Ethereum is getting used more than at any point in its history. Fees are at record lows, the staking line is growing, and the network is humming. The price is down about 60% from its old highs near $5,000. That gap is the whole story.

For months ETH has been crypto's punching bag. The running joke on X: you'd have made more holding a random chip stock for two hours than holding ETH for six years. This weekend it got real. Bankless co-founder David Hoffman sold his ETH. The Ethereum Foundation is shrinking into a lean research shop. People started asking who's even steering this thing.

Then Vitalik Buterin answered. He posted that the Foundation owns just 0.16% of all ETH, while his own net worth is about 90% ETH. His message was that he doesn't want to be Ethereum's frontman or its dictator, and the Foundation should do research, not marketing.

So who does the selling? The same kind of person who does it for Bitcoin. Tom Lee's Bitmine just made its largest ETH purchase since December, pushing toward 4.5% of the entire supply, most of it staked. Joe Lubin's Sharp Link is funneling institutional money in. The cheerleader job is getting filled while almost nobody's watching.

Here's what doesn't fit. The people with the deepest pockets and the longest time horizons are buying ETH from the people giving up on it.

If you hold ETH, the bet is easy to state and hard to wait out. Usage keeps climbing. Eventually the price has to notice — or it doesn't, and the bears are right that fundamentals don't pay rent. Vitalik isn't going to pump it for you. But the people buying your neighbour's bags aren't the type who sell.

For weeks the question was simple. Are the big buyers back? Friday's answer was no. Ecoinometrics says the Bitcoin ETF demand that recovered through March and April has been completely erased, after roughly 60,000 Bitcoin worth of outflows in two weeks. Institutional money isn't supporting the price. It's leaning on it.

Then the part that should make you sit up. Bitcoin is now trading about three standard deviations below where its long-standing link to the Nasdaq says it should be — the widest gap in the history of that model. Money is still chasing risk. It's just chasing AI and tech, and skipping Bitcoin entirely.

Yes, Bitcoin bounced almost 4% on Monday. A bounce off deeply oversold levels isn't the same as the buyers coming back. Until ETF flows actually turn, today's pop is noise on top of a demand problem that hasn't gone anywhere.

Most US crypto coverage treats dollar stablecoins as a payments upgrade. From Europe, they look like a threat. Michael Howell of Cross Border Capital made the boldest call of the week, and it wasn't about price.

His logic runs like this. Europe's only truly safe asset is German government debt. French and German bonds are drifting apart in quality. And the glue that held the bloc together, NATO, is wobbling. Now add dollar stablecoins, which make it fast and cheap to swap euros for dollars with little paperwork and less attention from the taxman.

That's a capital-flight machine pointed at the euro, the pound, and every fragile emerging-market currency. Not tomorrow, Howell says. But the dominoes are standing.

For anyone holding stablecoins, this is the fight that decides how hard Europe regulates them.

This is The Crossover. We tell you what happened and why. What you do next is your call, and our forecasting record is about as reliable as a stablecoin in a Michael Howell thought experiment.