coinbase users and Gliph, a messaging service that lets connected users send each other bitcoin. However, Blockchain is the first of the major players to offer wallet services on iOS since early 2014.

Nicolas Cary, CEO of Blockchain, told “The moment Apple signalled a shift in their policy toward digital currency apps, we pulled the iOS project off the shelf and got to work. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to improve the wallet, but we were still apprehensive about dedicating huge amounts of engineering time because it wasn’t clear what types of apps would get through the submission and approval process.”

He added: “Working with Apple has been quick and easy, and we really appreciate their thoughtful guidance – it’s a partnership we really value.”

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