🧭 The crypto market's macro compass

The banking sector now expects at least two new interest rate cuts in the US for the rest of 2025. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America all expect multiple cuts during this fall, a trend reversal that is becoming more and more likely.

The background to those expectations is a weak American labor market, as only 22,000 new jobs were created in August, significantly less than the expected 75,000. Even official US data had to be massively revised downwards retrospectively.

This monetary easing is seen as a likely catalyst for crypto markets, as lower interest rates bring more liquidity into risky assets. At the next Fed meeting in September, 88% of market participants expect a rate cut of 25 basis points.

In the meantime, the European Central Bank keeps pushing for its digital euro, notably through the voice of its Executive Board member Cipollone. The project is intended to strengthen resilience and establish better payment structures in Europe. However, many EU politicians remain critical: data protection, banking competition and control issues are all on the table. While Cipollone emphasizes that no payer information would be collected with a digital euro, members of the parliament warn of risks such as capital flight and state influence.

ECB President Christine Lagarde also warned last week against non-European stablecoins, which could trigger capital outflows from the euro zone. In her cross-hair are US dollar stablecoins, which are gaining a new momentum thanks to regulatory progress in the USA.

The US central bank is also hosting a conference on "payment innovations" in October. On the menu: tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), AI, stablecoins and their role in the financial system. The conference coincides with a phase of increasing on-chain adoption, as the value of tokenized RWAs has risen by over 220% in 2025. Ethereum remains the dominant platform, and projects such as Ondo Global Markets are already bringing hundreds of US stocks onto the blockchain.

Fireblocks and Stripe took action last week as well, with announcements of their own stablecoin networks with a focus on real-time transactions and compliance. The race with Ripple, Stellar, Visa and Mastercard for the global stablecoin rails is therefore in full swing and evolving each week.

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🧠 Bitcoin's split personality

The buying spree of large companies continued in August, as Strategy increased its holdings by 7,714 BTC in August, and most recently 4,048 BTC for $449 million.

The average price paid was $110,981 and its total reserves climbed to 636,505 bitcoins. Metaplanet also stocked up with 1,009 BTC bought. The Japanese company now holds 20,000 BTC and is planning massive capital measures to refinance itself.

However, analysts are urging caution. For PlanC, the expectation that Bitcoin will reach new highs at the end of the year is statistically unfounded as the classic halving cycle offers too little empirical basis. Although Q4 has been strong in the past, fundamental changes caused by ETFs and treasury companies could distort historical patterns.

The comparison of Bitcoin with gold is also causing debate. Peter Schiff continues to describe Bitcoin as the "wrong horse", pointing to new all-time highs for gold. The community answered back that over the long term BTC has massively outperformed gold with a +45,000% performance in ten years.

Recently, even the correlation between gold and BTC has begun to falter. While gold climbed to $3,485 after Trump's anti-inflation announcements, Bitcoin fell to a two-month low. Analysts speak of a split personality: sometimes a safe haven, sometimes a risky asset. The long-term link to gold could return, but uncertainty dominates for the time being and Bitcoin remains an asymmetric store of value.

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🤖 Ethereum's AI forecasts

Ethereum is getting ready for its next technological upgrade “Fusaka” due in November, with multiple improvements aimed at making the blockchain more efficient, secure and cost efficient.

Large institutional and private investors are continuing to expand their positions in Ethereum. Since April alone, the ETH holdings of the 10 largest wallets have increased by 14%. At the same time, expectations of a price rally in the fourth quarter are rising.

In this context, Cointelegraph has made the experiment of asking and comparing the Ethereum price forecast of three large AI models.

ChatGPT-5, Gemini and Grok all see moderate gains in the 5-10% range for September, but for the medium-term forecasts up to December 2025 they see a potential of between $5,200 and $7,100 depending on interest rate cuts, ETF inflows and the state of the altcoin markets.

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⛏️ New record in Bitcoin mining difficulty

The mining difficulty in the Bitcoin network reached a new all-time high of 134.7 trillion at the beginning of September, a clear signal of the increasing computing power required to secure the network. That number means the average amount of calculation attempts that must be made to successfully mine a Bitcoin block.

At the same time, the total computational power of the network is falling slightly, which shows that not all miners feel up to this challenge in the long term. While large mining groups are expanding their dominance, smaller players are coming under increasing pressure.

Despite the ever-increasing centralization of miners, there are a few exceptions: Three solo miners were each able to successfully mine a block in July and August and collect block rewards of up to $373,000 in the process, a rare stroke of luck compared to the dominance of large pools. However, these individual cases do little to change the structural shift: rising hardware and energy costs are increasingly turning mining into a game of institutional capital strength.

Tether recently denied rumors of a Bitcoin sale and instead confirmed that it will continue to reinvest its profits in BTC, gold and land. Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino clarified that a transfer of almost 20,000 BTC to an external platform (XXI Capital) should not be seen as a sale, but as a strategic reallocation. According to BitcoinTreasuries.NET, Tether currently holds over 100,000 BTC worth around $11.2 billion.

These parallel developments, centralization in mining and strategic accumulation by large players, are noticeably changing the dynamics in the Bitcoin ecosystem. While idealists hope for self-rule and decentralization, institutionalization and capital pooling continue to progress.

The Bitcoin blockchain is increasingly becoming a playing field for big players, both in mining and investing. The romantic dream of a decentralized network operated by equal users is giving way to reality: whoever has the computing power or the capital power dominates. Solo mining successes are just anecdotes in a market that has long since ceased to reflect only technological interests, but also geopolitical and financial ones.

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💪 Power shift in the crypto elite

2025 has so far shown that influence in the crypto industry is no longer solely created through exchange listings and token prices, but through control of infrastructure and capital flows. Although Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao continues to lead the rich list with around $63 billion in assets, other figures such as Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Paolo Ardoino (Tether) and Larry Fink (BlackRock) are currently the most influential.

Tether dominates global stablecoin trading with over $167 billion in market value and strategically invests in mining and AI. BlackRock steers trillion-dollar flows into Bitcoin and tokenized government bonds with its IBIT and BUIDL funds. And Ethereum is shaping the foundation of the Web3 ecosystem with a vision led by Buterin, whose influence extends far beyond his estimated net worth.

The crypto industry of 2025 is no longer a "Wild West", but it is a new form of institutional power. Whoever moves the markets today controls standards, security models and access to dollar liquidity. The question is no longer who is the richest, but who sets the pace.

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