Why crypto markets are sliding
There’s never a dull moment on the blockchain. Here’s what you need to know this week:
Bitcoin slipped below $113K. Also, the supply of stablecoins hit an all-time high, and BitMine became the second-largest public crypto holder.
Why some fintech firms are considering their own blockchains. And what these networks could mean for Ethereum and Solana.
The “liquid staking” sector just saw an all-time high in deposits. Plus more key stats to know from around the cryptoverse.
MARKET BYTES
After breaking records last week, crypto markets slide
Following last week’s blockbuster performance — with BTC hitting a new all-time high north of $124,000 and ETH notching its highest price in five years, near $4,800 — prices dipped to start this week as some traders sold to lock in profits.
On Tuesday, BTC fell under $113,000, ETH was below $4,200, and a wide range of other tokens were also in the red. Ethereum ETFs, which spiked during last week’s rally, saw nearly $200 million in outflows on Monday in their second-worst day ever. BTC ETFs shed $121million in the same period. By Wednesday morning, BTC hovered around $114,000 and ETH regained $4,300.
While prices tend to dip after a peak as traders lock in profits, markets are complicated and there’s rarely just one factor driving moves.
Why else might markets be struggling? Here’s what you need to know…
What other factors are dragging prices down this week?
For one, geopolitical tensions remain high, as the recent summits around the war in Ukraine have highlighted. “Crypto remains sensitive to these signals,” noted BRN Head of Research Timothy Misir, who added that progress in peace negotiations could help spur markets.
Some mixed signals in recent macroeconomic data measuring inflation, spending, and jobs could also be weighing on markets, with some traders potentially taking a wait-and-see approach. This Friday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will be speaking at the annual Jackson Hole conference, where many expect him to tee up a quarter-percent interest rate cut at next month’s meeting. Markets will be paying close attention to his speech to try to predict what could come next.
Stable stakes… The supply of stablecoins has reached a new all-time high around $160 billion. Some analysts suggest that it’s a sign that major traders could be preparing to deploy that capital in the near future. As one analyst told Decrypt, markets are pricing in an 83% chance that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in September, and “a friendly signal from the Fed could send those stablecoin piles into ETH and BTC first.”
Ethereum-acquiring firm BitMine becomes second-largest crypto treasury company
One major driver of the 2025 crypto rally has been the rise of crypto treasury firms — inspired by Michael Saylor’s BTC-accumulating company Strategy — which raise capital to buy as much crypto as possible in the hopes of generating high-yield returns for shareholders.
Ethereum, which had struggled relative to BTC for much of the last year, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries, with several companies racing to buy billions of dollars worth of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
As of Monday, the biggest of those firms, BitMine Immersion Technologies, reported holdings worth more than $6.6 billion, including more than 1.5 million ETH (around 1.2% of ETH’s total supply), making it the second-largest crypto treasury company after Strategy.
The company, which is led by Tom Lee and boasts Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund as a major shareholder, vaulted into the Top 20 most actively traded U.S. stocks on Monday, with trade volumes that surpassed household names like Netflix, Visa, and JPMorgan Chase.
Ether leader… “We continue to believe Ethereum is one of the biggest macro trades over the next 10-15 years,” Lee said. “Wall Street and AI moving onto the blockchain should lead to a greater transformation of today's financial system. And the majority of this is taking place on Ethereum.”
STABLE CONDITION
Why fintech giants are building their own blockchains
2025 has been a banner year for stablecoins.
The total market cap for stablecoins has reached record highs, dozens of Fortune 500 companies have expressed interest in using them, and President Trump signed landmark stablecoin legislation into law this summer.
The majority of stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to the price of another asset, typically the U.S. dollar — currently run on the Ethereum blockchain or newer networks like Solana. But for the next evolution of the stablecoin ecosystem, some major companies are considering bespoke, stablecoin-specific blockchains of their own.
USDC issuer Circle plans to launch its Arc blockchain early next year, and Stripe is reportedly building a blockchain called Tempo.
Why are companies like Circle and Stripe making these moves? And what might these new blockchains mean for stablecoin stalwarts like Ethereum and Solana? Here’s everything you need to know…
What exactly are Circle and Stripe working on?
Circle, which went public with a blockbuster IPO earlier this year, announced plans for Arc last week. CEO Jeremy Allaire said the blockchain is part of the USDC issuer’s goal of building “one of the largest financial networks in history.” (Disclosure: Coinbase has an equity stake in Circle.)
Using its own blockchain, the company can not only control the issuance of digital dollars, but also the network that moves them around the world — a complete, end-to-end system that would help make Circle a direct competitor of payments giants like Visa and Mastercard.
