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Cryptocurrencies backed by gold have underperformed over the week as the price of the precious metal saw a significant drop after moving up more than 10% so far this year. The decline came as speculation surrounding Trump’s tariffs being a negotiating tool.

Gold-backed tokens, including Paxos gold (PAXG) and Tether gold (XAUT), have declined roughly 1% over the past week to trade around $2,900 while the wider crypto market rallied. The CoinDesk 20 Index rose 5.7% over the same period, and the broader MarketVector Digital Assets 100 Index (MVDA) rose 3.4%.

The precious metal saw its price drop amid growing speculation that the new tariffs threatened by U.S. President Donald Trump are meant to be a negotiating tool. This hit the price of safe-haven assets, including the commodity and the U.S. dollar.

Trump announced reciprocal tariffs were on the table to match the tariff imposed by other countries on U.S. imports. Reciprocal tariffs could take months to implement, leading to speculation these are meant to allow the U.S. to negotiate with other countries.

However, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, gold’s recent dip could still present an “opportunity for those looking for hedges” amid global reflation, geopolitical tensions, and growing fiscal spending. Wall Street giants have recently raised their gold price forecasts, which would also help the price of gold-backed digital assets rise as these are backed by bullion stored in vaults.

Citi strategists recently raised their short-term gold price target to $3,000 and their average forecast for the year to $2,900. Meanwhile, UBS has hiked its 12-month gold target to $3,000 an ounce.

Disclaimer: The analyst who wrote this piece owns shares of Strategy (MSTR)

Strategy (MSTR) could be on track for potential S&P 500 inclusion by June 20.

Currently, the company meets all eligibility requirements except one: achieving positive GAAP net income over the trailing 12 months (the most recent four quarters combined). To qualify, Q1 2025 earnings must be high enough to offset losses from the previous three quarters—a goal that could be achieved thanks to the adoption (now mandatory) of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) digital asset accounting rule.

The FASB rule change requires companies to recognize bitcoin (BTC) holdings at fair value, meaning price gains will flow through to the bottom line (as would price declines). Prior to this rule, corporate digital asset holders were required to account for holdings at their weakest levels. Strategy, for example, in the fourth quarter of 2024 still valued its bitcoin at less than $16,000 per token, leading to a $1 billion impairment loss even as bitcoin closed the year at about $94,000.

Holy Grail

According to an analysis by Richard Hass on X, assuming Strategy holdings don’t change between now and March 31, bitcoin must close the first quarter above $96,337 for the company to meet the positive trailing 12-month earnings requirement. “Based on Q4 2024 earnings of -$671 million in net income MSTR requires $1.113B in Q1 2025 earnings to produce positive earnings in the prior four quarters and become eligible for S&P 500,” he wrote. “Based on MSTR’s current treasury of 478,740 BTC, the required BTC price on March 31 to achieve this is $96,337”. 

If bitcoin prices remain strong and MSTR continues accumulating tokens, S&P 500 inclusion is within reach. Said Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer:

“MSTR’s adoption of the amended FASB guidance strengthens its case for S&P 500 inclusion. Given its outperformance of every current index constituent over four years, exclusion would be surprising.”

“While joining the Nasdaq-100 was significant, the S&P 500 is the holy grail,” continued Palmer.” Inclusion would validate its Bitcoin strategy, as all S&P 500 index funds would hold MSTR shares, indirectly exposing investors to Bitcoin.”

Disclaimer: Richard Hass’s original X post was made before Strategy’s latest bitcoin purchase. CoinDesk reached out for updated analysis, including Monday’s acquisition.

Memecoin generator Pump.fun has launched a mobile app for both iOS and Android devices, making its platform more accessible to users and effectively doubling down on the ongoing memecoin craze.

Pump.fun’s new mobile app has features similar to its web interface. It allows users to create their own Solana-based memecoins for free and trade existing tokens while on the go. In an announcement on Friday, the firm detailed that the app includes tools for users to manage their memecoins portfolios and create customized watchlists to monitor tokens.

