The US Senate unveiled a refreshed Bitcoin Act; a user deliberately disrupted testing of Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade; EU politicians and citizens questioned the merits of a digital euro; and other highlights of the week.
BTC’s “organic” move towards $70,000 and recession jitters
Bitcoin began the week by testing the $80,000 level after declines in preceding days.
On Tuesday the price hit a local low near $77,000. By midweek it partly recovered. Overnight into Saturday the chart printed a local high around $84,500.
At the time of writing bitcoin trades at $83,266, for a market capitalisation of $1.65trn. The coin is down 0.3% over the past seven days.
Social-media analysis shows that after the market sell-off on February 27th, user anxiety about a slide towards $70,000 hit a peak.
But, according to Santiment, a true “capitulation point” will come when forecasts are dominated by a $50,000–$69,000 corridor and the $100,000–$119,000 range is rarely mentioned.
Nansen analyst Aurélie Barter called bitcoin’s move towards $70,000 “an organic part of the current bull market”.
In her view, the asset is tracking the broader macro trend. The next band is $71,000–$72,000 — but that would exceed levels seen before America’s November elections.
QCP Capital attributed the market’s stumble to the US president’s indifference to recession risks. Despite a reputation as a defender of equities, he allowed a correction — a “correction” of the state via a Wall Street downturn.
CryptoQuant noted a sharp drop in open interest in bitcoin and Ethereum futures, signalling a “leverage flush” and a chance for the market to stabilise.
Total open interest fell by $1.37bn — $668m in digital gold and $700m in the second-largest cryptocurrency.
Ethereum began the week around $2,000, having shed roughly 20% over the prior seven days.
On March 13th the ETH/BTC rate slumped to 0.0224 — the lowest since May 2020.
At the time of writing Ethereum trades at $1,895 with a market cap of $228.69bn, down 10.4% on the week.
Alliance DAO co-founder Qiao Wang says Ethereum’s current oversold level is comparable to the post‑Terra collapse in 2021, the 2018 bear market and The DAO hack in 2016.
Glassnode’s weekly on-chain view shows 600,000–700,000 ETH accumulated around $1,900. Resistance may appear at $2,200 (465,000 ETH transacted there).
#Ethereum‘s Cost Basis Distribution shows where a potential short-term support levels might form.
1W view:
? Price briefly dipped below the major $1.88K accumulation cluster, but addresses at this level showed no engagement
? New accumulation emerged at $1.9K (600K–700K $ETH) pic.twitter.com/i2VtCScofK— glassnode (@glassnode) March 12, 2025
The supply gap between these two zones remains narrow, making a short‑term move towards resistance plausible, analysts said.
Over a six‑month horizon, accumulation clusters stand out around $1,800, $2,400 and $2,900.
By March 11th SOL’s price fell below its realised value for the first time in roughly three years — by 8%. From the January 19th peak of $293.31, the price is down 57.7%.
Amid a waning meme‑coin hype cycle, Solana’s ecosystem TVL and on-chain revenues are dropping sharply.
From the January peak the former has fallen by more than 45%, the latter by 93%.
About 80% of Solana’s network revenue comes from fees on meme‑coin trading on platforms such as Pump.fun, according to VanEck.
Revenues at the “meme‑coin factory” topped $15m in the second half of January, but by March 10th daily takings had dropped to about $130,000.
The GMCI Meme Index, which tracks the market cap of the largest meme coins, is also sliding.
Among the top‑10 assets by market cap, only BNB (+5.2%) and XRP (+4.1%) rose over the past week.
The biggest losers were TRX (-10.6%), ETH (-10.4%) and ADA (-8.4%).
US to consider a new Bitcoin reserve bill
Senator Cynthia Lummis introduced an updated Bitcoin Act in the US Senate that would let the government hold more than 1m bitcoins in a newly created crypto reserve.
Proud to re-introduce the BITCOIN Act. Let’s secure America’s financial future.pic.twitter.com/jJFmMopP7h
— Senator Cynthia Lummis (@SenLummis) March 11, 2025
The bill envisages annual purchases of 200,000 BTC for five years by reallocating existing Federal Reserve and Treasury funds, allowing the US to amass 1m bitcoins.
The update also permits accumulation via lawful means — seizures, donations or transfers from federal agencies.
US states may voluntarily contribute their bitcoin reserves to the strategic stockpile, to be held in a separate account.
Key provisions of the Bitcoin Act:
- creation of a decentralised network of secure bitcoin vaults under the Treasury, “ensuring the highest level of physical and cyber security”;
- purchase of 1m BTC over a set period to acquire 5% of total supply, mirroring the size and scale of America’s gold reserves;
- funding the programme by diversifying existing Fed and Treasury funds;
- affirmation of private bitcoin holders’ right to self‑custody without compromising individual financial freedoms.
Rules for handling assets created by bitcoin forks were also revised. After a mandatory holding period in the reserve, the secretary may choose and retain the most valuable version based on market capitalisation.
Republican Byron Donalds plans to introduce a bill in Congress to shield the strategic bitcoin reserve from being reversed by a future president.
