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Plasma, a crypto startup building a Bitcoin-based blockchain designed specifically for stablecoins, raised $20 million to further its development, the company said on Thursday.

The fundraising round was led by Framework Ventures and will support Plasma’s testnet and mainnet launches, as well as its expansion into remittances, payments and DeFi applications, the team said.

The investment followed a $4 million round with early backers including Bitfinex, stablecoin issuer Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino, venture capitalist Peter Thiel and prominent crypto traders Cobie and Zaheer Ebtikar, also known as Split Capital.

Stablecoins have become a dominant force in crypto surpassing $220 billion in supply, and are increasingly used for everyday payments and savings. While Bitcoin is the longest-running blockchain, most of the stablecoin activity happens on newer chains like Ethereum, Tron and Solana.

Plasma is designed to be a sidechain on the Bitcoin blockchain with full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which underpins a large part of decentralized finance activity. The team said they aim to address challenges faced by stablecoins on existing blockchains, such as high fees and scalability limits by leveraging Bitcoin’s security and offering zero-fee USDT transactions.

“Stablecoins are the clear winner in blockchain adoption, yet they’re treated as second-class citizens on current blockchains,” Paul Faecks, founder and CEO of Plasma, said in a statement. “By leveraging Bitcoin as a foundation, zero-fee USDT transfers, alongside a purpose-built ecosystem and infrastructure for stablecoins with deep liquidity, Plasma creates the most secure, scalable, and efficient blockchain for stablecoins on the market.”

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (SFC) plans on lifting a ban that prevented institutions trading crypto in response to the upsurge in global participation in the market, it said on Thursday.

Non-profit organizations like charities, university and school corporations, law enforcement agencies will be able to sell their virtual assets by the first half of the year. By the second half of the year listed companies and professional investors will be allowed to buy and sell crypto.

Corporations and banks have been restricted from trading virtual assets due to government regulations that were put in force in 2017. At the time the blockage was put in place to alleviate “overheated speculation” and address money laundering concerns.

With the enforcement of the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, a foundation of user protection has been set, the regulator said in its statement.

“Major countries overseas are broadly allowing corporations to participate in the market, and the market environment is changing as domestic companies are also seeing an increase in demand for new blockchain-related businesses,” the statement said.

USDT issuer Tether could face challenges if proposed U.S. stablecoin regulation is passed, and the company may have to sell some of its reserves to comply with the new rules, Wall Street bank JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Wednesday.

The Senate’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act mandates federal regulation for stablecoins with a market cap of over $10 billion, the report noted, with the potential for state regulation if it aligns with federal rules. The House of Representatives STABLE Act calls for state regulation without any conditions.

“Reserve requirements under the STABLE Act are stricter, allowing insured deposits, U.S. T-bills, treasury short-term repo and central banks reserves,” analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote, adding that the Senate bill also permits money market funds and reverse repos.

“Both bills allow only high quality and liquid assets as reserves,” the authors wrote.

Tether dominates the stablecoin universe with a 60% market share. USDT has a market cap of about $142 billion. JPMorgan said the issuer’s reserves are “only 66% compliant under the STABLE Act and 83% under the GENIUS Act,” citing the company’s reports.

Furthermore, “both figures suggest a declining compliance ratio since the middle of last year as stablecoin supply surged,” the bank added.

Under the proposed regulations, Tether would have to replace non-compliant assets with compliant ones, the report said. This implies “sales of their non-compliant assets (such as precious metals, bitcoin (BTC), corporate paper, secured loans and other investments) and purchases of compliant assets such as T-bills.”

“Tether is closely monitoring the evolution of the different U.S. stablecoin bills and also actively engaging with local regulators. Consultation from the industry needs to happen and it’s still unclear which bill will move forward,” a Tether spokesperson said in emailed comments.

“Even in the most extreme scenario, JPMorgan discounts the fact the Tether’s Group equity is over $20 billion in other very liquid assets and is generating more than $1.2 billion in profits per quarter through U.S. Treasuries. Adapting new requirements will be straightforward,” the person added.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in a tweet on X on Thursday following publication of the bank’s report that “JPM analysts are salty because they don’t own bitcoin.”

New rules calling for increased transparency and more frequent reserve audits could also pose further challenges for Tether, the report added.

