Company: FLDDW
Filing Date: 2025-03-28
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001013762-25-004107
Chunk: 261

Company: Fold Holdings, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-28
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 261
---
 partners’ platforms and infrastructure that can lead to inadvertent suspension of services across parts
of the platforms or the entire platforms. As a result, from time to time we may experience outages. Outages can lead to increased customer
service expense, can cause customer loss and reputational damage, result in inquiries and actions by regulators, and can lead to other
damages for which we may be responsible, any of which could harm our business.

Risks Related to Bitcoin

Due to unfamiliarity and some negative publicity associated with
Bitcoin products and services, confidence or interest in our platforms may decline.

Bitcoin is relatively new. Many of our competitors
offering Bitcoin-related products and services are unlicensed, unregulated, operate without supervision by any governmental authorities,
and do not provide the public with significant information regarding their ownership structure, management team, corporate practices,
cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance. As a result, customers and the general public may lose confidence or interest in Bitcoin platforms,
including platforms like ours that partner with regulated providers.

Negative perception, a lack of stability and standardized
regulation in the cryptoeconomy, and the closure or temporary shutdown of crypto asset platforms due to fraud, business failure, hackers
or malware, or government mandated regulation, and associated losses suffered by customers may continue to reduce confidence or interest
in the cryptoeconomy and result in greater volatility of the prices of assets, including significant depreciation in value. Any of these
events could have an adverse impact on our business and our customers’ perception of us, including decreased use of our platform
and loss of customer demand for our products and services.

Transferring Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain involves risks,
which could result in loss of customer assets or our proprietary assets, customer disputes and other liabilities, which could adversely
impact our business.

In order to transfer Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain,
a person must have a private and public key pair associated with a network address, commonly referred to as a “wallet.” Each
wallet is associated with a unique “public key” and “private key” pair, each of which is a large number. To send
Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain, a user must sign a transaction that is created using the private key of the wallet from where the user
is transferring Bitcoin, a hash of the recipient wallet’s public key, the amount of Bitcoin to be sent, and the transaction fee.
The transaction must be signed using the user’s private key through a cryptographic process, which creates a digital signature to
prove ownership of the