Ethereum lays out bold vision

Bitcoin rose by 1.5% on Sunday to cap off a run-up of more than 5% for the trailing seven days. The risk-on rally over the past weeks has coincided with overlapping macro developments including actions taken by Beijing to restart growth and drive real estate recovery and record gold prices.

Perhaps most importantly, rising odds of a Trump victory has fueled the rally as the once skeptical GOP candidate has fully embraced crypto. At a town hall event in Pittsburg featuring Trump surrogate Elon Musk, the world’s richest man endorsed crypto broadly, following questions from the audience.

The shifting political landscape has also influenced the USD and large-cap equities - creating a positive correlation with BTC month-to-date that has weakened somewhat this weekend as U.S. stock futures pulled back slightly and the greenback waffled.

Critically, open interest on U.S. listed BTC futures contracts exceeded $40 billion in weekend trading, an all-time high. Over $11.5 billion of that total was accounted for by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange underscoring strong bullish sentiment among U.S. traders.

A surge of market participation on this scale was last seen in summer of 2023 when Blackrock - the world’s largest asset manager, issued its spot BTC.

The risk-on run-up for BTC lifted other blue-chip crypto coins. Notably, Solana (SOL) spiked by 5% in trading on Monday despite ongoing legal headwinds. An amended complaint issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week revealed that Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation remain in the regulator’s crosshairs.

While crypto is on a tear, there are signals that rich Chinese investors are being shut out of the digital markets.

Signs that China is cracking down harder on crypto trading have emerged. Reports of a new focus on collecting a tax levy of up to 20% from wealthy Chinese citizens were published last week by Hong Kong based publications.

Beijing has taken steps to prop up floundering property markets in recent weeks, and the move to push rich investors to bring money home appears to be an attempt to drive inflows into domestic real estate.

The use of crypto to transfer cash abroad has been a focus of Chinese tax authorities since banning all virtual currencies domestically in 2019.

Separately, a fugitive Chinese national pleaded not guilty to charges of Bitcoin laundering in the U.K. on Monday. Zhimin Qian is set to face trial in September of 2025. Qian has been on the run from Chinese authorities since 2017, after allegedly defrauding more than 125,000 investors. Currently, authorities in London are holding 61,000 BTC as evidence in the case.

"Ethereum should feel like one ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains," groused Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, in a recent blog post lamenting what to him feels like too much of a walled-garden vibe stemming from all these various layer-2 networks.

Buterik has mapped out Ethereum's road ahead, daring developers to dream big: the network eventually should be able to push through 100,000 transactions per second (tps).

Currently, Ethereum's base layer (or layer-1) has the bandwidth for a tps rate of approximately 174. Buterin's "Surge Plan" would implement PeerDAS, a form of "one-dimensional sampling," which, as Bitcoinist explains, allows nodes to "efficiently verify data availability."

Buterik also advocates exploring cost-optimized gas fees.

As far as layer-2s playing nicely together, sans any friction, Buterin suggested creating standardized chain identifiers.

"If we are serious about the idea that L2s are part of Ethereum," he wrote. "Then we need to make using the L2 ecosystem feel like using a unified Ethereum ecosystem."