Read more: Stablecoin Regulations Could Pose Problems for Tether, JPMorgan Says; USDT Issuer Claims Sour Grapes

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

Bitcoin City sounds like a modern El Dorado — a dreamlike enclave in the jungle, a 21st century utopia.

Announced by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele in 2021, the metropolis will supposedly be raised at the base of the Conchagua volcano. Renderings of the project from May 2022 show a circular shape, like the Bitcoin logo, and a structure painted in gold.

Visiting El Salvador this month, I was curious to see Bitcoin City for myself, or at least try to spot signs of construction.

It’s a four-and-a-half hour drive from San Salvador to Conchagua. The volcano sits on the easternmost side of the country, on the coast, by the Gulf of Fonseca. You can see Nicaragua and Honduras from the top of it, as well as small islands like Tiger Island, Conchagüita and Meanguera Island. It’s a beautiful place, but terribly humid, and hot. It was 35 degrees Celsius (95°F) when I arrived at noon in late-January.

Bitcoin City faces southeast according to plans shared by Bukele, meaning that it should look toward the water. But Google Maps shows no roads on that side of the volcano, only the Conchagua Forest and virgin beaches like Playa El Flor (flower beach). So I drove to the little village of Conchagua, on the northern side.

What I found in Conchagua

Conchagua is a tiny village, and it’s adorable. My immediate impression was that I’d fallen back in time, like to Portugal in the 1950s, perhaps. Droves of school children in white uniforms rushed through the streets, making their way back home for lunch after being dropped off by colorful buses.

As in most Latin American cities, the central square displayed the town’s name in bright block-letters: CONCHAGUA. There is a white fountain behind, and Christmas decorations were still up despite festivities being long over.

Opposite from the square stands a gorgeous, white colonial church. Its patron saint is Santiago Apóstol; villagers refer to the parish by that name as well. It’s hard to tell when construction began, but it finished in 1693, which makes it the oldest church in El Salvador, and a prized tourist attraction.

Be that as it may, there didn’t seem to be other foreigners when I arrived, and my presence drew a few stares. It’s a quiet town; outsiders stand out. It’s hard to say how many people live there — the mayor’s office didn’t have access to the census taken in 2023 by the Salvadoran central bank — but I’d be surprised if it were more than a couple thousand.

Wikipedia says 37,400, based on a 2007 survey, yet that figure is for the entire municipality of Conchagua, which takes in a half-dozen other villages around the volcano, and even then, it feels like an overestimation.

At the mayor’s office, I was politely greeted by Margarito García, who has worked for the office for 15 years. When I asked about Bukele’s plans to build Bitcoin City on the volcano, García shook his head.

“These are only words,” he said.

There have been no signs of construction nearby, he added, nor have government officials been sighted. I wasn’t the first person to ask. Tourists — French and Slovak, he remembered — had come searching for Bitcoin City in the last few months. But he saw the attention brought to Conchagua as a positive for the local economy.

García mentioned that an airport was being developed close to Loma Larga, about 30 minutes southwest of Conchagua. He was referring to the “Pacific Airport,” an initiative proposed by Bukele as far back as 2019 to boost tourism in El Salvador’s eastern region and relieve the country’s existing international airport of some of its congestion.

The Legislative Assembly approved the airport’s construction in 2022. The project will cost $328 million and initially service between 300,000 and 500,000 passengers per year. Construction is expected to begin in 2025.

Plans for Bitcoin City

The project is notable because Bukele’s plans for Bitcoin City do include an airport, as well as a port, rail services, commercial and residential zones, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Could the Pacific Airport be a first step to building the metropolis?

Possibly.

“In Bitcoin City, we will have mining, agriculture, culture and sports. When we are gone, this will endure, and everyone will be able to see the city,” Bukele said back in 2021, when he announced the project.

“We will have no income tax, forever. No profit tax, no property tax, no hiring tax, zero municipal taxes and zero CO2 emissions. The only taxes you will have in Bitcoin City is VAT, half of which will be used to pay the municipality’s bonds and the rest for public infrastructure and city maintenance,” he added.

The Conchagua volcano’s geothermal energy was envisioned as Bitcoin City’s primary power source, a nice environmental touch considering the environmental reputation of the bitcoin mining industry.

Bukele said Bitcoin City’s construction will be funded via a $1 billion bitcoin-backed tokenized bond, called the Volcano Bond, originally scheduled for issuance in 2022. The bond received regulatory approval in December 2023 and was supposed to launch in the first quarter of 2024, according to El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office. But the Salvadoran government has remained silent on the matter since.