Some politicians, by contrast, urge the government to scrap the plans. Among them is Representative Gerald Connolly, who called the reserve “useless” and accused the president of a conflict of interest.
He also labelled Mr Trump’s plans “unfounded fiscal policy”, pointing to his promotion of digital assets on social media.
According to a Data For Progress poll, 51% of US voters oppose creating such a strategic reserve, 34% support it and 15% are unsure.
User deliberately disrupted Pectra testing
A culprit was behind the technical issues that arose on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet after the Pectra upgrade was deployed.
Developer Marius van der Wijden believes an unknown user exploited an unaccounted-for edge case to deliberately crash the network.
After the release, the Geth client began reporting errors and mining empty blocks. The malfunction was triggered by an incorrectly generated event by the deposit contract. A test transaction had been sent to verify withdrawals.
Developers produced a patch and coordinated its rollout roughly three and a half hours later. Soon after, the network again started producing empty blocks. Programmers found another problematic transaction that caused the same error.
At first, van der Wijden said, they thought a trusted validator had made a mistake. It turned out the operation came from a new, recently funded account.
The team suspected the attacker was reading some of their chats and decided to proceed with the update quietly.
“The only way to stop the attack is to filter all transactions that interact with the deposit contract. So we made a private fix, which we deployed on several of our own nodes,” van der Wijden explained.
Those nodes made up about 10% of the network, allowing full blocks to be proposed again and the testnet to be used for a further coordinated fix.
“We did not lose finalization during the incident. As noted earlier, the issue occurred only on Sepolia because we use a token-locked deposit contract, unlike mainnet,” the developer added.
What to discuss with friends?
- FIFA’s president mooted the organisation launching a native token.
- Garantex said it intends to reimburse clients’ frozen cryptoassets.
- The Grok chatbot issued a token via Bankr, raking in $270,000.
- Experts questioned bitcoin’s status as digital gold.
EU doubts about the digital euro
According to European Central Bank analysts, euro‑area citizens are not keen on a digital euro and see little value in a CBDC.
In a hypothetical allocation of €10,000, the average household would devote only a small portion to a digital euro, leaving the shares of traditional assets such as cash and current and savings accounts largely unchanged.
Europeans prefer existing payment methods and see little upside in a new system given the abundance of offline and online alternatives.
Following a central‑bank payments outage, lawmakers raised doubts about the regulator’s ability to deliver a national digital currency.
Problems in the Target 2 (T2) system at the end of last month delayed transactions for a day. The cause was an error in the ECB technicians’ initial diagnosis.
Officials said the digital euro would be closer in architecture to the instant‑payments system TIPS, which “processes millions of small transfers around the clock and has proven reliable”. The impact on TIPS on the day of the incident was limited, they added.
Four of the eight political groups in the European Parliament voiced concern, arguing the incident calls into question the ECB’s reliability as it develops a digital euro intended to operate as a new payments system across the euro area.
The digital euro is slated to launch by October 2025, subject to the necessary legal framework, said the ECB’s president, Christine Lagarde. The project requires approval from the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Commission.
Also on ForkLog:
- Robinhood will pay $29.75m to settle FINRA claims.
- The US scrapped an IRS rule on collecting data from DeFi platforms.
- Bloomberg: EU regulators are probing OKX over activity by Bybit hackers.
- A US resident was fined for hiding 119.65 BTC that had been seized.
A solo miner hits the jackpot
On March 10th a solo miner mined block #887,212 on the bitcoin network using a home Bitax rig with 480 GH/s of hash rate. The reward was 3.15 BTC, or about $250,000.
Congratulations to a super lucky miner bc1qaxccz85rx6ywy2xw6ugtm6u37mvew6qqn7lgtd with only 3.3TH who solved the 297th solo block at https://t.co/UWgBvLkDqc with a 480GH bitaxe! https://t.co/OKIq0tfSOX
— Dr -ck (@ckpooldev) March 10, 2025
According to CKPool administrator Con Kolivas, the odds of finding a block with such power are about one in a million — on average, 3,500 years of work.
In total the user ran six Bitax devices from D‑Central Technologies with an aggregate hash rate of about 3.3 TH/s. The “winner” was an Ultra model using Bitmain’s Antminer S19XP ASIC chip.
Kolivas noted that connecting multiple miners boosts the chances of success. In his view, overall hash power is what matters most in such cases.
CKPool users have mined 297 solo bitcoin blocks in total, Kolivas added.
What else to read?
Our new piece explores creative content, its value, and a resource‑allocation economy for the AI era proposed by the founders of the Story Protocol blockchain:
We unpack the coming major Base upgrade and the network’s prospects in its face‑off with Solana:
We spoke with Web3 entrepreneur Vladimir Menaskop about building a project’s tokenomics without code:
We discussed with political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky Mr Trump’s role in advancing decentralisation, how crypto reserves affect national economies and the idea of the “state as a service”:
We compiled expert views and forecasts on bitcoin’s trajectory amid the ongoing market slump:
Our regular digest rounds up the week’s biggest cybersecurity stories: