Bitcoin is down by about half from its October high. Is the four-year cycle broken?

The boom everyone waited for did show up this year. The economy sped up, money got cheaper, cash went hunting for risk. It just didn't come here. It went into AI shares and the hot tech IPOs instead.

Crypto used to be the wildest bet in the room, where spare cash chased the biggest swings. Not this time. AI hoovered it up, and the drought shows everywhere you look. June was the worst month ever for US spot Bitcoin funds. They bled a record $4.06 billion and now sit underwater on the coins they hold. Even Strategy, the most relentless buyer of the last two years, raised over $1 billion last week and bought zero Bitcoin. A record 82% of big institutions call this a bear market now, up from 31% in December.

So is it over? Maybe not. Flip the screen over and the chain says something else. Bitcoin is going through the biggest ownership handover in its history. Old hands are passing their coins to new buyers, and stablecoin cash is piling up while the price falls. That kind of churn usually turns up near a bottom, not at the start of a fresh drop. One thing is still missing. A real wave of panic selling, the capitulation that has marked every past bottom. Close to a floor is not the same as standing on one.

None of this means the cycle is dead. It might just be late. The money comes back when the AI boom cools, or when the rules finally land, and the people who read the chain for a living think that day is closer than the price lets on. Milk Road's John Gillen is in no hurry. He holds the coin itself, no borrowed money, and waits. Everyone else is busy picking a side.

A handful of Ethereum's old core researchers have started a new outfit with a blunt aim. Make Ethereum win.

It's called Ethlabs, set up by two former Ethereum Foundation researchers, Ansgar Dietrichs and Caspar Schwarz-Schilling. The split of work is the whole idea. The Foundation guards what makes Ethereum Ethereum, the neutrality and the security underneath. Ethlabs takes that and pushes it out to the rest of the world. The plans are concrete. An upgrade this autumn aims for roughly 4x more capacity, and the longer goal is to triple that every year. A new team will spend its days asking Wall Street and app builders one thing. What do you actually need from the chain?

Ethereum has been written off as dead money all year. This is the clearest sign yet that the people who build it are regrouping, out to win back the big money now pouring into stablecoins and tokenised assets.

America's small-town banks have opened a six-figure ad war on crypto's biggest bill in Washington.

The bill is the CLARITY Act, the law meant to settle which coins count as a security and which don't. It got through the House, then stuck in the Senate. Now the Independent Community Bankers of America, the voice of some 4,000 local banks, is running ads against it. Their warning is plain. Let crypto platforms pay rewards on stablecoins, and deposits drain out of small towns into crypto apps. They put the damage at $1.3 trillion in lost deposits and $850 billion less lending to farmers and small firms.

It's working. Galaxy Research has cut the odds of the bill passing this year from 60% to 50%. The one big win crypto was counting on is now a coin-flip, just as the market looks its ugliest of the whole cycle.