“I don’t know when we’ll have some news on that,” Stacy Herbert, director of the Bitcoin Office (which acts as the government’s marketing arm for all things crypto-related) told me back in December when I asked her for updates on Bitcoin City and the Volcano Bond. “But the foundation has been laid for everything.”

Driving to the volcano

I was quite determined to go up the volcano and lay my eyes on the Gulf of Fonseca. I wanted to get a sense of the view that residents of Bitcoin City may enjoy in the future.

The villagers didn’t seem to think that my rental car would make it. It was all dirt tracks; I would need a four-wheel drive, they said, or I’d have to take a shuttle up there.

I gave it a try anyway. Slowly making my way on a bumpy road, I drove eastward, circumventing the volcano, towards another village called Amapalita. On both sides of the track were fields and forests. Every once in a while I’d see the northern side of the volcano break through the foliage.

It wasn’t long before the road got too steep for comfort. I turned around and made my way back to the village. I could have tried another road, which runs along the volcano’s western side, but the day was getting on, and I wanted to reach El Zonte, four hours away, before nightfall.

Assuming the Pacific Airport starts getting built in 2025 (which looks likely) it will have been six years since the moment Bukele first mentioned the airport and the moment construction started.

Bitcoin City, being a vastly larger enterprise, could take much longer than that. There is no guarantee the initiative will ever come to fruition at all. Other such planned cities — like Neom in Saudi Arabia — have faced even greater delays.

Who knows? El Salvador has surprised the world more than once under Bukele. I wouldn’t bet against it.

Popular non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea said Thursday that it is expanding its platform to crypto trading and confirmed it is planning to distribute SEA tokens to users.

The trading platform called OS2 has launched today, and aggregates marketplaces, allows cross-chain purchasing and offers lower fees in the beginning, according to the protocol’s press release.

“This represents an expansion of OpenSea from an NFT marketplace to a much broader platform for trading all types of digital assets,” said Devin Finzer, Co-founder and CEO of OpenSea. “We think tokens and NFTs belong together in a single, powerful, delightful experience.”

OpenSea Foundation, the Cayman Islands-based development organization behind the protocol, will also distribute SEA tokens offering utility on the OS2 platform.

While details and date of the airdrop remain undisclosed, OpenSea has confirmed that SEA will recognize both active users and those who have been part of the platform since its early days. US users will be included in the airdrop.

OpenSea has said that SEA’s utility will be focused on long-term engagement rather than short-term speculation.

The platform’s monthly trading volume is down significantly from a $5 billion peak in early 2021, having facilitated trading of $190 million worth of NFTs last month. The platform’s annualized revenue stands at $33 million, according to Dune Analytics data.

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 3191.13, down 1.0% (-32.82) since 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

Three of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: APT (+1.3%) and AAVE (+0.9%).

Laggards: NEAR (-3.1%) and AVAX (-2.6%).

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

Inflation at the wholesale level came in faster than forecast last month in another disappointment to investors and policymakers hoping for cooling price pressures.

The Producer Price Index (PPI) rose 0.4% in January versus economist forecasts for 0.3% and 0.2% in December. On a year-over-year basis, PPI was higher by 3.5% against estimates for 3.2% and 3.3% in December.

Core PPI, which excludes food and energy components, rose 0.3% in January versus forecasts for 0.3% and 0% in December. Core PPI year-over-year was higher by 3.6% versus estimates for 3.3% and 3.7% in December.

Under pressure once again this morning ahead of new Trump tariff announcements promised for later today, the price of bitcoin (BTC) continued to trade around the $96,000 level.

Normally not too widely followed, today’s PPI figures took on more import coming one day after markets were surprised by Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for January that came in far stronger than estimates. Testifying before Congress yesterday following the fast inflation report, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted there’s more work to be done on the inflation front.

The PPI number took on even greater significance as Powell said he would be interested in seeing if today’s number confirmed the disappointing CPI data.

After cutting rates 100 basis points in the final months of 2024, Powell and the rest of the Fed has made clear their intent to pause any further monetary ease until there’s a notable slowdown in either the economy and/or inflation.

Before the PPI figure was published, markets had priced in only one rate cut for all of 2025, according to the CME Fed Watch Tool.

