Bitcoin (BTC) held higher on Wednesday as crypto and risk assets continued to brush off US-Iran war tensions.

Key points:

• Bitcoin limits its comedown from five-week highs despite fresh escalation in the US-Iran war.
• US stocks also ignore the potential risks, as analysis warns that shorts could pay as a result.
• A Bitcoin trader sees BTC/USD outperforming the S&P 500 going forward.

Bitcoin, stocks digest Trump pledge to “destroy” Iran power plants

Data from TradingView showed BTC/USD down 1% on the day, having earlier hit five-week highs near $67,000.

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Crypto and US stocks continued Tuesday’s direction, which saw them ignore escalation in the Middle East, including direct strikes by both Iran and the US.

US president Donald Trump threatened attacks on Iranian bridges and energy infrastructure, which had only a mild impact on market performance.

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“From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Only oil prices saw volatility on the day, with WTI and Brent crude reaching $88.60 and $95.50, respectively, both at their highest since June 11.

CFDs on WTI crude oil vs. CFDs on Brent crude oil one-day chart.
Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Stocks’ bullish momentum prompted trading resource The Kobeissi Letter to suggest that those betting on a market reversal could see more pain.

“Short interest in the S&P 500 is up to ~3.7% of its free float, near the highest in data going back to 2010. Short interest in the Russell 3000 is up to ~6.1%, also near an all-time high,” it reported on Tuesday alongside data from Bloomberg.

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“Both metrics have steadily increased since the start of 2025.”

S&P 500 index short-interest data. Source: The Kobeissi Letter on X.com

Kobeissi suggested that a “short squeeze” could result, punishing late short positions.

Trader sees BTC price outperforming stocks

As for Bitcoin, traders continued to wait for a more decisive move, with $67,000 a particular focus. At time of publication, it was at roughly $65,975, with 24-hour trading volume topping $30.3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Related: Bitcoin analysis eyes ‘serious volume’ after Binance sees 9K BTC daily outflow

“Breaking above that point would make for a daily bullish market structure break putting in a higher high,” trader Daan Crypto Trades told X followers earlier Wednesday. 

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“This is the first daily higher high since the push up in May.”

BTC/USDT four-hour chart. Source: Daan Crypto Trades on X.com

To be sure, some traderseyed pronounced BTC price strength against the S&P 500.

“$BTC vs. US stocks is seeing a strong weekly bullish divergence and is at the brink of an RSI trend breakout,” an X post by Osemka read, referring to the relative strength index (RSI) leading indicator. 

“Divergent lows are 5 months apart, similar to literal 2022 lows. $BTC should outperform the US stock market nicely for the foreseeable future from the most mis-priced territory in history, as the lows should already be in.”

BTC/USD vs. S&P 500 one-week chart. Source: Osemka on X.com

As Cointelegraph reported, broad consensus continues to favor Bitcoin’s next bear-market low coming later this year or in early 2027.

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Reddit may block Google’s AI from using its content. Their licensing deal, reportedly worth $60 million per year, is about to expire. Reddit (RDDT) shares fell as much as 5.8% in premarket trading Wednesday.

The 2024 deal lets Google use Reddit’s posts to train and power its AI models. Talks over a renewal are ongoing. Neither company has made a final call.

Why Publishers Are Rethinking Google AI Deals

Reddit is not alone. The Journal also named USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc., and Reuters. All are rethinking their ties with Google.

The anger comes down to one thing. Google’s AI Overviews answer questions right on the search page. Readers get the answer. Publishers lose the click.

Pew Research Center data shows how big the hit is. Users clicked a regular result just 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared. Without one, the rate was 15%. Only 1% clicked a source inside the summary itself.

Semrush data cited in the Journal’s reporting points the same way. USA Today’s Google traffic fell nearly 50% in a year. Politico’s dropped 23%.

Regulators are stepping in too. On June 3, Britain’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), gave publishers a new right. They can now opt out of Google’s AI features without vanishing from search.

“It is crucial that content publishers, including news organizations, have appropriate bargaining power over how their content is used,” CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in the announcement.

Similar complaints about Google stealing publisher traffic now reach crypto media, where AI answers are already siphoning publisher visits.

Will RDDT Stock Crash?

A crash looks far from certain. Reddit’s threat may be a bargaining chip, not an exit. Its human conversations are among the most cited sources in AI answers. It also licenses data to OpenAI. That gives it rare pricing power.

Executives reportedly want usage-based fees that grow as Reddit becomes more central to AI results. A new Reddit Google AI deal could reset prices across the market. AI training data lawsuits are already testing what unlicensed content costs.