The launch comes just weeks after Pump.fun was hit with a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the firm and its executives of violations of U.S. securities laws. It also comes at a time when the ongoing memecoin trend only appears to be accelerating.

Bobby Ong, co-founder and COO of cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, has highlighted on social media that 600,000 new tokens were launched in January of this year alone, a 12-fold increase over the same period in 2024.

Ong attributes the explosion in token launches to a new monthly record to token launchpads like Pump.fun, which simplify the process of creating a token and allow its users to do so even without any technical expertise.

While it’s now easier than ever to launch new tokens, Ong also pointed out that new blockchains and decentralized exchanges are growing rapidly. At this rate, he said, there could be 1 billion tokens in circulation “in the next five years.”

The sheer number of new tokens being launched could be fragmenting available liquidity and attention. “Too many tokens, each spreading the limited attention and liquidity of traders even thinner. That’s why we don’t see the great alt pumps of previous cycles,” Ong said on social media.
Read more: CZ’s Dog Made a Killing for One Memecoin Creator and Murdered Everyone Else

The cryptocurrency exchange and wallet provider Blockchain.com has taken new steps toward a potential initial public offering (IPO) by appointing two seasoned executives with financial and operational expertise.

Blockchain.com hired Justin Evans, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs, as its new chief financial officer, Bloomberg reported. It also appointed Mike Wilcox, previously CFO of Velocity Global and former Point72 portfolio manager, as its chief operating officer.

Evans said that the exchange is “taking the steps necessary to be a public company, if and when the public markets are available.”

The move comes amid a flurry of other cryptocurrency firms reported to be considering going public, including Circle, Kraken, Bullish Global (Parent company of CoinDesk), Gemini, Ripple and BitGo.

Growing institutional adoption after major firms, including BlackRock and Fidelity, launched exchange-traded fund (ETF) offerings in the cryptocurrency space and the more balanced approach the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to take toward digital assets are creating a potentially more favorable environment for these firms to go public.

Blockchain.com has seen its valuation fluctuate over time. In March 2021, it raised $300 million at a $5.2 billion post-money valuation in its Series C funding round. In 2022, it closed a funding round that increased its valuation to $14 billion, while in Nov. 2023, it closed a $110 million funding round valuing the company at $7 billion.

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,” he told me on the first day, in Spanish. “Not everybody knows English. It’s already hard to learn a complex topic in your own language. In another, it’s three times harder.”

Martínez was involved in organizing the event. The expectation, he said, was for maybe 100 to 150 Salvadorans would show up — but more than 1,500 tickets were sold to Spanish speakers. “I’ve never seen so many Salvadoran faces at a Bitcoin conference,” he said. “We’re arriving at a point where Salvadorans are realizing that Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere, and either we learn to become part of it right now, or we’re going to be left behind.”

I could feel it too.

The English-speaking area, located at the Sheraton Presidente San Salvador Hotel, had crypto celebrities on stage including Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, and OGs like Samson Mow, Jimmy Song, Blockstream CEO Adam Back and early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. “We are witnessing a battle between centralized and decentralized systems!” Walker America, host of THE Bitcoin Podcast, shouted at the conference’s opening panel.

Yet that side of the conference felt somewhat formulaic compared to the Spanish-speaking zone, held at the Museum of Arts of El Salvador, which was absolutely electric. Over there, Salvadorans of all stripes outlined plans to help their country develop — from providing new educational opportunities, to mixing Bitcoin with dental care, to discussing the government’s strategy with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Many of the panel speakers, young Salvadorans themselves, had fire in their eyes.

“We are in the right place in the world at the right time in history,” Gerardo Linares, co-founder of Bitcoin Berlín (the initiative behind the nation’s second Bitcoin circular economy) said to a completely bewitched audience. “It’s all happening right here, in El Salvador.”

A conference for Salvadorans

I was struck by the Spanish area’s demographic makeup. Crypto conferences are famously male-dominated; participants often complain of having to navigate a sea of dudes. The English-speaking zone was like that — maybe 90% male and 10% female.

