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The crypto world is starting to look like just bitcoin again

Now dominating 63% of the total crypto market value, BTC keeps breaking new records.

7/18/25 8:57AM

Looks like 2025 is shaping up to be a big year for crypto... or at least for one particular coin.

Bitcoin briefly flew past $123,000 on Monday morning, the first day of the House’s “Crypto Week,” which (despite some disappointments) saw landmark legislation to regulate stablecoins passed by Congress, helping to boost the value of the entire crypto market beyond the $4 trillion mark on Friday. Through the week, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency did cool off a little, with a handful of meme coins and altcoins starting to steal the show.

However, zooming out beyond the recent altcoin gains reveals that the crypto landscape is still very much dominated by bitcoin, which takes up a whopping 63% of the total crypto market’s value.

Bitcoin's dominance chart — Sherwood News

Can’t stop, won’t stop

The last time bitcoin enjoyed a similar level of dominance was from 2018 to 2020 following the collapse of the Initial Coin Offering boom in 2017 that made investors abandon many altcoin projects. Companies like Tesla and PayPal had also just started to accept bitcoin as a form of payment, lending an increasing sense of legitimacy to the asset.

Just as new demand stemmed from bitcoin’s growing image as a safe haven, supply was also being squeezed by many long-term investors HODLing (translation: holding) on to their coins, expecting gains after a “halving” event in mid-2020.

But a lot has changed since then, and more commentators are looking away from retail bitcoin traders to explain BTC’s latest surge.

Stable(r) coin

As bitcoin’s price fluctuates less wildly and it begins to look a little more like big name securities such as the Magnificent 7, institutional investors have piled in. Bitcoin treasury companies like Michael Saylor’s Strategy, for instance, now hold $73 billion worth of bitcoin, while spot bitcoin ETFs have brought in some $50 billion since 2024, per Deutsche Bank analysis.

All told, institutions now control nearly one-third of all bitcoin in circulation.

Indeed, as fund managers move toward risky assets more broadly, with investors’ three-month risk appetite at its highest levels since since 2001, bitcoin appears to be hitting a bit of a sweet spot for today’s risk-on institutions — a high-beta asset that is nevertheless still perceived as a safe haven.

BofA chart risk appetite — Bank of America Global Research

Main character energy

The rising tide is not lifting all boats in the crypto world, however. A Coinbase-EY Parthenon survey of institutional investors reveals that this new institutional demand is only really filtering through to bitcoin and ethereum, with an overwhelming majority of the surveyed interviewees’ firms holding the two biggest cryptocurrencies (97% and 86%, respectively). Even when they are interested in other currencies, more than half of respondents held only one or two coins in addition to BTC and ETH.

Institutional investors survey chart — Sherwood News

Ethereum, which took advantage of some institutional attention from record spot ETF inflows and companies experimenting with an ethereum-based treasury to rise more than 20% in the last five days, might need even more — the asset is still about 25% below its all-time high from 2021.

Magic internet institutional money

Around 2010, when 10,000 BTC were used to buy two pizzas, the cryptocurrency was mostly seen as an alternate means of investment for critics of the centralized financial system, which was dominated by banks, traditional currencies, and huge corporations.

Now, 15 years and a lifetime’s worth of bitcoin gains later, it seems like the institutions could be starting to shape the crypto’s dominance more than the original HODLers.

Sage D. Young3h

Justin Sun sues Trump-backed World Liberty over frozen tokens

Crypto billionaire Justin Sun, owner of the world’s most expensive banana, was named an adviser to World Liberty Financial the day after investing $30 million in the project. (He’d later boost that with $45 million more.) Sun has long been a supporter of President Trump, and has not once, but twice topped a competition to amass the most $TRUMP coins. But it seems even for Sun, the gold has turned brass.

Sun announced on social media that he’s filed a lawsuit in a California federal court against the crypto project backed by Trump.

The lawsuit alleges World Liberty engaged in an “illegal scheme to seize property” and “positioned itself as the new boogeyman” by stripping Sun of his governance rights, threatening to burn his WLFI tokens, and freezing his stash, which at times were worth $1 billion, according to the complaint dated on Tuesday.

“I have tried in good faith to resolve this situation with the World Liberty project team without resorting to litigation,” Sun wrote in a lengthy X post on Tuesday night. “But the project team has refused my requests to unfreeze my tokens and restore my rights as a token holder. They have left me with no choice but to turn to the courts.”

