Over the week, Bitcoin climbed toward $64,000, Democratic senators pushed to add anti-corruption provisions to the CLARITY Act, miners ignored BIP-110, Moonshot AI’s new model rattled the semiconductor market, and more.
Neutral sentiment
Bitcoin started Monday with a drop. A correction amid renewed U.S.–Iran tensions and broader macro uncertainty pushed the first cryptocurrency down to $61,000.
However, on July 14, after the publication of the CPI in the U.S., the crypto market began to recover. The core reading excluding food and energy came in at 2.6% year over year versus 2.8% expected — inflation slowed more than forecast.
Another driver was positive rhetoric from the Fed chair Kevin Warsh during testimony before Congress.
Bitcoin hit a local high of $65,500 on the evening of July 15, then began to consolidate.
On Friday, July 17, digital assets fell along with traditional markets amid a semiconductor crisis, but over the weekend the first cryptocurrency managed to recoup the losses.
At press time, Bitcoin is trading at $64,500, up about 1% for the week.
Top-10 assets by market capitalization showed mixed performance. Ethereum rose 4% to $1,850, while HYPE lost about 8%.
Amid easing inflation expectations in the U.S., investors kept returning to exchange-traded funds. From July 13 to 17, spot bitcoin ETFs took in a net $75.5 million — a second consecutive week of inflows.
Ethereum funds mirrored the trend with net inflows of $105.5 million.
The crypto fear and greed index rose to 28, but remains in the “fear” zone.
Total market capitalization stands at $2.27 trillion. Bitcoin dominance remains at 57%, Ethereum’s share is 9.9%.
Anti-corruption provisions for the CLARITY Act
U.S. Democratic Senators Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley, and Chris Van Hollen opposed the current version of the CLARITY Act without anti-corruption provisions.
They believe the bill creates a regulatory regime for digital assets but does not eliminate conflicts of interest related to U.S. President Donald Trump’s and his family’s crypto business.
They proposed including provisions of the MEME Act or the End Crypto Corruption Act — a ban on the president, vice president, cabinet members, senior federal officials, members of Congress, and their immediate family from owning a crypto business, promoting digital assets, or profiting from them.
The CLARITY Act is intended to delineate the powers of the SEC and the CFTC and establish a federal regulatory framework for the digital asset market.
“It is not enough to prepare an amendment or a separate law against corruption. It needs to be truly stopped,” Merkley said.
According to Americans for Financial Reform, consideration is expected to begin on July 20. Sixty votes will be needed to clear the procedural hurdle.
What to discuss with friends?
- U.S. regulators missed the deadline to implement the GENIUS Act.
- Glassnode: Bitcoin holders stopped realizing losses en masse.
- The head of DeepMind proposed testing cutting-edge AI models before release.
- NEAR will cancel gas-fee rebates for developers.
BIP-110 draws no interest
Over a two-week period, not a single major mining pool signaled support for BIP-110. Adoption hovered around 1% versus the required 55%.
The initiative limits non-payment data in Bitcoin transactions, including OP_RETURN and parts of scripts.
The voluntary activation threshold expires at block height #961,632 in early August. If support falls short, in September only nodes that choose to adopt the rules will be able to enable them.
Amid minimal support, Strategy founder Michael Saylor and Blockstream co-founder Adam Back criticized the initiative. The latter addressed BIP-110 supporters directly. He said he understands their desire to protect the network from spam but disagrees with the proposed approach.
In parallel, the Runestone founder under the pseudonym Leonidas introduced the DOG Mode client. Unlike BIP-110, the solution needs only one miner — no majority vote is required.
The solution raises the transaction limit from 400,000 to 3.9 million WU and lowers the “dust limit” from 294–546 satoshis to 1 satoshi — to simplify sending Ordinals and Runes. The developer’s estimate is about $25 million in “extra” satoshis.
“Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots have for years enforced rules that consensus itself does not provide. The DOG army is no longer waiting for permission — it’s time to remove redundant restrictions,” Leonidas wrote.
EthSystems privacy service
The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy team spun out into a commercial company, EthSystems.
The startup targets blockchain solutions for institutional clients and tools based on zero-knowledge proofs so that banks and asset managers can execute large transactions on Ethereum while hiding position details and client data.
The project is backed by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, as well as BitMine and SharpLink. EthSystems’ co-founders are former Ethereum Foundation employees Mo Jalil, Oscar Toren, and Aryamann Challani.
The company’s business model is based on paid consulting and custom systems development. EthSystems representatives explained that large businesses require a commercial counterparty rather than a nonprofit foundation. The startup will continue to publish protocol specifications openly.
Also on ForkLog:
- Meta employees accused the company of using AI in layoffs.
- Japan recognized crypto assets as financial instruments.
- Visa launched a stablecoin platform for banks.
- Developers proposed protecting rights to bitcoins after a quantum hack.
Formidable Kimi K3
China’s Moonshot AI unveiled the largest open model, Kimi K3, with 2.8 trillion parameters, native vision, and a 1 million-token context window.
The solution is built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals. Sparsity is handled by Stable LatentMoE, where 16 of 896 experts operate simultaneously — delivering 2.5x better efficiency compared to K2.
Developers said that in overall benchmark standings, Kimi K3 trailed only the proprietary Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.
The model can run long engineering sessions with minimal human input, navigate large repositories, and control terminal tools. As a demonstration, the system independently designed a neural network chip on its own architecture.
The launch of Kimi K3 triggered a sell-off in chipmakers’ stocks. On Friday, July 17, shares of chipmakers and AI companies fell around the world. Asian firms dropped the most: Taiwan’s index lost more than 6%, and Japan closed down 4%. In the U.S., the sell-off continued — the Nasdaq fell 1.5%, its worst session of the week.
Shares of Chinese AI developer Z.ai plunged nearly 30% in Hong Kong. Nvidia briefly ceded to Apple the title of the world’s most valuable company.
Investors compared the situation to the “DeepSeek effect.” In January 2025, the AI startup released the R1 model. Nvidia then lost about $590 billion in market capitalization in a single session.
What else to read?
What tokenized deposits are and how they differ from stablecoins — explained in the new Cryptorium cards.
We break down the stages the new Ethereum roadmap consists of, why the blockchain needs post-quantum cryptography, and how rank-and-file industry participants reacted to the revised scaling timeline.
Why has the U.S. bitcoin reserve got stuck on paper?
