Plus: Trump’s push to pass pro-crypto bills

GM. We brought the juice and left the haters with just seeds - stay thirsty.

🤔 What's happening with Ethereum?

🍋 News drops: Donald Trump's convincing Republicans to vote for crypto bills, California Governor's getting help from crypto execs + more

🍍 Market flavor today

Crypto Market Cap: $3.78T 2.65% (24H)
Name		Price	24H	7D
	Bitcoin BTC	$118,965.18	2.50%	9.54%
	Ethereum ETH	$3,233.93	8.22%	22.62%
	XRP XRP	$2.99	3.73%	26.11%
	BNB BNB	$701.34	2.84%	6.09%
	Solana SOL	$167.04	5.42%	8.85%

Bitcoin couldn’t hold $120K - and part of the reason could be the confusing macro data that dropped recently.

First up: the CPI (Consumer Price Index, if we’re talkin’ full government names), which measures how much everyday stuff costs.

In June, it rose 0.3%, about a 2.7% annual rate - the biggest increase we’ve seen since January.

Economists saw this as proof that Trump’s tariffs are starting to make everyday goods more expensive for consumers.

That’s a problem for the Fed. Trump keeps pressuring them to cut interest rates, but higher prices make them nervous about cutting, since that could make inflation worse.

But here’s where it gets weird.

We also got June PPI (Producer Price Index, if we’re talkin’ full government names) data, which shows what producers pay for stuff before it hits the shelves.

And it stayed flat, even though economists expected it to rise 0.2%. Last month it was up 0.3%.

That’s weird, because tariffs usually hit producers first when they import stuff.

So why isn’t PPI rising too? There are a few possible reasons:

👉 Producers might just be eating the extra costs for now, instead of passing them on;

👉 The tariffs could be hitting products that show up in CPI (like finished goods), not in PPI;

👉 ... Or maybe tariffs aren’t actually the main reason CPI jumped.

Whatever the case, for the Fed, this is tricky:

👉 Higher CPI makes them hesitant to cut rates;

👉 But flat PPI suggests inflation might not keep climbing.

For now, tho', CME FedWatch shows markets don’t expect the Fed to cut rates at their July 30 meeting - which matters for crypto, because rate cuts tend to be bullish.

That said, as we mentioned yesterday, this doesn’t mean the rally is over.

CryptoQuant’s Crypto Dan says Bitcoin's nowhere near the kind of overheated levels we saw in March or December 2024.

So yeah - some short-term bumps possible, but plenty of room left to grow.

🥝 Memecoin harvest

The blockchain is drunk. Please don’t feed it any more memes 🍺

Data as of 04:20 AM EST.

Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.

😵 Back from the dead?

Something we haven’t seen in over 5 months: Ethereum is back above $3K. Finally.

And not just that - it’s actually outperformed most other major coins during this rally.

So, what's goin' on?

Well, thing is, it's not your usual army of degens running things this time. As we discussed yesterday, retail traders are still nowhere to be seen.

This rally is powered by institutions.

And their attitude toward Ethereum is changing.

One big clue: Ethereum ETFs had $1.5B of inflows just this month.

On top of that, more and more public companies are adding ETH to their corporate treasuries - just like Strategy did with Bitcoin.

Altogether, these companies bought ~545K ETH in the past month, worth around $1.7B at today’s prices.

Some of the biggest dawgs in that department so far:

👉 SharpLink Gaming: ~280K ETH;

👉 BitMine Immersion Technologies: ~163K ETH;

👉 Bit Digital: ~100K ETH (after selling off their Bitcoin to move to ETH).

And… why are they bullish on ETH? Let's break it down 👇

1/ Copying the Bitcoin treasury thesis - but with more upside

Companies saw how much shareholder value Strategy unlocked just by holding BTC and turning itself into a “Bitcoin proxy.”

Now they’re trying to do the same thing with Ethereum - where there’s way less competition and more room to define the narrative.

In other words, they don’t wanna be Strategy 2.0 (or like 150.0 at this point)… they wanna be the Strategy of ETH.

2/ Productivity

Unlike Bitcoin, which just sits there, ETH is productive.

You can stake it and earn 3 - 6% yield annually.

For a treasury, that’s a big plus: upside and income.

3/ Tokenization

One of the hottest narratives this year is tokenization - turning real-world assets like stocks into digital tokens.

And guess which blockchain dominates here? Yuuup - Ethereum.

So, betting on tokenization means betting on Ethereum to deliver as the underlying infrastructure - and holding ETH is equally a bet that tokenization will keep fueling its growth.

4/ Stablecoins

Stablecoins are basically eating the world:

• Market cap now $200B+, up over 2,000% since 2020;

• Stablecoin transfers hit $27.6T in 2024, more than Visa and Mastercard combined.

And the biggest stablecoins - like USDT, USDC, and DAI - have most of their activity on Ethereum (and its Layer-2s).

So every time someone moves them there, they pay fees in ETH.

This means: holding ETH = exposure to a big chunk of the stablecoin ecosystem.

And what does all this mean?

The more institutions embrace ETH as a strategic, long-term asset, the more its price starts reflecting real, sticky demand - not just hype from retail traders.

That’s a solid, medium-to-long-term bullish case.

🍋 News drops

🤝 Donald Trump sat down with House Republicans to try and get them back on board with three big crypto bills. This happened after the first vote flopped and the bills got blocked.

💼 California Governor Gavin Newsom set up a new panel to help make the state’s government run better. The group, called the California Breakthrough Project, features execs from Coinbase, Ripple, and MoonPay.

⚖️ The town of Grosse Pointe Farms in Michigan launched rules for crypto ATMs - even though, funny enough, they don’t actually have any yet.

🍌 Juicy memes