The Spanish side was much more balanced, with a ratio of approximately 60% men and 40% women. While the majority of attendants sported black and orange Bitcoin T-shirts, you also saw middle-aged Salvadoran couples wearing elegant Salvadoran outfits, and twenty-something university students with turtlenecks and notepads.

I asked Evelyn Lemus and Patricia Rosales, two of the Salvadorans who spearheaded the Bitcoin initiative in Berlín, what they thought of the female attendance rate. They didn’t seem surprised. “There is a new generation of Salvadoran women who do not depend on men,” Rosales, a single mother herself, told me.“

In El Salvador, most of the time, it’s women who manage family finances,” Lemus said. “That’s why they come to events like this: To see how they can manage and invest the family money. It’s one of the reasons we really wanted to have the conference in Spanish.”

Bitcoin shouldn’t be reserved to the nation’s elite, but should make everyday life easier for ordinary Salvadorans, Lemus said. That concern influenced her action plan for Bitcoin Berlín. “We wanted to push back on this notion that Salvadorans don’t use Bitcoin — that only expats use it. Now, if you go to Berlín, you’ll see working class people using Bitcoin.”

Making sense of El Salvador’s situation

There was an overall feeling that El Salvador is on the cusp of entering a new phase in its Bitcoin experiment.

The last four years have seen the Central American nation, once known as the homicide capital of the world, rebrand itself into Bitcoin Country. President Nayib Bukele, by locking up MS-13 and Barrio 18 and putting an end to gang warfare, had given El Salvador a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reorganize itself and attain prosperity — at least that’s how most of the people at the conference seemed to see it.

A lot of conversations revolved around the pick-up in Bitcoin adoption. For years, despite bitcoin becoming legal tender in 2021, you could only pay for stuff with the cryptocurrency in El Zonte, the small surfing village also known as Bitcoin Beach. In 2023, 88% of Salvadorans did not use the digital coin, according to a survey by the Central American University.

But now a second Bitcoin circular economy has been implemented in the town of Berlín, up in the mountains, and other initiatives are reportedly growing elsewhere, like in Santa Ana, the second largest city in the country.

Martínez, Lemus and Linares were all eager to share tips and advice. The secret sauce to adoption, they said, is to mix Bitcoin initiatives with social work. “If the way to get people to use Bitcoin was to make hamburgers instead of doing social work, then I would be making hamburgers,” Linares told me. “Whatever works. People like social stuff, so that’s what we’re doing.”

Stablecoin giant Tether’s decision to relocate its headquarters to El Salvador was also perceived as a massive win. Tether reported $143.7 billion in assets, including $94.5 billion in Treasury bills, in the last financial quarter of 2024. For comparison, El Salvador’s GDP was estimated at $34 billion in 2023 by the World Bank.

Tether has become the largest company (by far) to be based in El Salvador — and other crypto firms are bound to follow in its footsteps, taking advantage of the nation’s advanced crypto regulatory framework and increasingly skilled workforce. For Salvadorans, that means more career opportunities, higher salaries and the possibility that the country may become a tech hub in its own right.

“El Salvador should not only be known for being the first to implement bitcoin as legal tender,” Darvin Otero, CEO of tiianki Technology, said on stage. “Let’s change the lives of the young folks here and create the next leaders of this tech movement.”

“We have a small territory, but we can have a big dream,” Alejandro Muñoz, a Salvadoran lawyer, said. “We can provide a big service. … Good lawyers will attract good investors and filter the scammers out. Bitcoin education needs to happen in the legal industry; steps are being taken already in that direction.”

Bright future ahead

The conference occurred only days after the government, as part of a recent multi-billion dollar deal with the IMF, rescinded bitcoin’s status as legal tender — meaning that businesses aren’t obliged to accept bitcoin payments anymore. While some members of the Bitcoin community have accused Bukele of caving to the IMF, none of the Salvadorans at Plan B seemed to see it that way. In their view, nothing has changed on a practical level, since the vast majority of businesses didn’t use Bitcoin to begin with.

