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Ether's (ETH) price action is mirroring a pattern seen during the early August bottom, hinting at a renewed bull run ahead.
Ether has faced a steep decline of 32%, dropping to $2,770 since mid-December and has lagged significantly behind its larger rival, bitcoin (BTC). The volatility reached new heights on Monday when prices plummeted to nearly $2,000 on several exchanges, only to rebound to $2,700 on the same day, the biggest one-day swing since September 2021 . The dramatic two-way price action resulted in a surge in trading volumes on platforms like Coinbase (COIN) and Bitstamp, hitting levels not seen since August.
The spike in volume means selling pressure likely peaked at the beginning of the week, leaving fewer potential sellers in the market. That could help stabilize prices, potentially setting the stage for a rally. That's precisely the pattern observed on Aug. 5, when ETH hit a low of around $2,100 in a two-way action on the back of high volumes. The cryptocurrency stabilized in the $2,200-$2,800 range for a few weeks, breaking into a new uptrend later that saw prices rise to $4,100.
Let's see if history repeats itself. Demand during Monday's dip supports the bullish case.
"I am noting strong over-the-counter demand for ETH, which is particularly noteworthy amid broker chatter around a fund blowing up amidst weekend volatility," Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at crypto market maker Wintermute, told CoinDesk Tuesday.
Plus, the U.S.-listed spot ether ETFs have registered $420 million in net inflows this week, according to Farside Investors. That's nearly 13% of the total $3.18 billion inflow since inception.
If that's not enough, a large bull call spread crossed the tape on Deribit this week, involving a long position in the $3,500 call option and a short position in the $5,000 call option, both expiring on Dec. 26, 2025. The strategy aims to profit from a rally to $5,000 and higher by the year-end. |
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DeAI 'Bigger Than Bitcoin': Silbert |
Crypto investment magnate Barry Silbert is betting big on decentralized AI, calling it "the next big era of crypto" that could be bigger than even bitcoin.
In a letter to shareholders of his crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group, Silbert went long on deAI: the crypto industry's effort to fuse AI innovations with blockchain tech. He believes the tech mashup may pay better dividends for humanity than the closed-off systems being developed by OpenAI and other giants. "We’re moving from the digital ownership of assets to the decentralized ownership of intelligence and the availability of vast decentralized compute resources," Siblert wrote in the Q4 letter reviewed by CoinDesk.
The setup reminded Silbert of bitcoin, the best-known and by far biggest cryptocurrency, and the one where he first made his crypto fortune. But instead of a money revolution, deAI could herald a power revolution with crypto as the mechanism to distribute ownership of and governance over powerful AI models. DCG certainly thinks so. The company has already invested $105 million into over a dozen deAI projects, "and we're excited to ramp this up in 2025," Silbert wrote.
He highlighted DCG's investment in Bittensor – a crypto network that specializes in machine learning and AI applications – as the portfolio company closest to "escape velocity." Bittensor's TAO token has many similarities to bitcoin, he wrote.
Notably, TAO's market cap is $2.7 billion, a rounding error against bitcoin's nearly $2 trillion valuation.
DCG plans to invest mightily in supporting the Bittensor ecosystem. Silbert pointed out that in November, it spun up a company called Yuma that incubates Bittensor infrastructure projects. And Grayscale, another DCG company, now offers investment products that give exposure to TAO.
Silbert's Q4 letter capped a year of "rebuilding" at DCG after a long period of tumult spawned by the FTX implosion, which felled its lending business, Genesis. DCG is also a former owner of CoinDesk, having sold to Bullish in late 2023. All five of DCG's wings had a "successful 2024," he said.
"The discipline required over the last couple of years has resulted in enhanced infrastructure and more mature processes, improved governance, and a stronger organization focused on executing on our growth initiatives," Silbert wrote.
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Pham Suggests Tokenization Sandbox |
Caroline Pham, who is running the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on an acting basis, is pursuing a stablecoin-backed tokenization pilot program, and an upcoming summit will include the heads of Coinbase, Ripple, Circle, Crypto.com and other digital assets firms.
Pham had suggested the idea for a so-called regulatory sandbox on tokenization through her advisory committee, the Global Markets Advisory Committee, in November, but that hadn't been embraced by the agency's previous leadership. “I’m excited to announce this groundbreaking initiative for U.S. digital asset markets,” Acting Chairman Pham said in a statement on Friday. “I look forward to engaging with market participants to deliver on the Trump Administration’s promise of ensuring that America leads the way on economic opportunity.” The idea, based in what Pham called "responsible innovation," would push into the use of non-cash collateral "through distributed ledger technology," according to the agency.
MoonPay's CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, will also be among those attending.
"Throughout her tenure as commissioner of the CFTC, we have always held Caroline Pham's opinions on how the ecosystem can evolve in the highest regard," he said in a statement on Friday. "She is a rational, fair and progressive thinker, and it’s our honor to participate in this forum."
The November recommendation from Pham's advisory committee had anticipated allowing market participants to try out non-traditional collateral.
"By improving the operational infrastructure for assets already eligible to serve as regulatory margin, blockchain or other distributed ledger technology (“DLT”) can help reduce or eliminate some of those challenges without requiring any changes to collateral eligibility rules," the recommendation suggested.
"Market participants can also use their existing policies, procedures, practices, and processes to identify, assess, and manage risks to using DLT, like they do for other forms of market infrastructure and technologies."
A date and further details for the forum of digital assets CEOs hasn't yet been set.
As acting chairman, Republican Commissioner Pham has made some dramatic changes at the U.S. derivatives watchdog in just a few weeks after she began standing in for the previous Chairman Rostin Behnam, a Democrat appointed by former President Joe Biden. Those changes have included a wide-ranging replacement of senior officials at the agency, and one personnel matter involving a former human-resource chief sparked an unusually open and detailed response on Thursday from the CFTC.
Spokespeople for the regulator argued that "false allegations" had been made against Pham by "disgruntled individuals" the agency linked to internal misconduct investigations.
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Tornado Cash Dev Pertsev Released |
Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash developer found guilty of money laundering in 2024, was released from prison on Friday as he begins to prepare for an appeal, he said in a post on X. The 31-year old Russian national was sentenced to 64 months in a Dutch prison last May after an indictment said Pertsev had "a habit of committing money laundering" and should have suspected illicit transactions on the platform. Tornado Cash is a coin-mixing protocol that allows users to privately send tokens to another wallet. It achieves privacy by pooling funds together and shuffling them until the origin is unclear.
The protocol is sanctioned by the U.S. government, which alleges that Tornado Cash was being used by North Korean hackers Lazarus Group. |
The Takeaway: $30 Trillion Tokenization |
By Herwig Konings, Security Token Market What if I told you that the experts are wrong? Over the years several prestigious consulting firms and financial institutions have put out forecasts about the growth of tokenization by the end of the decade. It’s interesting how between all that “expertise,” their ranges vary between $2 trillion (McKinsey) and $16 trillion (BCG). Fourteen trillion dollars is a heck of a lot of spread!
Since 2017, there have been trials to tokenize assets all around the world. Along the way we’ve seen almost every asset class brought on-chain. Today there are more than $50 billion in tokenized stocks, bonds and real estate, with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions, like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Apollo starting to invest serious resources into tokenization. Add in over $200 billion in stablecoins (or what we can call tokenized dollars) and we’ve got one quarter of a trillion dollars in RWAs. What will it look like when the faucet actually turns on? We believe it looks like going from $250 billion today to $30 trillion in 2030, all thanks to the new crypto clarity in the U.S. Read the full op-ed here. |
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