Ethereum Drops Below $2,500

BTC OG and insider whale Garrett Jin released this week’s market report, characterizing South Korea’s market rebound as a wide-range consolidation rather than a new trend. SK Hynix retested the 1.42 million won level before a consecutive rebound, closing up 5.9% at 1,593,000 won on August 13. The KOSPI has rallied 20% from its July low to enter a technical bull market, but foreign investors have not shifted to long-term holdings, and the drag from leveraged ETFs remains. Garrett Jin set the first take-profit level at $1,150 (≈1.63 million won), with the next target at $1,300 (1.85 million won. Garrett Jin also noted that gold posted its strongest weekly gain since January this week, rising 7.8% to $4,388. The rally was driven by July’s non-farm payrolls falling by 23,000 and moderate CPI data, which pushed back bets on a September rate hike. However, gold is now overbought in the short term, so a pullback would present an opportunity to add positions in batches. Bitcoin failed to react to the same macro tailwinds, remaining trapped between the $62,500 support and $65,000-$70,000 resistance. A bottoming structure since the $57,700 level is gradually forming, and Garrett Jin will wait for a pullback to enter the next buying round. On SpaceX, Garrett Jin views its recent performance as a classic case of “bad news fully priced in + short squeeze”, with the lock-up period itself acting as a washout rather than a starting point for a decline. However, the lock-up window is not over: 319 million shares will unlock on August 20, and another ~700 million shares each in September and October. The current price up to $160 is a take-profit zone, not a zone for chasing highs.

August 13 Update: #Bitcoin ETFs: 1D NetFlow: -1,132 $BTC(-$72.24M)?? 7D NetFlow: -202 $BTC(-$12.89M)?? #Ethereum ETFs: 1D NetFlow: +3,947 $ETH(+$7.47M)?? 7D NetFlow: +65,941 $ETH(+$124.71M)??

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), the Nasdaq’s intraday gain widened to 1% during US stock trading hours, with the storage sector leading the rally. Notable gainers in the sector include: Seagate Technology (STX) up 3.6%; Western Digital (WDC) up 7.4%; SanDisk (SNDK) up 5.2%; Micron Technology (MU) up 4.2%; and SK Hynix ADR up 5.2%.

ether.fi announced that EtherFi Cash’s current lending infrastructure is no longer sufficient to support its growth. The protocol is deploying a dedicated Aave V4 instance on the Optimism blockchain to power its credit card backend. EtherFi Cash’s active loan balance stands at $22 million, with plans to expand its lending capacity to $500 million by 2027. To date, 70,000 cardholders have used cryptocurrency for spending without liquidating their crypto holdings.

Conflux Network announced that its v3.1.0 network hard fork upgrade will introduce multiple network improvements, including EVM compatibility updates, bug fixes, RPC changes, and security enhancements. The upgrade is scheduled for August 25, with the activation of CIP-173 expected on August 26.

Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Kaplan called the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady in July “absolutely” correct, urging policymakers to remain open-minded ahead of September. He cited the complex factors influencing inflation, warning that rigid forward guidance would backfire. Kaplan noted: “If we see meaningful improvement, I might be willing to hold steady, but I want to make full use of every period before September to form judgments, avoiding rigidity or preconceived notions.” Current factors at play include inflationary pressures from AI development, tariffs, labor constraints, and surging oil prices; meanwhile, AI applications are working in the opposite direction, accelerating the trend of inflation cooling. Warsh should leverage his speech at this month’s Jackson Hole Symposium to briefly explain the Fed’s reasoning for holding rates steady in July, rather than delivering a purely “philosophical” address. The global rise in long-term U.S. Treasury yields reflects a structural supply-demand imbalance driven by persistent large fiscal deficits, not Federal Reserve policy.