In fact, a number of people welcomed the deal. “El Salvador locked in long-term funding to finish the reforms needed,” Mike Peterson, an American expatriate who lives in El Zonte and co-founded of Bitcoin Beach, posted on X recently. “The IMF loan puts the country on track to get the BBB credit rating that most sovereign wealth funds require to invest in a country.”

That’s the big difference between Salvadorans and Bitcoiners. Hardcore Bitcoiners prioritize global adoption; they want the cryptocurrency to eventually supplant government-issued currencies, like the U.S. dollar. For them, El Salvador is a stepping stone, the first nation to initiate hyperbitcoinization, but certainly not the last.

Salvadorans don’t have the same priorities. For them, Bitcoin is simply a tool, a means to an end. Their goal is to develop Salvadoran society.

“Salvadorans have always been proud of being Salvadoran. But there was a lot of pessimism. We were never the first in anything positive, only in negative things,” Linares told me. “Now people come from all parts of the world to listen to what we have to say. Bitcoin has a lot to do with that.”

“There are a lot of projects here in El Salvador that invest so much time and resources and get almost nothing in return — except tremendous pride in being able to give back to the community and support everyone else. This feeling needs to expand throughout the country. We’re in a moment of great change. You can feel it in the air.”

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 hit $1.1 billion after launch, although it appeared that purchases and sales were skewed; there were 74,500 individual buy orders and 28,900 sales – indicating that larger sell orders flattened the flurry of retail activity.

Milei later addressed the botched memecoin on X, stating that he “was not aware of the details of the project.”

“A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever,” Milei wrote. “I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet).”

The sell-off in Libra rippled across the wider memecoin market, with TRUMP losing $500 million from its market cap, according to market data, in a 30-minute period after Libra began to tumble.

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 Mark Uyeda’s new crypto task force, headed by Commissioner Hester Peirce.

“The crypto task force’s work may affect and could facilitate the potential resolution of both the underlying district court proceeding and potential appellate review, conserving judicial resources. Because the Commission’s review of crypto-related issues is ongoing, the Commission requests this additional time to prepare its answer to Coinbase’s petition and for appropriate review,” the filing said.

This is the second case the SEC asked for an extension in; earlier this week, the SEC and Binance filed for a 60-day stay in the regulator’s case against that exchange and affiliated parties, saying the extension could similarly lead to a resolution. The judge overseeing that case granted the stay.

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 liquidity to increase sufficiently for community members to recuperate some of their funds.

SafeMoon was one of the most popular projects of the 2021 crypto bull market. Its token rose to a $17 billion market capitalization at its highest point, but now floats at roughly $41 million in market cap, according to CoinGecko, and has been delisted from almost every exchange.

SafeMoon’s old executive team was charged by the Department of Justice with perpetrating fraud on its investors in 2023. They were notably accused of withdrawing more than $200 million from supposedly locked funds to buy luxury cars and homes.

The company declared bankruptcy in December 2023 and was subsequently acquired by the VGX Foundation.

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 Retirement System later also reported owning shares of bitcoin ETFs, the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) and two of Grayscale’s bitcoin products.

SWIB, established in 1951, oversees more than $156 billion in assets including funds from the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) and the State Investment Fund (SIF). The board manages investments on behalf of state employees and other trust funds.

Today marks the deadline for institutional investors managing at least $100 million in assets to report quarterly holdings to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The market is closely monitoring these filings to gauge whether large traditional finance firms have been adding bitcoin ETFs to their portfolios since their launch last year.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

Justin Sun wishes he could travel more. But there’s too much to do.

“There are too many exciting things happening in crypto every week,” he said in a December interview with CoinDesk at home in Hong Kong. “I don’t really take vacation time. It’s hard to get away for a week.”

If Sun did take an extended vacation, it’d probably be to Mars, he said. But only for a two-way trip.

“I think the only thing [that] may change my mind on crypto is Mars exploration,” he said.

TRON’s founder says crypto trading would be tough on the red planet as its distance from Earth means a significant lag time.”I’m not going to die on Mars.”

