Regulation: The Clarity Act
The Crypto Clarity Act will get its first procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on September 15th. There is a set date and time. Many people said the bill was dead. It is not. Coinbase's chief policy officer told Fox Business that Democrats are still at the table and talks continue.
The plan was to start the process before the Senate broke for its August recess. That did not happen, but a fixed date and time is the next best thing. Floor time is the "coin of the realm" in the Senate, so having a locked date sets up the bill well for when Congress returns.
The bill is strongly bipartisan. It came from the House with 80 Democrats backing it. Since then, several hundred pages of Democratic priorities were added. The president made ethics commitments. There is an agreement on Democratic nominations to the SEC and CFTC. Some progress was made over a recent weekend on more technical parts of the bill. More small work is expected before the vote.
BlackRock Courts Bitcoin Holders
BlackRock's head of crypto, Robert Mitchnik, told Bloomberg the Bitcoin bull case for August and beyond is still alive. Buyers of BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, are mostly long-term holders. BlackRock just reached $15 trillion in assets under management and is telling its wealth clients to put 1% to 5% in Bitcoin and crypto.
Bitcoin has fallen, and the ETFs track that drop. Many people bought at $100,000 or $110,000 and are now underwater. Over the past two and a half years, the ETF investor base has stayed steady through this kind of downturn. They act as fundamental, long-term, buy-and-hold investors. Bitcoin is a volatile asset and always has been. There have been five major boom-and-bust cycles. Each cycle ends far higher than the one before it, with a bumpy ride in between.
Sentiment shifted in a small but clear way over the last month. Bitcoin started to decouple from stocks earlier in the year. For a while that hurt Bitcoin, because stocks, especially AI names, were roaring while Bitcoin stayed flat to down. In July, AI had a big pullback and Bitcoin outperformed. That split is healthy, since part of the Bitcoin thesis is that it works as a diversifier and a possible hedge against rare, extreme risks elsewhere in a portfolio.
BlackRock also cut its Bitcoin ETF in-kind threshold to $1 million. Holders with at least $1 million in Bitcoin can now convert it to IBIT with no capital gains tax, starting today. The old threshold was $25 million. The change follows the recent Cold Card exploit, which raised self-custody worries and may make institutional custody and ETF products more appealing. Bitcoin's next 15 years will look very different from its first 15.
Altcoins: Chainlink and Ethereum
Standard Chartered reaffirmed a bullish call on Chainlink, targeting $200 by 2030. That is roughly a 25x from today. Their price path: $13 this year, $41 next year, $82 in 2028, $133 in 2029, and $200 by 2030. This ties to their view that tokenized assets on-chain hit $4 trillion by 2028 and DeFi assets reach $2.7 trillion by 2030.
Morgan Stanley published a primer on Ethereum. It is not a price target or trading call. It covers Ethereum as infrastructure for stablecoins, tokenized assets, payments, settlements, lending, and financial apps. Wall Street is choosing Ethereum. More people, institutions, AI agents, and entities are choosing Ethereum in this bear market than in the last one.
Technicals: Is Bitcoin Bottoming?
Trader and on-chain analyst Will Clemente notes that Bitcoin's weekly chart now looks like late 2022. Price sold off into the prior cycle's all-time highs, printing its first oversold reading in years, followed by a bull divergence in price and momentum. The RSI shows that bull divergence.
Bitcoin trading below its 200-week moving average puts it in deep value territory. This has happened in every past bear market, and these are the best entry points. Price sits in this zone only about 8% of the time, yet this is where generational wealth in crypto gets built. This is one of the lowest monthly RSI prints in history.
The four-year cycle could still play out, putting Bitcoin's final low in October or November. If that happens, price could drop into the $50,000s, and some predict even lower. Still, the Bitcoin bear market looks close to ending. Bitcoin has been in a bear market for more than 10 months. There may be a couple months left, but there is a real chance the cycle bottom is already in and crypto is ready to break out.
Michael Saylor is now selling a small amount of Bitcoin almost every week, and the market has already priced this in.
