Weekly Update: 10th of July
What happened between July 3 and July 10?
- After bottoming near $58,000 in early July, bitcoin edged cautiously back toward $63,000, while spot bitcoin ETFs attracted fresh money for the first time in ten days. Read more
- Vitalik Buterin unveiled the Lean Ethereum roadmap, which he calls the network’s biggest rebuild since the Merge, with quantum resistance and privacy as core priorities. Read more
- Banking network SWIFT launched a blockchain ledger that seventeen major banks will use to pilot tokenized cross-border payments, partly as an answer to the rise of stablecoins. Read more
- In the U.S., a new, unified version of the CLARITY Act could arrive as soon as next week, though an unresolved ethics dispute keeps its chances of passing this year in doubt. Read more
Market recovers cautiously as ETF flows turn
Bitcoin started July on a weak note, sliding on July 1 to nearly $58,000, its lowest level in more than a year. Disappointing U.S. jobs data, with only 57,000 new positions, triggered roughly $450 million in short liquidations. A cautious recovery toward $63,000 followed, helped by more positive signals on interest-rate policy.
More telling than the price was the shift in exchange-traded products. On July 3, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in more than $221 million, their strongest day in two months, ending a ten-day run of outflows. Over that stretch some $2.7 billion had left the funds. Analysts note that U.S. demand remains fragile, keeping the recovery tentative.
Vitalik Buterin unveils the Lean Ethereum roadmap
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published the Lean Ethereum roadmap on July 6, calling it the network’s biggest rebuild since the Merge. The plan aims to overhaul nearly every major part of the protocol over the next three to four years while limiting disruption to existing applications. Two themes stand out: quantum resistance and privacy.
Quantum resistance is now treated as urgent and would require replacing vulnerable cryptography such as BLS signatures and ECDSA with post-quantum alternatives. Privacy, meanwhile, becomes a core goal of the protocol itself rather than an application-layer add-on. Leading developers welcomed the direction, though some argued the three-to-four-year timeline is too slow and urged faster execution.
SWIFT launches a blockchain ledger for banks
International banking network SWIFT announced on July 9 that its blockchain-based shared ledger is ready for use. Seventeen major banks, including UBS, BNP Paribas, Citi, HSBC, Wells Fargo and MUFG, will be the first to pilot tokenized cross-border payments on it. The system is designed to enable payments that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
With the move, SWIFT aims to combine traditional banking controls with the speed of digital payments, while final settlement still runs through existing rails. The ledger supports regulated digital money and tokenized assets across multiple blockchains and is widely seen as a response to the rapid rise of stablecoins. In time it could enable programmable money and automated payments.
CLARITY Act: new version could arrive next week
Sources said on July 9 that a new version of the U.S. CLARITY Act could arrive as soon as next week. The bill is meant to set clear rules for trading in digital assets. The new text merges the work of the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committees and is said to have grown by more than seventy pages.
Not all sticking points are resolved, however. The biggest is a Democrat-demanded restriction barring senior officials, including the president, from holding business ties to the crypto sector. Without a compromise, several senators have said they will vote no. With only a few weeks left on the calendar before the summer recess, time to pass the bill this year is running short.
In other digital assets news
- XRP briefly swapped places with USDC in early July to rank as the fifth-largest crypto by market value, after a weekly gain of almost 10% to around $1.18.
- BlackRock’s staked-ether fund ETHB drew significant capital in early July, with ether rising about 6% on the day.
- The White House has yet to decide how a federal bitcoin reserve should be structured and where it should be housed.
