The only country in which bitcoin is legal tender, El Salvador, is set to build an entire city based on the flagship cryptocurrency, according to President Nayib Bukele. The ‘Bitcoin City’ will be located along the Gulf of Fonseca near a volcano.

Square’s secretive TBD project has debuted a new 18-page white paper that sketches out the design principles and ambitions for a “decentralized exchange for Bitcoin.Dubbed the tbDEX, it’s set to make “crypto assets and decentralized financial services more accessible to everyone.”

Binance has announced it completed its integration of Arbitrum One, an Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Offchain Labs. The integration works for Ethereum (ETH) deposits and allows Binance users to directly deposit their funds without using the Arbitrum bridge

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Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• El Salvador Plans Volcano-Powered ‘Bitcoin City’
• Square Unveils White Paper for Decentralized Bitcoin Exchange
• Binance Launches Layer-2 ETH Deposits With Arbitrum One
• Chart of the Week: Do Forks Impact Performance?
• Sponsored: Crypto.com - The World’s Fastest Growing Crypto App

El Salvador Plans Volcano-Powered ‘Bitcoin City’

The only country in which bitcoin is legal tender, El Salvador, is set to build an entire city based on the flagship cryptocurrency, according to President Nayib Bukele. The ‘Bitcoin City’ will be located along the Gulf of Fonseca near a volcano.

The government plans to create a power plant by the volcano to provide energy for the city and bitcoin mining operations. According to Bukele, the Bitcoin City will have both residential and commercial areas, restaurants, an airport, a port and a rail service.

It’s set to be laid out in a circle like a coin, with its center hosting a huge Bitcoin symbol. The Bitcoin City will have no income, property, capital gains, or payroll taxes.

The country is also planning on issuing a $1 billion US “bitcoin bond,” a tokenized financial instrument developed by Blockstream on the Liquid Network. $500 million of the raised funds would be used to construct energy and bitcoin mining infrastructure, and $500 million to buy more bitcoin.

Square Unveils White Paper for Decentralized Bitcoin Exchange

Square’s secretive TBD project has debuted a new 18-page white paper that sketches out the design principles and ambitions for a “decentralized exchange for Bitcoin.Dubbed the tbDEX, it’s set to make “crypto assets and decentralized financial services more accessible to everyone.”

The document describes the project as “a protocol for discovering liquidity and exchanging assets (such as bitcoin, fiat money, or real world goods) when the existence of social trust is an intractable element of managing transaction risk."

The exchange reportedly “facilitates decentralized networks of exchange between assets by providing a framework for establishing social trust, utilizing decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to establish the provenance of identity in the real world."

The document suggests stablecoins could serve as stand-ins for fiat currency while the exchange creates a “ubiquity of on-ramps and off-ramps directly between the fiat and crypto financial systems without the need for centralized intermediaries and trust brokers."

Binance Launches Layer-2 ETH Deposits With Arbitrum One

Binance has announced it completed its integration of Arbitrum One, an Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Offchain Labs. The integration works for Ethereum (ETH) deposits, and allows Binance users to directly deposit their funds without using the Arbitrum bridge.

Until now, users had to move funds from Arbitrum to Ethereum through the bridge, meaning the integration makes it easier for Binance users to access their funds for trading. The exchange is set to enable withdrawals on Arbitrum at a later date, the exchange said, but no timeline was specified.

Arbitrum reduces transaction costs through the use of Optimistic rollups technology. It allows Ethereum transactions to be executed off-chain, thereby reducing network congestion and reducing transaction fees.

Binance is one of a few centralized exchanges that have integrated a scaling solution for Ethereum. Decentralized protocols like Uniswap, 1inch, and Aave have already integrated Arbitrum and other solutions into their platforms.

Chart of the Week: Do Forks Impact Performance?

Cryptocurrencies are powered by blockchain protocols, and forks are upgrades to these protocols that allow them to keep progressing over time. In the chart below we look at a 5-year fork history for both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Bitcoin forks have been improving the cryptocurrency’s scalability, with the latest one adding smart contract functionality to its network. Ethereum forks have slowly been helping it move toward a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm meant to boost the network’s performance.

While in the short-term forks have seemingly had little impact on price performance, over time they appear to influence the cryptocurrencies’ performance, likely as their effects are felt.

Check out more of CryptoCompare’s research in the link below.

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