According to a Fortune report, Stripe’s blockchain effort will be called Tempo. For Stripe, which made a $1.1 billion deal to acquire the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge in February, its own custom blockchain could be used to process some of the more than $1.4 trillion in transactions the company handled last year.
Why blockchains are ideal for payments
Payments are already one of the biggest blockchain use cases, with stablecoins accounting for around $30 billion in transactions daily, according to a recent report from McKinsey.
Traditional banking-system payments are often limited by business hours and borders, meaning that a simple transaction can take days to process. Because blockchains enable near-instant payment settlement at low costs, they’re reshaping the ways money can flow around the globe.
Some of the world’s biggest financial institutions are paying attention. Stripe recently announced a product called Stablecoin Financial Accounts, which allows merchants in more than 100 countries to send or receive stablecoins.
A consortium of the world’s biggest banks (including JPMorgan and Bank of America) are exploring plans to create a joint stablecoin, while merchant giants Amazon and Walmart are both exploring stablecoins of their own.
Why would payments companies want their own blockchains?
Public blockchains like Ethereum or Solana have many benefits. They’re decentralized, which makes them secure and difficult to manipulate; they have global reach, since anyone with an internet connection can make a wallet; and they have access to massive pools of liquidity.
But for companies like Stripe and Circle, building their own blockchains is a chance to control every part of the payment process, some experts say.
This allows them to build in native features around compliance, foreign exchange, and fee controls, while also ensuring that unrelated activity doesn’t clog the network, said Morgan Krupetsky, VP of ecosystem growth at Ava Labs. And since companies are in control, they wouldn’t be at the whim of technical bottlenecks or decisions made by a third-party network’s developers.
“The idea of a company owning and customizing their end-to-end blockchain infrastructure is increasingly appealing,” Krupetsky said.
What could these custom blockchains mean for Ethereum and Solana?
Ethereum and Solana are two of the most popular blockchains for stablecoin usage, meaning blockchains like Arc and Tempo made specifically for stablecoins could be seen as competition, analysts say.
While it’s too early to say how exactly these new chains could impact some of the most widely-used networks, Coinbase Institutional Global Head of Research David Duong suggests that Ethereum and Solana might see varying outcomes.
Solana specializes in extremely fast transaction processing (over 3,000 per second) at low costs, the same type of transactions that Arc and Tempo would focus on, Duong notes. Additionally, around 80% of stablecoin activity on Solana involves USDC, so the network could be subject to competition if Arc and Tempo also use USDC, as Duong expects.
Ethereum — though it has become popular for institutional finance and has less of its stablecoin supply in USDC (around 37%) — could also face competitive forces from blockchains like Arc or Tempo in the realm of transaction speed: Ethereum processes just 20 transactions per second.
But as Martin Burgherr, chief clients officer at crypto bank Sygnum, told CoinDesk, shifts in market and onchain dynamics wouldn’t happen overnight. “New entrants will need not just technology,” Burgherr said, “but also years of trust-building to shift the deepest liquidity and highest-value payments away from incumbent rails.”
NUMBERS TO KNOW
$86 billion
All-time high amount deposited into the “liquid staking” sector last Thursday, led by Lido’s $41 billion in deposits. Liquid staking, which enables users to earn staking rewards while still maintaining liquidity, has recently surged amid a broad ETH rally and emerging regulatory clarity.
104,529
The peak amount of transactions per second that a Solana validator was able to handle in a recent experiment, more than 25x higher than the typical transaction throughput of the network. The test, which was done on a “whim” to showcase Solana’s capabilities, surpassed Visa’s own high of 65,000 transactions per second.
722%
The amount that WisdomTree’s onchain real-world-assets fund has grown since May, bringing its value to more than $930 million. The fund is largely composed of tokenized U.S. Treasuries across multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Stellar.
33.6%
Percent of Bitcoin’s total hashrate that 13 U.S.-listed miners are responsible for, the highest level on record, according to a new report from JPMorgan. Those same miners also saw a 94% increase in hashrate year-over-year. (Bitcoin’s hashrate refers to the total computational power used to mine BTC and verify transactions on its blockchain.)
TOKEN TRIVIA
What is proof of stake?
A
A way to verify data shared from another computer
B
A major consensus mechanism used by cryptocurrencies to verify new transactions, add them to the blockchain, and create new tokens
C
Identification cards for vampire hunters
D
The process by which networks of mining computers generate new bitcoin
Encuentra la respuesta a continuación.
Respuesta de la trivia
B
A major consensus mechanism used by cryptocurrencies to verify new transactions, add them to the blockchain, and create new tokens