But, it wouldn’t be as bad as trading on Coinbase in 2013. Those were the early days when order books were thin and before matching engines were invented.

“In 2013, if you wanted to sell Bitcoin on Coinbase, they made you wait a week to find out if it sold,” he said. “You had to set a price range, and they would notify you later about the sale and final price.”

“It was like being on Mars.”

Everything crypto

You can see why Sun doesn’t have time for travel.

The TRON founder is relentless. Since founding the blockchain in 2017, Sun has established himself as one of the most influential people in Asian crypto. His X account has 3.7 million followers. TRON has 125 million active users. More than $50 billion in USDT is traded on the network daily.

Around Sun, there’s a universe of affiliated and advised companies, like HTX (exchange), BitGo (custody) and Rainberry (formerly BitTorrent Inc., which has a crypto connection even though it’s a P2P file-sharing service).

Still, when CoinDesk set up an interview with Sun, the idea was to see if the face of DeFi in Asia would talk about something other than crypto.

Surely there’s more to the man than digital assets, right?

We gave up ten minutes in.

For Sun, everything in life touches crypto, and crypto touches everything in life.

Even art.

Sun, an avid collector, owns works by Picasso and Warhol. He recently purchased, and ate, a $6.2 million banana that was part of an artwork called “Comedian,” which poked fun at the concept of modern, expensive art.

Which turned out to be a bitcoin metaphor.

“The banana taped to the wall is not about the physical artwork itself. It’s a concept, an image, rather than something physical,” he said.

“When I first learned about bitcoin, I thought it was cool because you can pass customs without anyone knowing you’re carrying wealth. It’s freedom. The banana has the same effect.”

Except, if someone eats it, as Sun did.

“This kind of conceptual art is new to regulation. It’s not about the physical piece. It’s about the concept,” he said. “Regulators don’t know how to handle it, just like they don’t know how to handle crypto. No matter what laws or rules you impose, you can’t stop someone from taping a banana to a wall.”

Gaming is not escapism

Back IRL, Sun has a soft spot for the Caribbean. Thanks to his obsession with Tropico, a world-building simulation game set in the Cold War tropics, it’s a region he visits as a virtual dictator under the game’s rules. But Sun prefers geopolitical neutrality.

“I run a neutral island, pleasing both the U.S. and the Soviet Union by giving each an island for their military bases,” he said. “Because, why not? They pay me for it.”

Sun says he’s a PC maxi, and not a console gamer. It’s Steam for him, not Xbox Live. Aside from Tropico, he’s a fan of the turn-based strategy game Civilization IV. He once played for 24 hours straight.

“One more turn, one more turn,” he kept saying. He finds the game addicting because it reminds him of what he does in the real world.

Justin Sun isn’t universally adored in the world of crypto. But few can look away.

“Justin Sun is like a Game of Thrones episode,” the man himself says. “No matter what you think of him, you need to keep watching.”

Recently, he riled bitcoiners through his investment in BitGo, which supports Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), a piece of trading infrastructure that allows the liquidity of bitcoin on DeFi.

Almost instantly after it was announced, Sun’s harshest critics came out of the woodworks with all kinds of crazy accusations.

Coinbase, which has its own wrapped BTC product, delisted Sun’s version, citing its “listing standards.” Sun and Coinbase are now continuing their argument in court.

BitGo’s CEO Mike Belshe called Sun’s loudest critics “intellectually dishonest.” They all had their own token to pump, he alleged.

Back to Game of Thrones.

In the show’s first season, it appeared the writers were setting up the character of Ned Stark as a lead – until he was beheaded towards the end of the first season.

“I thought, ‘This must be a mistake. Someone will come and say it’s all a misunderstanding.’ But no…he was really gone!” is how Sun recalls watching the show.

This surprise hooked audiences and made Game of Thrones one of its highest-rated shows in the network’s history, beating out The Sopranos, and kept viewers glued to the very end.

To really understand – and judge – Sun, you’ll just have to wait until the final episode.