Coindesk

This article is part of a four-piece series on El Salvador. You can find the previous dispatch, a story on El Zonte, here.There was formidable energy at this year’s Plan B conference in El Salvador.The event, which took place on Jan. 30-31, was historic for many of its 2,500 attendants. It was the first Bitcoin forum in the Central American nation to have a full dual-language agenda — meaning sessions in both English and Spanish.For Roman Martínez, a Salvadoran co-founder of Bitcoin Beach, Plan B was a dream come true, because it enabled ordinary Salvadorans to make sense of their country’s Bitcoin experiment and ponder their own place within it. “Up until now, every Bitcoin conference was geared towards foreigners,”...

Argentina's president Javier Milei has backtracked on a tweet promoting a memecoin called Libra, which rose to a $4.4 billion market cap before plunging by more than 95%.In a now-deleted tweet, Milei initially wrote: "This is a private project dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy," along with a Solana contract address linked to the Libra token.Libra rose by more than 2,000% in a 40-minute span following the tweet, only to tumble rapidly as a group of early holders began to cash out. X account KobeissiLetter shared a series of BubbleMaps screenshots showing that alleged "insiders" liquidate tokens by adding one-sided liquidity pools on Metora with only Libra, allowing them to remove SOL and stablecoins.Trading volume for Libra...

Attorneys for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission hinted at a potential settlement with Coinbase in a late Friday court filing, citing the regulator's new crypto task force.The SEC asked a federal appeals court to extend its deadline to respond to Coinbase, which filed an appeal of a federal judge's ruling last month. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled last year that the SEC had brought a plausible case that Coinbase sold unregistered securities on its platform. The exchange asked the appeals court panel to weigh in on how securities laws might apply to crypto. On Friday, the agency asked for a four-week extension to its deadline (currently set for Feb. 14) to file its response, citing Acting SEC Chair...

The SafeMoon team is planning on launching a memecoin on Solana (SOL) on Saturday at 1:00 AM UTC.The team has burned 2.2 trillion SFM tokens across the Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain networks, the VGX Foundation told CoinDesk. In total, almost the entirety of the Ethereum and Polygon supplies have been eliminated, as well as roughly 60% of the Binance Smart Chain supply. SFM holders will be given the opportunity to exchange their SFM tokens for the SafeMoon memecoin through the VGX wallet.“We are going to allow the community to swap their tokens so people can get out of their positions,” VGX said.The hope, the firm said, is for the new token to be listed on exchanges again and for...

Wisconsin’s investment board saw fit to significantly add to its bitcoin (BTC) bet in the last three months of the year.The State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) disclosed ownership of just over 6 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as of the Dec. 31, per a 13F filing on Friday, up from roughly 2.9 million shares three months prior.The position was valued at $321 million as of year-end and would be worth about $588 million at bitcoin's current price near $98,000.The fund in 2024 became the first of its kind to report a bitcoin ETF purchase, initially buying 94,562 shares of IBIT and some shares of Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which it later sold. The State of Michigan...