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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.

Consensus, the world’s longest-running crypto conference, opens in Hong Kong next week, offering a unique viewpoint into digital assets in Asia.

More than 270 speakers and thousands of attendees from over 90 countries are expected at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for the event being held from Tuesday, Feb. 18 to Thursday, Feb. 20.

Here are some of the highlights:

The conference’s opening keynote (Feb. 19) will be given by Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-Po, and will be followed by a panel discussion on bitcoin’s potential to be the basis of a new financial system with Bitcoin OG and Blockstream CEO Adam Back, JAN3 CEO Samson Mow and Babylon co-founder David Tse.

Then Julia Leung, the head of Hong Kong’s primary financial regulator, the Securities and Futures Commission, details the territory’s regulatory priorities.

Yat Siu, the co-founder and chairman of Web3 giant Animoca Brands will discuss the fight for digital property rights, while the always colorful founder of TRON, Justin Sun, is slated to talk about his token’s meteoric rise.

Meanwhile, Solana Foundation president Lily Liu will discuss the blockchain’s future, and is also participating in a panel with Robinhood head of crypto Johann Kerbrat on why retail investors are moving on-chain. SUI founder Evan Cheng will explain how his blockchain is adapting to institutional needs. And, rounding out the first day, Binance CEO Richard Teng will sit down with Consensus Hong Kong chairman Michael Lau.

On Thursday, regulators in Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia will provide an outlook on regulation in the region. Stacks’ CEO Muneeb Ali headlines what should be a spirited discussion on the renaissance in Bitcoin Layer 2s that also includes Lombard Finance co-founder Jacob Phillips and early CoreDAO contributor Rich Rines. And Eric Anziani, the president of Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com, which recently received a license to operate in the EU, gives a fireside chat on his company’s ambitious global plans.

Also Thursday, Memeland CEO and co-founder Ray Chan sits down with CoinDesk’s Sam Ewen to talk about the memification of finance. And, on the Emerging Tech stage, we have the Decentralized AI summit, featuring panels with Mark Rydon (Aethir), Paul Veradittakit (Pantera), Gary Liu (Terminal 3) and many others.

Apart from the formal programming, there are also a host of other events offering the chance to network and compete. From Tuesday to Wednesday, the conference will see hundreds of developers from Asia and beyond vying for prizes and potential investments from top VC firms in the EasyA Hackathon. And be sure to catch the live onstage pitching battle between many of the world’s most promising early-stage Web3 companies in the CoinDesk Hong Kong Pitchfest 2025, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday.

Finally, for those with a sporting bent, the eighth installment of the popular Crypto Fight Night boxing exhibition will be held on Thursday night at the Grand Hyatt next to the HK Convention and Exhibition Centre, headlined by a bout between crypto influencers Bitlord and Korean Jew.

It all promises to be an invigorating conference at a special time, set in one of the most dynamic cities in Asia.

For the full agenda, please see here. Passes are still available for sale here.

This article is part of a four-piece series on El Salvador. You can find the previous dispatch, a story on Bitcoin City, here.

The sun was setting as I rolled into El Zonte, a small surfing village on the coast of El Salvador. It was a late January afternoon. The sky had turned pink and orange; the ocean seemed made of gold. Shafts of light shone through the leaves of the coconut trees. Young, sun-tanned surfers were coming back from the beach, carrying their boards, joking around. Tropical birds shrieked above your head.

El Zonte is a unique kind of paradise because it supports the world’s first Bitcoin circular economy. Almost every business — restaurants, coffee shops, surf shops, hotels — accepts bitcoin (BTC) payments. It takes effort to find anyone who won’t take your satoshis. The village of roughly 3,000 people has turned into a mecca for crypto folks, who come from all corners of the globe to experience life on the Bitcoin Standard.

The village is also the birthplace of El Salvador’s Bitcoin journey. President Nayib Bukele, has credited the small coastal community for inspiring him to make bitcoin legal tender in 2021. That was my reason for visiting: I wanted to see for myself how the experiment was evolving.

What I found was a town in the midst of tremendous change — a place where Salvadorans and expatriates, together, spearhead the technological development of a whole nation.

The residents of El Zonte, once heavily weighed down by poverty, now have educational opportunities and interesting work prospects. Their children are being given tools to achieve prosperity, right here in their community.

I came away with the feeling that you cannot truly grasp the country’s Bitcoin project without understanding what happened in El Zonte.

How it all started

Throughout my stay, almost every time I talked about Bitcoin with the locals, the conversation would eventually turn to an American expat named Michael Peterson, a revered figure. The village’s Bitcoin initiative would probably have never happened without him.