Timing adds pressure. Alphabet reports Q2 earnings after Wednesday’s close. Options traders are already pricing outsized earnings moves across big tech. Any comment on content costs could move both stocks, as noted in BeInCrypto’s Alphabet Q2 earnings preview.

For now, this looks like hardball, not a breakup. The renewal terms, and Alphabet’s comments tonight, should soon show what Reddit’s data is really worth.

The post Reddit May Block Google AI Access as $60 Million Deal Nears Expiry: Will RDDT Stock Crash? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Arbitrum will collect 10% of fees generated on Robinhood Chain and every other Layer 2 built on its technology stack, Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder said Wednesday on X. Of that cut, 8% goes to the tokenholder-controlled Arbitrum treasury and 2% funds development, he said. Goldfeder… Read the full story at The Defiant

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XRP price is trading around $1.13, up about 2% over the past 24 hours. Those modest gains hide a much larger binary risk approaching. A Senate deadline could determine whether XRP secures the regulatory clarity many institutional investors want or loses its biggest legislative catalyst for now. That possibility still appears underpriced, leaving traders on edge.

Meanwhile, the crypto market is sending mixed signals. Bitcoin and Ethereum have spent the past two days moving sideways, and large-cap altcoins, including XRP, are following suit. XRP has traded between $1.12 and $1.16 during the past day, reflecting consolidation with no decisive trend.

Even so, price stability does not mean risk has disappeared. XRP has increasingly become a legally driven trade, with sentiment shifting alongside every regulatory headline. Any court filing, settlement rumor, or signal from lawmakers before Thursday could trigger a sharp repricing.

The real question is the direction of that move. A favorable outcome could strengthen confidence and attract fresh institutional demand. On the other hand, another delay or disappointing development may leave XRP stuck in its current range, or even spark another wave of selling as traders unwind expectations.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

Can XRP Price Break $1.25 Before the Senate Deadline?

XRP has been consolidating around the $1.08 to $1.15 range over the past week. The $1.10 area continues to act as a short-term pivot, while support sits near $1.05 after holding several recent pullbacks. Meanwhile, sellers have repeatedly defended the $1.15 to $1.20 zone.

Recent trading volume has offered little conviction despite the rebound. Instead, the move looks more like traders adjusting positions than chasing a fresh trend. That often happens before major headlines, when market participants prefer waiting over making aggressive bets.

The bullish scenario remains straightforward. If Senate legislation advances or Ripple receives favorable legal news, XRP could break above $1.20 with strong volume. That would expose the next resistance around $1.30 to $1.40, where sellers may try to slow the rally.

Xrp (XRP)

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The base case assumes no meaningful update arrives. In that situation, XRP could remain trapped between $1.08 and $1.15 as traders wait for the next catalyst. XRP Price action is likely to remain choppy until fresh news shifts sentiment.

The bearish case comes into play if legislation stalls or regulatory pressure increases again. A decisive break below $1.05 could send XRP toward the $1.00 level first. If that support fails, the next buying zone sits around $0.90 to $0.95.

Technically, XRP still appears compressed, and those conditions rarely last forever. Once a catalyst arrives, the move could develop quickly in either direction. Position sizing ahead of Thursday remains the key consideration because this setup is unlikely to stay quiet for long.

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Maxi Doge Targets Early-Mover Upside as XRP Tests Key Levels

XRP at $1.13 is, at minimum, a known asset with a nine-figure market cap and a legal binary that limits near-term upside to a defined range. Even the optimistic $1.50 target represents roughly a 30% move from current levels. It’s respectable, but not the kind of asymmetric return early-stage exposure can theoretically offer.

Traders watching the XRP setup and seeking a different risk profile have been rotating attention toward early presale positions.

Maxi Doge ($MAXI), available at $0.000283 per token, has pulled in $4.8 million in total raised, a number that signals meaningful community traction without the dilution risk of a fully saturated cap.

Built on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token, the project is positioned around a “leverage king” trading culture. It has a holder-only competition with leaderboard rewards, a Maxi Fund treasury for liquidity and partnerships, and meme-first marketing built around a 240-lb gym-bro mascot embodying 1000x trading mentality.

The staking program runs on a dynamic APY structure. The tagline, “never skip leg-day, never skip a pump,” commits to the bit. As with any presale, token value post-launch is speculative, and capital loss is a real outcome.

Research Maxi Doge before committing to any position.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

The post XRP Price Could Turn Volatile This Month: What’s at Stake for Ripple? appeared first on Cryptonews.

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White House AI adviser Michael Kratsios accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI of secretly copying Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. He said the copies helped build its new Kimi K3 model.

