Regulatory progress has become the core focus. The final decision of the US SEC on the Ethereum ETF is in the countdown. The 19b-4 document approved on May 23rd shows that the management fee for the first batch of products is as low as 0.15% (BlackRock plan), but the S-1 registry still needs to supplement technical details. Bloomberg analysts have raised the probability of approval in early July to 75%, and if it comes true, it will attract an average of $400 million in institutional funds per month (BitMEX Research model). However, the surprise inspection of the crypto custodian by BaFin in Germany led Coinbase Germany to suspend the ETH staking service, affecting the liquidity of assets of 210,000 users. More crucially, the latest hearing of SEC Chair Gensler hinted that “POS tokens are all securities”, and the legal dispute has increased the estimated compliance cost by 30%.
Technological upgrades reshape network performance. The deployment progress of the Pectra hard fork testnet has reached 60%. The core proposal EIP-7702 has reduced the account abstraction Gas fee by 22%, while EIP-7251 has raised the validator staking cap from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, which is expected to reduce the node operation cost by 35%. The competition for L2 scaling is heating up: The on-chain transaction cost of zkSync Era has dropped to 0.02 (98,230 cheaper than the mainnet and 300% more efficient than SWIFT).
The indicators adopted by the institution have reached a historical peak. Fidelity ethereum news now Spot Fund (FETH) raised $170 million in its first week, with 90% coming from million-level accounts. Enterprise on-chain activities have soared: PayPal issued 500 million PYUSD stablecoins using the Base chain, with the number of daily transactions exceeding 470,000. The scale of tokenized Treasury bonds has exceeded 1.2 billion US dollars, among which BlackRock BUIDL Fund accounts for 34%, with an annualized return rate of 4.8%. According to Chainalysis data, the proportion of institutional ETH holdings rose from 19% in 2023 to 29% in 2024, and the negative premium of Grayscale ETHE narrowed to 5.3% (17% in January).
Ecological economic data demonstrate resilience. Despite market fluctuations, the ETH staking rate rose against the trend to 27% (with a total of 40.1 million), and the annualized return remained at 3.8%. The Dencun upgrade pushed L2 transaction fees down by 99.7%, and Uniswap’s weekly trading volume on Polygon zkEVM soared by 217% to 4.2 billion. The NFT market has shown a clear recovery: Blur platform’s royalty income increased by 4,066,000 in July compared to the previous month, resulting in a loss of 1 million. This led to a chain reaction of liquidation, forcing MakerDAO to raise its DAI collateral ratio to 170%.
Global policy disturbances intensify the risk of volatility. The new regulations of the UK FCA require exchanges to isolate customers’ ETH assets, increasing operating costs by 20%. The transition period of the EU’s MiCA regulation led to Kraken’s withdrawal from the Italian market, affecting access for 85,000 users. Key on-chain indicators issue a warning: The funding rate for ETH perpetual contracts has reached a year-high of -0.15%, and the open interest of derivatives has shrunk by 2.2 billion (a decline of 183,200). If this figure is lost, it may trigger a $430 million leverage liquidation (CoinGlass data). Long-termists are focusing on the changes in L1 circulation after the Cancun upgrade – currently a net increase of 3,200 ETH per day, with the inflation rate dropping to -0.8%, providing fundamental support for the price.