El Salvador is famous for its world-class waves. Peterson visited El Zonte for the first time in 2005 on a surfing trip, and immediately fell in love with the place. He came back with his wife and bought a house, thinking of it as a vacation home for the winter. But, as time wore on, the couple felt increasingly drawn to El Salvador — and to the nation’s problems.

“We were attending a church in San Salvador, and a lot of people there were doing stuff like running children’s homes or working with victims of sex trafficking,” Peterson told me.

“The helpers themselves were facing a lot of trauma and challenges. We decided to move down here full-time in 2014, not to be the people on the frontlines, but to support the different organizations working here.”

The Petersons built guest houses in El Zonte and in Punta Mango, which they made available for people to decompress in, free of charge. They also organized conferences to connect various churches and missionaries together and provide psychological counselling.

These were not small things. El Salvador, at the time, had the highest murder rate in the world. A lot of the people hosted by the Petersons had seen dead bodies, and some of them experienced extreme violence themselves. One of their friends, whom I briefly met, was ambushed in his car and shot in the neck, thus partially losing his voice.

Peterson did youth outreach in Punta Mango and El Zonte, “to help them believe in a better future,” he said. Some of the first kids he took care of, like Roman Martínez and Fredis Molina, are now adults working with him at Bitcoin Beach, the initiative that fueled Bitcoin adoption in El Zonte.

“Mike showed us a different way of seeing life, of thinking, of dreaming. You can teach children how to dream. That’s why our reality changed,” Martínez told me. 

The work Peterson did — plus the fact that his own kids grew up with local children — led him to fully integrate into El Zonte’s community. Bitcoin Beach, the organization, naturally grew out of all of these social projects when, in 2019, an anonymous party reached out to Peterson to make a significant bitcoin donation.

Becoming Bitcoin Beach

The donation was made under one condition: The bitcoin could not be exchanged for U.S. dollars. It had to be used to support the community in its digital form. “The donor’s belief was that actually using Bitcoin would really transform the world,” Peterson said.

Bitcoin Beach started off small. Local children were given little bitcoin grants and stipends for performing various jobs, like cleaning up beaches and rivers, staying in school, and getting good grades. A couple of businesses started accepting bitcoin — just enough for the kids to go and buy things with the money they’d earned.

The turning point came in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. Like everywhere else, El Zonte closed up and people lost their jobs. Bitcoin Beach started using its funds to support the local economy. Each family received a bit of bitcoin, enough to make sure nobody would go hungry or lack basic necessities. The local stores, eager to keep money coming in, now had an incentive to accept the cryptocurrency.

Later on, when the country opened up again, Bitcoin Beach implemented a re-employment program, hiring 120 locals for community construction projects like fixing roads. Salaries were fixed low, so workers wouldn’t depend on the initiative in the long run. Local businesses also received aid to help them bring their employees back on.

“You need to be very careful when you’re working in a community, because a lot of people come in with good intentions and give things for free, because they think that’s what the community needs,” Peterson said.

“It can really distort the local economy. It can create dependency. Because you’re paying higher salaries, you end up taking the best employees from other local businesses. During the pandemic, we were able to put those concerns on hold because people were going hungry.”

Things accelerated from there. Before Bitcoin Beach, 90% of people in El Zonte had no bank accounts; nor had they ever made a digital transaction. Up until then, the vast majority had no savings. Suddenly, everybody was using Bitcoin Lightning wallets. Forbes and local media outlets showed up. Word spread across the crypto community at large that something unique was happening in a small village in El Salvador.

Jack Mallers, the CEO of Zap (the parent company of bitcoin payments platform Strike), visited El Zonte for a few months, and what he saw convinced him to launch Strike in the Latin American nation. Mallers’ social media posts about El Zonte were shown to Bukele, according to Martínez, inspiring the President to implement the Bitcoin law in 2021.

“We were the project that proved that Bitcoin could be a good thing for Salvadorans,” Martínez said. “The same problems we had in El Zonte, we had elsewhere in the country.”

Tremendous growth

I wasn’t staying in the touristic zone, but a 10 minute walk away, in a little neighborhood with unevenly paved streets. It wasn’t a wealthy place. Most of the houses were made of wood and tin. There were no foreigners that I could see. The area gave me a sense of what El Zonte may have looked like before capital started flowing in.