Kratsios made the claim in a Wednesday post on X. He said Moonshot built a special platform for large-scale distillation of US models. The firm allegedly kept switching access routes to avoid getting caught.

White House Draws a Line on Moonshot AI Distillation

The technique at the center of the row is called distillation. It trains a new AI model on the answers of a stronger one. Done openly, it is legal and common. Kratsios said the covert, industrial-scale version is theft.

“We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model… However, large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable,” Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy stated.

Anthropic has said the same thing. In a February report, the company traced over 3.4 million Claude exchanges to Moonshot. The traffic came from hundreds of fake accounts. Account records even matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff.

Anthropic said the campaign targeted Claude’s reasoning, coding, and vision skills.

Kratsios also said Moonshot got hold of NVIDIA GB300 servers and used them in Thailand. These are NVIDIA’s top AI chips, and US rules block their sale to China. Washington tightened its AI chip export clampdown in May. In June, a Super Micro office raid in Taiwan targeted alleged chip smuggling into China.

Kimi K3 Deepens the US-China AI Fight

Moonshot launched Kimi K3 on July 16. At 2.8 trillion parameters, it is the biggest open-weight model ever released. Demand was so strong that Moonshot had to pause new Kimi subscriptions within 48 hours. The full model weights go public by July 27.

That date matters. Anthropic warns that copied models lose their safety guardrails. Once open-sourced, they can spread beyond anyone’s control.

This is not the first such charge. In January 2025, White House AI czar David Sacks accused DeepSeek of copying OpenAI’s models. DeepSeek denied it. Beijing called Anthropic’s February findings groundless.

Kratsios announced no penalties, and Moonshot has stayed silent. The US still holds a 23x spending lead in AI, yet Chinese models keep gaining ground. The next move now sits with Washington.

The post China’s Moonshot Reportedly Stole U.S. AI Tech for Kimi K3 appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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In Ethereum news today, new smart contract deployments on the network have surged 192% above the 90-day baseline, with funding rates simultaneously running 220% above their 90-day norm, a combination of signals that, according to a CryptoQuant QuickTake published by analyst CryptoOnchain, rarely fires without preceding a significant directional move.

The question the data forces is whether the early leverage bid currently accumulating in derivatives markets is front-running the builder activity, or simply reacting to it.

ETH price climbed unevenly from roughly $1,770 to $1,903 over the past two weeks, a movement that reads as ordinary chop on the surface. Beneath it, three structurally distinct signals are activating in parallel for the first time in recent memory.

Ethereum News: Builder Activity Spikes While Capital Stages on Binance

The sharpest signal in the CryptoQuant analysis is the developer activity reading. Smart contract deployments jumped roughly 192% versus the 90-day baseline, with nearly 57% of that increase occurring within the past week alone.

Deployment spikes of this magnitude typically indicate new protocol launches, redeployed contracts ahead of a release, or coordinated testing cycles, builder activity, not speculative noise.

Alongside that, stablecoin net flow into Binance has surged to nearly 370% above its three-month average, with daily inflows averaging over $58M. Capital staging on an exchange rather than deploying directly on-chain is a classic pre-trade positioning pattern; it suggests intent without yet confirming direction.

What complicates the read is that these two signals, which typically appear in sequence during a clean accumulation phase, are running simultaneously with a hot derivatives market. That removes the analytical comfort of a slow, cold-funding accumulation setup.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

Leverage Signal Disrupts the Accumulation Script

Funding rates on Binance are now running approximately 220% above their 90-day norm. That is not an ambiguous reading; it is a clear signal that leveraged traders are already positioned long and paying to hold those positions.

For anyone tracking perpetual trading dynamics, elevated funding at this level has historically preceded either a flush that resets overextension or price follow-through that validates the bet.

The problem, as CryptoOnchain’s analysis notes, is that having both stablecoin staging and hot funding rates activate together is not a clean accumulation script.

It is a setup that historically precedes more volatile, two-sided price action rather than a straightforward directional trend. Open interest building into elevated funding with a price that has not yet broken out cleanly creates the conditions for sharp moves in either direction.

The on-chain metrics that would normally anchor a bullish read are not in dispute. Staking has climbed to a fresh all-time high of 33.58%, tightening liquid float.

Median transaction fees are down by over 96% versus three months ago, not due to network abandonment. These are the readings that define the valuation gap: base-layer economics remain subdued: median transaction fees are down over 96% versus three months ago, while staking continues its steady climb to a fresh high of 33.58%.

The gap between robust on-chain metrics and ETH price performance has attracted institutional attention at these levels, and staking continues its steady climb to a new high of 33.58%, further tightening the liquid float.

