Week in Crypto: El Salvador Adopts Bitcoin as a Legal Tender| China Extends Crypto Mining Restrictions| Coinbase Enters $22 Trillion Pension Market| Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade Locked-In

The week has been quite eventful for the crypto space with major news coming from all around the world. The biggest story of the week comes from a small country in Central America, El Salvador.

El Salvador adopts BTC as legal tender: El Salvador becomes the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender. The country’s treasury would also buy $150 million in Bitcoin for its treasury and promote its use among merchants and traders.

Nayib Bukele, the country’s president also announced they will promote 100% clean energy Bitcoin mining using volcanic energy.

China extends crypto mining restrictions: China has continued its crypto mining crackdown on new provinces this week after early measures by Inner Mongolia and Sichuan. This week the Xinjiang province one of the key crypto mining hotspots was asked to shut down mining operations.

Local governments in Qinghai also imposed an immediate ban on all crypto mining operations in the region. The continuous restrictions and shutdown of mining operations led to a sharp decline in the hashrate of the Bitcoin network.

Coinbase enters $22 trillion, Pension Fund Market: Coinbase, the crypto exchange from the US partnered with 401(k) pension plan provider ForUsAll Inc. to offer crypto investment opportunities to the pension plan holders. This would be the first of its kind partnership that would allow pension plan holders to invest 5% of their portfolio into 50 crypto assets that Coinbase offers.

Even though ForUsAll forms only a small portion of the Pension Fund ecosystem it is seen as a major step forward. No other pension plan provider had offered a direct crypto exposure before.

Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade Locked In: Today the Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade was locked in for the November voting. Once approved, it would mark the biggest upgrade on the Bitcoin network in 4 years. The last one coming in the form of SegWit integration in 2017.

Taproot integration would make the Bitcoin network more smart contract compatible and privacy-oriented.