The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday urged El Salvador to remove Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender, according to a new report published by the organization. IMF directors asserted "there are large risks associated with the use of bitcoin on financial stability, financial integrity, and consumer protection, as well as the associated fiscal contingent liabilities."

The IMF said some directors also expressed concern over the risks associated with issuing Bitcoin-backed bonds, referring to President Nayib Bukele's plan to raise $1 billion via a "Bitcoin Bond" in partnership with digital assets infrastructure firm Blockstream. The report was published after bilateral talks with El Salvador, and it pushes the country's authorities to narrow the scope of its Bitcoin law by removing the status of legal money.

In September 2021, the Central American nation became the world's first country to adopt the cryptocurrency as legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar (USD). Bukele's administration has also acquired hundreds of BTC on the country's balance sheet in recent months and bought an extra $15 million worth last Friday.

Here is the rest of the week in review:

Google's (GOOGL  ) cloud division has established a group to build business around blockchain applications, following efforts to grow in retail, healthcare, and other industries. The tech giant's veteran Shivakumar Venkataraman has taken charge of a new blockchain group, which is separate from the cloud team oriented around digital assets. Richard Widmann, head of strategy for digital assets at Google's cloud unit, said: "We think that if we do our jobs right, it will drive decentralization." He noted the cloud unit aims to hire a slew of people with blockchain expertise and it is considering what types of services to offer directly to developers in the blockchain industry. Google's cloud marketplace already offers tools developers can use to start building blockchain networks, as well as data sets that people can explore with the BigQuery service to view crypto transaction history. Success in the blockchain space could help Google further diversify away from advertising and become more prominent in the growing market for cloud computing and storage services.

Fireblocks has raised a $550 million Series E funding round that increases its new valuation to $8 billion. D1 Capital Partners and Spark Capital led the latest round, with participation from General Atlantic, Index Ventures, Mammoth, CapitalG, Altimeter, and other investors. The New York-based blockchain firm is a crypto asset custodian. It helps exchanges, trading desks, hedge funds, and banks issue, store, and transfer about $215 billion worth of digital assets per month. Its custodial offering features a novel form of wallet security called multi-party computation, which entails splitting private keys into shares among multiple parties who each compute their part of the key without revealing private data. The firm's institutional customers surged from 150 to 800 in just one year. The firm claims to offer support for 1,000 crypto assets across over 20 blockchains. Fireblocks plans to use the fresh capital to further invest in innovation around decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and payments.

Crypto prices edged up to $1.66 trillion this week, still in the downturn. For the majors, Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) climbed while Terra (LUNA) plunged. In the top 100, the biggest decliners were Terra, down 29%, Cosmos (ATOM), down 15.7%, and Kusama (KSM), down 11%. The biggest gainers were FLOW, up 32%, Helium (HNT), up 27%, and The Sandbox (SAND), up 26%. Next week traders will watch if the market makes another big move.

The author owns a small amount of BTC.