Bitcoin gets a positive bounce following State of the Union

Ethereum has been stuck between $2,000 and $2,150 in the past week amid ongoing scrutiny toward the Ethereum Foundation, which has seen its talent pool thin out.

“ETH continues to show weakness... ETH/BTC keeps grinding lower, at a 10-month low,” Jasper De Maere, a desk strategist and OTC trader at Wintermute, posted on X. “The marginal risk dollar went into equities, not crypto. When AI semis are working and yields are easing, crypto should follow. It didn’t.”

De Maere continued, “Based on our OTC flow, we see that institutional buying pressure, which was responsible for the recent +ve price action, is now fading quickly, indicating that institutional investors might be at capacity or are re-assessing risk/reward at these new levels.”

Data from SoSoValue shows ethereum ETFs have seen 10 consecutive days of outflows, totaling more than $471.1 million.

Meanwhile, the blockchain’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin, who sits on the board of the Ethereum Foundation, addressed the controversy surrounding the nonprofit over the weekend. Holding around 0.16% of ethereum’s total supply, the foundation is not the center of blockchain network, but rather “one node, with a defined purpose alongside other nodes,” according to Buterin, who says nearly 90% of his net worth is in ethereum.

“EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months,” Buterin said, adding that the EF will sell ethereum less and focus on remaining censorship-resistant, open-source, private, and secure.

“The most high-value ‘product’ of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH,” Buterin continued. “That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset — *necessary* aspects even — that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help.”

Carlos Guzman, vice president of research at crypto trading firm GSR, said Vitalik’s response is a bet on credible neutrality as ethereum’s durable competitive advantage, which attracts liquidity, users, and apps, because “builders and institutions gravitate toward platforms they can trust won’t be captured or co-opted. This is what builds network effects, and network effects are what create durable moats,” Guzman wrote on X.

And yet, Guzman argued credible neutrality is just one piece of the puzzle:

“The risk is that a nimbler chain builds sufficient network effects by executing well on fees, throughput, and UX today while promising credible neutrality tomorrow. Vitalik’s vision is arguably the right one. Whether the ecosystem can execute on it before that window closes remains uncertain.”

Blockchain.com, one of the oldest crypto firms, announced it confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a step toward conducting an initial public offering.

The number of offered shares and price range has yet to be determined, according to a Thursday press release. If the company completes its IPO, Blockchain.com would join Circle and Bullish as crypto companies that have gone public in the year.

Simultaneously, a number of other companies, namely ethereum development firm Consensys, security hardware firm Ledger, and rival crypto exchange Kraken, have paused their plans to IPO due to rough market conditions.

The exchange started in 2011 as a bitcoin search engine before expanding to providing wallets and powering bitcoin transactions. The company raised funds through a series of funding rounds, with a Series D funding round in 2022 giving the firm a $14 billion valuation at the time.