The complaint also alleged that World Liberty appears to be in financial trouble, citing concerns over whether the project can repay an on-chain loan that was collateralized by using, at the time, $5 billion worth of WLFI. The token reached an all-time low less than two weeks ago.

Despite the escalation with World Liberty, Sun said the lawsuit does not change his feelings about Trump or his administration. “I have always been — and remain — an ardent supporter of President Trump and his Administration’s efforts to make America crypto friendly,” he said.

Blockchain billionaire Sun takes Trump family’s crypto firm to court

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Analyst: “We are now clearly in a bull market phase” as bitcoin hits highest level since February

So far this month, bitcoin is up nearly 15%, surpassing April’s historical average.

A member of idol group Kasotsuka Shojo (Virtual Currency Girls) wearing a bitcoin mask

Sage D. Young

4/21/26

Ethereum ETFs notch eight straight days of inflows, longest streak since start of October

And BitMine, the largest ethereum treasury company, acquired 101,627 ethereum tokens last week, worth $234.8 million.

Paper money streaming out from globe on computer screen

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

“split personality”

4/21/26

Analyst says “liquidity conditions, not halvings” are now bitcoin’s primary clock

The breakdown of the four-year cycle removes a key empirical metric that investors relied on.

$290M

Sage D. Young4/20/26

On Saturday, ethereum-based protocol KelpDAO, known for liquid restaking, was exploited for $290 million, the largest hack of 2026 in the decentralized finance ecosystem.

“Preliminary indicators suggest attribution to a highly-sophisticated state actor, likely DPRK’s Lazarus Group,” LayerZero said in its statement explaining the attack. KelpDAO issues rsETH, while LayerZero provides network infrastructure that allows users to move KelpDAO’s rsETH between blockchains.

The configuration of KelpDAO’s exploited application, powered by LayerZero, relied on a single decentralized verifier network (DVN), responsible for verifying the integrity of cross-chain messages.

The industry best practice is for protocols to use a multi-DVN setup to prevent a unilateral point of trust or failure. “A properly hardened configuration would have required consensus across multiple independent DVNs, rendering this attack ineffective even in the event of any single DVN being compromised,” LayerZero stated, essentially placing the blame on the restaking protocol for using a single-DVN setup.

The exploiters executed an RPC-spoofing attack and performed DDoS attacks to manipulate the single DVN instance into confirming transactions “that never in fact took place.” The LayerZero team said, “Operating a single-point-of-failure configuration meant there was no independent verifier to catch and reject a forged message.”

Meanwhile, KelpDAO is preparing to dispute LayerZero’s account and place the blame on the latter, per a CoinDesk report.

Spilling over

The exploit has since impacted the wider crypto landscape.

The attackers successfully drained 116,500 rsETH from KelpDAO’s bridge, allowing them to deposit $249.7 million of the token to DeFi’s largest lending protocols and withdraw $228.2 million worth of different cryptocurrencies, wETH and wstETH, on-chain data from Arkham Intelligence shows.

Aave, the largest lending protocol, has frozen several markets and is now facing a liquidity crunch.

On Aave’s v3, the ETH, USDT, and USDC markets, which have a combined reserve size of $10.7 billion, have each reached a 100% utilization rate, as total borrowed equals total supplied. When borrows are maxed, users cannot withdraw their supplied liquidity.

The pseudonymous head of strategy at DeFi lending platform Spark, @MonetSupply, wrote on X, “There has been a ~$300 million increase in borrowing with USDT collateral in just the past day since the rsETH exploit.”

On-chain folks are spooked

The attack comes in the same month that Drift, a solana-based trading venue, suffered from an over $270 million hack. Saturday’s attack also follows worries stemming from Anthropic’s unreleased AI model Mythos, which “is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system.”

Even though the major cryptocurrencies have not seen their prices move substantially in the last 24 hours, crypto participants have been spooked, evident by the capital exiting the decentralized finance ecosystem.

DeFi saw its total value locked decrease by $13 billion over the weekend to $85.64 billion at the time of writing, its lowest point since April last year, data from DefiLlama shows.

“OK — Kelpdao hacker, how much you want? Let’s just talk. With KelpDAO’s help, of course. It’s simply not worth it to sacrifice both Aave and KelpDAO and let them go down over this hack. You can’t spend $300 million anyway,” said Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, who has been beefing with the President Trump-backed World Liberty team.