Crypto majors fell 2-3% on Tuesday ahead of Kevin Warsh's inaugural FOMC meeting as Federal Reserve chair, with Bitcoin slipping to $64,800 and Ethereum to $1,763. The anticipation of the new chair's policy tone — and the almost certain hold on interest rates at 3.5%–3.75% — kept traders cautious, even as major players held firm. Exchange balances for Bitcoin dropped to 2.56 million BTC, the lowest since 2020, as long-term investors stopped selling.
Meanwhile, Coinbase made its boldest move yet to merge traditional finance and crypto, rolling out a suite of new products it calls the 'everything exchange.' Users can now trade US stocks, ETFs, and indexes alongside crypto, transfer stock portfolios from other brokerages, and access tokenized equities backed 1:1 by real shares. The platform also added perpetual futures on thematic baskets (AI, defense, Chinese equities), pre-IPO perps, options on both equities and crypto, an SEC-registered AI advisor, automated trading agents, a USDC-backed credit card, Bitcoin travel rewards, and loans against staked Solana. The vision is a single app that blends brokerage, banking, and robo-advisory atop a crypto exchange.
The macro backdrop dominated altcoin watchlists. XRP hovered at the $1.19 mid-Bollinger Band level — a close above $1.1934 would signal a bull trap and open $1.35, while a break below risks $1.0419. Shiba Inu (SHIB), now 95% below its all-time high, faces a pivotal 45-day window as historical data shows July has a median return of +8.92% and recent on-chain data showed large holders moving 40–50 billion tokens to cold wallets. Ethereum reached a development milestone as the Glamsterdam hard fork entered closed testnets. The upgrade introduces enshrined proposer-builder separation, parallel execution, a gas limit increase to 200 million, and multidimensional fees — potentially boosting L1 throughput by 3–4x. Analysts see ETH potentially consolidating at $2,500–$3,300 post-fork, with a bullish scenario extending to $5,000. ETF flows also rotated: BlackRock's spot Ethereum ETF saw $17.3 million in net inflows, while Bitcoin ETFs logged $10 million and funds tied to SOL, XRP, and HYPE attracted fresh capital.