Midas, a protocol for issuing yield-bearing tokens backed by U.S. Treasuries and other assets, has introduced Liquid Yield Tokens (LYT) linked to actively managed, decentralized finance (DeFi) funds, starting out with Edge Capital, RE7, and MEV Capital.

Late last year, Midas received regulatory approval to issue its basis trade and U.S. Treasuries tokens in Liechtenstein, allowing passporting across Germany and Europe.

Tokenization builders in the crypto native and DeFi-focused arena saw the need for yield-bearing alternatives to established stablecoins like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, which keep the interest generated from reserves.

Additions to the Midas product suite reflect changing market conditions. For instance, the firm’s tokenized T-Bill product, based on a BlackRock money-market fund, was introduced when interest rates were around 5% and DeFi markets were much lower, at around 2%.

The later addition of a cash and carry trade token delivered yields last year of over 20%, however market trends are reversing, said Midas CEO Dennis Dinkelmeyer. The new LYT product aims at yields as high as 20%, he said.

“We’ve partnered up with the best in the industry such as Edge Capital, RE7 Capital and MEV Capital with more great names coming soon,” Dinkelmeyer said in an interview. “These fund managers are really experts when it comes to yield, whether with T-Bills, basis trades, or other yield sources like market making and arbitrage.”

The Midas tokenization platform allows a wide audience exposure to these tokens with a one-click issue and redeem process, Dinkelmeyer said. “In addition, the tokens can be used as collateral in DeFi, starting with Euler and Morpho with more to follow.”

BNB Chain’s BNB token and PancakeSwap’s CAKE bucked low-volatility market conditions to rally 9.3% and 35% respectively even as bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency, remained rangebound at $96,200.

CAKE has more than doubled over the past seven days, a move coinciding with a spike in trading volume, with $1.1 billion being notched in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.

BNB, meanwhile, flipped Solana’s SOL token in terms of market cap following a series of tweets from Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who hinted at “interacting with memecoins” on the BNB Chain.

The move in BNB and CAKE is correlated because CAKE is the native token of decentralized exchange PancakeSwap, the largest protocol on BNB Chain.

The increase in activity comes as bitcoin experiences a lull. BTC has traded between $95,000 and $98,000 since Feb. 8.

Rangebound price action for BTC typically leads to a rise in activity in alternative cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, because traders tend to look for more speculative bets. In the past 24 hours LIDO, INJ, JTO and HYPE have all gained between 7% and 9%.

Robinhood (HOOD) shares surged in pre-market activity Thursday after the popular trading app reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street estimates driven by a massive jump in crypto revenue.

The company reported $358 million in crypto transaction revenue in the quarter, the highest contribution from digital-asset trading to date, Wall Street bank JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Wednesday.

JPMorgan raised its price target for the stock to $45 from $39, while maintaining its neutral rating. Citi (C) raised its target to $60 from $45 and kept its neutral rating on the stock. Broker Bernstein more than doubled it price objective to $105 from $51 and kept an outperform rating on the shares.

The stock jumped 13% to $63.20 in early trading Thursday following results, released after the market closed on Wednesdy.

Robinhood said fourth-quarter revenue rose 115% from the previous year to $1.01 billion, beating Wall Street analysts’ estimate of $945.8 million, according to FactSet data. Transaction-based earnings increased 200% year-on-year, mainly due to a 700% rise in cryptocurrency revenue.

Crypto revenue normally contributes 10%-20% of total revenue, JPMorgan noted. The 46% jump in total cryptocurrency market cap in the period and the increase in Robinhood notional volumes, which were 393% higher quarter-on-quarter, fueled the revenue beat.

The company has big plans for its crypto business. “Management seeks to add more tokens, strengthen its wallet offering, add an order book with exchange routing functionality, integrate Bitstamp and explore tokenization longer-term,” the report said.

Robinhood has benefitted from favorable trends since the start of the year, with “crypto market tailwinds and retail activity remaining strong,” Citi said.

If this positive backdrop is maintained, the shares are likely to see support, but investors should expect volatility. While the bank has become more positive on the company’s fundamental outlook, it said it preferred to wait for a “more reasonable entry point.”

Bernstein reiterated that Robinhood was the best idea in the broker’s global digital assets coverage. It said it expected continued momentum in the first quarter “driven by crypto volatility and a sustained price cycle.”

Read more: Robinhood’s Big Earnings Beat Could Bode Well for Coinbase