Close to my rental was a small store selling food and drinks, called El Milagro (“The Miracle”), that sports a full-blown painting of Satoshi Nakamoto eating pupusas (one of El Salvador’s national dishes). The store owner asked if I’d pay in cash or bitcoin in the same casual tone that anglophone grocery clerks ask “cash or card?”

The town changes dramatically as you get closer to the ocean. The roads are neat. Beautiful hotels advertise Spanish and surfing lessons. You find cute coffee shops and nice bars. In restaurants, you’ll sometimes overhear the foreigners at the next table talking about crypto. I inadvertently stumbled on early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd in a hotel by the beach. Huge, multi-story edifices are being built on the western side of town — presumably apartments.

A 20-year-old Salvadoran by the name of Ivan, who works at a surf store called Los 3 Hermanos, told me that about half of the shop’s clients pay in bitcoin. He said he liked using the cryptocurrency in a personal capacity.

Agent León, a local police officer, said that Bitcoin was great for El Zonte because it was leading to more development. “It’s good that foreigners get to interact with Salvadoran society,” he said. Some of the changes had caused friction within the community, but he said it was normal considering how rapidly the town was evolving.

One Salvadoran Bitcoiner, who did not wish to be named, was effusive about Bitcoin Beach’s work, calling it fantastic. However, he said the enormous influx of money into the village had happened so quickly that not everybody in the community had benefited at the same time.

“We have been transformed from a so-called third world surf town into a wannabe first world tourism destination — but we’re still lacking serious infrastructure, we still have tons of people left behind, living in poverty, if not misery,” he said.

“Just a couple of years ago, if you had an accident or anything, there was no way to take care of you. You had to be driven into the city,” he added. “We now have big, big investors flowing in. They’re building multi-million dollar projects. These people do not have the same attachment to El Zonte as the locals or the foreigners like Mike that bought property long ago.”

Martínez, who co-founded Bitcoin Beach, addressed the development issues during a panel discussion at Plan B, on Jan. 30. He said he was grateful for the kind of problems that El Zonte now has to deal with, because they’re due to success. “It’s the best moment that we’ve ever had in the history of our community,” he said.

“Sometimes people go to Bitcoin Beach and say we still don’t have infrastructure, we still don’t have four-star hotels, we’re still missing so much,” he added.

“It’s difficult for them to see the change of mentality in our people. Now, our people think: ‘Maybe I don’t need to emigrate to the U.S. Maybe my dreams can come true here. Maybe I can have a family and start my business here.’ There are opportunities for locals — something happened in El Zonte that hasn’t occurred anywhere else.”

Eyes on the future

With El Zonte almost completely orange-pilled, the people at Bitcoin Beach have expanded their horizons. Martínez and other Salvadorans now lead the initiative, with Peterson mostly acting in an advisory role. Bitcoiners from all around the globe come to El Zonte for guidance, including folks in Berlín, a mountain town which is home to El Salvador’s second Bitcoin circular economy.

For Martínez and Molina, one of the highest priorities is to take care of El Zonte’s kids. Around 50 of them are being trained in Bitcoin-related topics, including basic finance, by the organization — and taught to dream.

“The work that Mike did with us, that’s what we’re trying to replicate with another generation,” Martínez told me. “It’s just about sharing. We’re offering them a path to walk on. Giving them advice. Teaching them about God, and the spiritual side of life.”

I wasn’t able to see Peterson while in El Zonte, but I met up with him a couple of days later at Plan B, in San Salvador. He was in high demand at the conference — and Martínez even more so. Everywhere he went, the young Salvadoran attracted crowds; he was the main speaker and moderator of the Spanish-speaking area of the forum.

Peterson was visibly emotional when he spoke of Martínez’s leadership in the community. “Roman and Fredis and the others — I’ve known them since they were kids,” he said. “We went to the Plan B conference in Lugano, and it was just incredible. They came from families that, in the past, would have hoped to just survive, but now they’re speaking to bankers in Switzerland.”

“They’re doing a much better job than I ever could.”

Bitcoin (BTC) managed to put in a modest rally early in the U.S. trading session on Friday, but the move was quickly snuffed out. Are bulls lightening up positions ahead of the weekend?

They could be forgiven for doing so.

In his Friday note, Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick said bitcoin’s price has now declined for five consecutive weekends (measured from 5 pm ET Friday to the same time on Sunday).

Among the scares during that timeframe were the DeepSeek AI news and Trump tariff threats.

“This is not normal,” reminded Kendrick, noting that weekend price action for all of 2024 tended to be rather muted, with Mondays and Fridays instead being the time to pay attention for big moves.