Trade Ethereum on Bybit and Get a Chance to Win Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop

Three Signals Rarely This Active Simultaneously

In other Ethereum news, CryptoQuant’s analysis highlights a rare convergence of three signals: elevated builder activity, capital staging in stablecoins on exchanges, and existing leverage via derivatives. Each signal has meaning individually, but their simultaneous occurrence in the absence of a price catalyst is notable.

Ethereum’s post-Dencun architecture shows lower fees, as Layer 2 activity has offloaded execution costs from the mainnet without compromising economic security or validators’ staking yield. Developer activity remains robust, with a 192% spike in deployment, indicating resilience even during downturns.

Institutional flows suggest cautious short-term behavior, but demand from cumulative inflows since the launch of the ETH ETF remains evident. This context is crucial for understanding whether the leverage bid stems from retail speculation or early institutional accumulation.

According to CryptoQuant, the outcome will either be funding rates cooling as leveraged longs are flushed out, or a price breakthrough that validates the leverage position.

The eventual dominant signal, whether from builders, exchange capital, or derivatives, will only be clear as these paths unfold. Until then, the three-signal convergence remains the primary focus.

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The post Ethereum News: Builder Activity & Leverage Data Align, $2k Next? appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Ethereum is pressing against a price level that has capped every rally. ETH trades at $1,925, little changed over the past 24 hours. But the $2,000 mark remains both a technical ceiling and a psychological flashpoint. What’s changed is who’s bidding, and why.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee posted on X that capital tied to the AI sector is rotating from chip stocks into Ethereum. He framed ETH as the new digital infrastructure play for AI-focused portfolios. The thesis argues that decentralized compute and data networks could attract capital that previously favored names like Nvidia.

That narrative gained institutional support the same week. S&P Dow Jones Indices and Pantera Capital launched the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index. The 18 asset benchmark applies S&P 500-style financial viability screens to crypto protocols. Ethereum is its largest holding, while the index’s constituents generated more than $3 billion in annualized revenue across the previous two quarters.

Both developments arrive as ETH tests a resistance zone it has struggled to clear throughout July. For Ethereum price, if institutional demand strengthens while technical resistance weakens, it could finally get a clean shot at reclaiming the $2,000 level.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

Can Ethereum Price Break $2,000 This Week?

Ethereum is trading around $1,925 after briefly testing the $1,940 price area. Price action remains tight, with only a modest gap across major exchanges. That narrow spread points to cooling intraday volatility rather than aimless trading. Buyers and sellers are waiting for the next catalyst before making a decisive move.

Trading volume has improved from last week’s average, giving the latest rebound more credibility. Even so, traders will likely want another pickup in activity before treating any breakout as sustainable.

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Technically, the structure remains straightforward. Support sits between $1,850 and $1,900, where buyers stepped in several times this month. On the upside, resistance stands around $1,950, followed by the psychological $2,000 mark. Ethereum has yet to secure a convincing daily close above $1,950, making that the key level to watch.

If buying pressure continues to build, Ethereum could break $1,950 and challenge the $2,000 to $2,100 zone over the coming weeks. A more likely outcome is continued consolidation between $1,880 and $1,960 until a macro event or major network development shifts sentiment. However, a daily close below $1,850 would put the $1,720 to $1,750 region back into focus.

ETF inflows into Ethereum investment products have continued to strengthen, providing steady demand beneath the market. That support may help limit downside, even if the push above $2,000 takes longer than bulls expect. Still, price confirmation matters more than headlines, especially while Ethereum trades just below a major resistance zone.

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LiquidChain Targets Early Mover Upside as Ethereum Tests Key Levels

ETH at $1,925 with a $231 billion market cap is not where asymmetric returns live; it’s where capital preservation and measured upside live. Traders who want the AI infrastructure narrative without the large-cap ceiling are looking at where that architecture is being built at the execution layer.

LiquidChain is a Layer 3 infrastructure project positioned as a cross-chain liquidity layer that fuses Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity into a single execution environment. The pitch to developers is clean: deploy once, access all three ecosystems.

Its core architecture boasts Unified Liquidity Layer, Single-Step Execution, Verifiable Settlement, and Deploy-Once Architecture. Those targets one of DeFi’s most persistent friction points: siloed liquidity across chains.

The presale is live at $0.01482 per $LIQUID, with $915K raised to date.

For traders who’ve done the diligence and want exposure to L3 infrastructure before institutional attention reaches that layer, research LiquidChain’s presale structure here.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

The post Ethereum Price Eyes $2,000 as AI Funds Shift From Chips to ETH, Says Tom Lee appeared first on Cryptonews.

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