Week in review: bitcoin slips to $113,000 as the White House issues crypto-regulation guidance

Digital gold sank, dragging the wider market with it; crypto rulemaking advanced in the US; the Fed held its key rate; ChatGPT chats surfaced in search engines; and other highlights of the week.

Correction

On Monday the first cryptocurrency climbed to $119,000, but failed to sustain the positive trend.

By midweek bitcoin traded between $115,000 and $118,000. Despite strengthening after the Fed meeting, the coin began to slide on the back of statements by US President Donald Trump about imposing 25% tariffs on India over trade with Russia.

From Thursday evening a cascade of selling drove the asset down to $112,000. At the time of writing it had recovered to $113,800, leaving it down 3.5% on the week.

The slide was accompanied by outflows from spot bitcoin ETFs, which saw net redemptions of $643m.

Ethereum-focused funds, by contrast, posted $154m of inflows.

Yet the coin itself tracked bitcoin over the past seven days. Given the preceding rally, its drop was even steeper — 8.5%.

All the largest digital assets ended in the red. The worst performers were SOL (-13%) and DOGE (-16%).

Total market capitalisation over the week fell by about 6% to $3.76 trillion. Bitcoin’s dominance stands at 60.3%.

Rates unchanged

On 30 July the Federal Reserve kept its key rate in a 4.25–4.5% range.

“Although fluctuations in net exports continue to affect the figures, recent data indicate a slowdown in economic activity in the first half of the year. The unemployment rate remains low, and the labour market is stable. Inflation remains elevated,” the Fed’s commentary says.

The decision matched market expectations, but at the next meeting a majority (80.3%) already expects a 25 bp cut.

Friday’s labour-market data (Non-Farm Payrolls) clouded the picture. The reading came in worse than forecasts; the number of unemployed rose from 14,000 to 73,000 over the month.

Tariffs proposed by Trump could also delay Fed easing. At a press conference, Fed chair Jerome Powell said:

“High tariffs have begun to be reflected more clearly in the prices of some goods, but their overall impact on economic activity and inflation has yet to be assessed.”

Powell had repeatedly noted that any rate cuts would depend on inflation and labour-market readings.

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Ethereum’s anniversary and the road ahead 

On 30 July Ethereum’s mainnet marked ten years since launch. To celebrate, the Ethereum Foundation released free NFTs and announced a series of events.

Later, developer Justin Drake, on behalf of the foundation, shared the blockchain’s development plans. He noted 100% protocol uptime since launch, client diversity, and 35.7 million ETH worth $130bn locked in staking.

Drake named scaling and L1 development as the network’s main goal. In his words, over the next 6–12 months only a modest performance increase is expected. Longer term, he foresees the blockchain switching to “beast mode”:

• for layer 1 — consumption of 1 gigagas/s (providing 10,000 TPS);
• for layer 2 — 1 teragas/s (1m TPS).

The Ethereum team is working on improvements to three core components of the protocol — consensus, data and execution.

Project co-founder Vitalik Buterin also shared his vision. The chief task is to ensure uninterrupted network operation to preserve users’ digital autonomy.

He noted that the mission for the years ahead will be to create applications “that move humanity forward and improve cooperation” while protecting users’ digital rights.

“In the next five or ten years, Ethereum will turn from the leading platform for smart contracts into the foundation of the next-generation world economy,” he emphasised. 

Regulation in the US 

The United States continues to push ahead with crypto regulation. This week, the White House working group on digital-asset markets published recommendations for industry oversight.

Its members included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and SEC chair Paul Atkins. The document aims to usher in a “golden age of cryptocurrencies”.

The authors proposed creating a digital-asset “taxonomy” that clearly defines which cryptocurrencies are securities and which are commodities. Oversight would be split between the SEC and the CFTC.

“A rational regulatory framework is the best way to spur American innovation, protect investors from fraud, and keep our capital markets the envy of the world,” Atkins commented on the report.

The document recommends simplifying banking rules. That would allow financial institutions to custody cryptocurrencies legally and offer clients services tied to digital assets.

The group also called for supporting stablecoins to protect the US dollar’s dominance. It suggested Congress create dedicated tax rules that account for the unique features of digital assets, including staking.

Following the report, the SEC chief announced Project Crypto — a comprehensive initiative to modernise rules and turn the country into a “global crypto capital”.

According to Atkins, the SEC is moving from “regulation by enforcement” to creating conditions conducive to innovation. He pledged to set clear rules for cryptocurrencies, assuring that most of them are not securities.

Georgy Verbitsky, founder of the crypto-investment platform TYMIO, told ForkLog that Project Crypto addresses the long-standing problem of token classification. In his view, the lack of clear criteria creates a “grey zone” and holds the industry back.

“In essence, this is the beginning of the normalisation of crypto finance in the US,” the expert concluded.

Also on ForkLog:

• Vitalik Buterin explained why he eschewed anonymity when creating Ethereum.
• The Coinbase premium pointed to waning interest in bitcoin in the US.
• Experts deemed Solana, Sui and Near resistant to quantum attacks.
• Nvidia denied the presence of backdoors in its chips.

AI chats in search engines

This week a stir arose around OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the bot indexed public dialogues through search services. By filtering results on Google, Bing and other engines at a specific address, one could find other users’ public conversations with the AI.

Often the chats were unremarkable — people asked for help renovating a bathroom, grappling with astrophysics, or hunting for recipes.

By default the bot did not make chats public. The /share format appeared only if a user manually hit “Share” in a chat and then confirmed by clicking “Create Link”. The name, instructions and all messages added after publication remained private.

OpenAI said this was a short-lived experiment that posed an unacceptably high risk of inadvertent data disclosure. The ability to “share” has been removed from the app.

Earlier, the company’s CEO Sam Altman, on the This Past Weekend podcast, said that personal conversations with ChatGPT are not legally protected. Therefore, if necessary, a court can request all information users shared with the bot.

“Your conversations with a therapist, a lawyer or a doctor are protected by privacy law. We have not yet developed similar norms for communicating with ChatGPT,” Altman noted, acknowledging the problem. 

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