Failed rally on Friday

Turning to the action early Friday, bitcoin managed to rally about 1.5% to $97,600 in very short order following the release of U.S. retail sales data for January. The number missed economist estimates by a mile, giving hope that rate cuts for the Federal Reserve might be back on the table in the first half of the year.

The price has since returned to roughly where it was ahead of the print at $96,400.

An extra thought for those fearful about the coming weekend: It’s three days in the U.S., which has the day off on Monday for Presidents’ Day.

Leading stablecoin issuer Tether announced earlier today it has invested in Italian football club Juventus FC, leading to a massive price rise not only for the club’s crypto fan token JUV, but also for other crypto fan tokens.

The price of Juventus Fan Token surged more than 200% before seeing a correction that brought the gain back to about 120% over the past 24 hours.

The announcement moved the prices of several other fan tokens, with the S.S Lazio Fan token (LAZIO) jumping 11%. Similarly, the FC Porto fan token (PORTO) is up more than 10% for the day.

The Tottenham Hotspur fan token, the Paris Saint-Germain fan token, and the Napoli fan token — all tokens associated with European soccer clubs — are also among those posting gains following the news.

Crypto exchange Bybit is no longer illegally operating in France in the eyes of the country’s financial regulator, its CEO said Friday.

The exchange was on France’s regulatory blacklist for more than two years, Ben Zhou, the CEO of Bybit, said in an X post on Friday.

“After more than two years of working with the French regulator through multiple remediation efforts, BYBIT is now officially removed from France AMF blacklist,” he said.

A search of the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF) database confirms that Bybit, the second largest global exchange by volume, is no longer on the blacklist.

Just last May the regulator was advising people that Bybit was not registered to operate in the country and encouraged investors to make arrangements so that the platform eventually “ceases.” Soon after the notice, Bybit said it would stop offering products to French nationals.

But now the exchange’s CEO is hopeful it will be able to get a Markets in Crypto Assets license (MiCA).

“MiCA license next,” Zhou said on X. Companies are striving to get the coveted MiCA license, which would let them operate across the 30 European Economic Area nations.

The Dubai-based exchange knows how to make a comeback after receiving warnings from regulators. Recently, Bybit managed to secure a license in India after paying a $1 million fine.

Neither Bybit nor the AMF returned requests for comment.

The Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) has set itself a deadline for a decision on whether it will allow an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the price of XRP (XRP).

The SEC acknowledged a 19b-4 filing by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and asset manager Grayscale, which is the first time it has responded to a filing regarding the crypto asset. This means that the Commission now has up to 240 days to make a decision on the filing.

While the regulator has previously acknowledged several other applications for crypto-focused ETFs, including for Solana (SOL), Litecoin (LTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE), this latest acknowledgement is is significant given that the SEC’s ongoing lawsuit against Ripple, the issuer of XRP.

The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020 for allegedly violating U.S. securities laws by selling XRP as an unregistered security to raise funds. Ripple won the court case partially in August 2023 and XRP was deemed a non-security when sold on secondary markets by a federal judge.

The SEC filed an appeal in the case on Jan. 15 — five days before Donald Trump assumed office as U.S. President — arguing that Ripple’s approach to selling XRP met the tenets of the Howey Test, a Supreme Court precedent used as a common standard for identifying securities.

“They could have easily rejected this filing,” said Nate Geraci, President of the ETF Store in a post on X. “Enormous message [in my opinion.]”

Last week, Bloomberg ETF analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas predicted a 65% chance for an XRP ETF to be approved by the end of 2025. The two analysts gave the highest chances to a LTC ETF (90%), followed by DOGE (75%) and SOL (65%).

All of the current outstanding ETF applications for those assets will receive a decision in October.

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3298.82, up 2.9% (+92.48) since yesterday’s close.

Nineteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: XRP (+9.4%) and XLM (+6.1%).

Laggards: APT (+0.0%) and ADA (+0.3%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Tether, the cryptocurrency firm behind the $140 billion USDT stablecoin, said on Friday it has invested in Italian football club Juventus FC.

The firm’s investment arm, Tether Investments, acquired a minority stake in the sports club, according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. Juventus FC shares, which are publicly traded on the Italian stock exchange, advanced 1.5% immediately after the news.

“Aligned with our strategic investment in Juve, Tether will be a pioneer in merging new technologies, such as digital assets, AI, and biotech, with the well-established sports industry to drive change globally,” said Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino in a statement.

The acquisition comes after Tether reported $13 billion in profits last year, and expanded beyond its core stablecoin business with investments in artificial intelligence, payments and energy companies.