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Crypto is stabilizing after BTC slid alongside the “AI darling” NVIDIA, while ETH USD continued its frustrating trend of underperforming expectations. Up until today, there has been no major crypto-specific disaster to blame. But the market is reminding us that Bitcoin and Ethereum are increasingly trading like high-beta tech assets, and the days of financial rebellion are long gone.

Wall Street’s AI obsession has linked crypto and semiconductor stocks into the same basket trade. Funds that piled into NVIDIA, AMD, and Bitcoin during the liquidity-fueled rally of the past two years are now trimming exposure as interest-rate fears return. That being said, BTC USD and ETH USD can sell off together with chip stocks even when nothing fundamentally changes inside.

Following the prolonged bear market, the Ethereum Foundation unveiled a major restructuring, slashing 20% of staff and cutting its budget by around 40%. At the same time, we are once again debating if the Federal Reserve will deliver another rate hike after a hawkish June meeting.

So, how bad is the market situation today?

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BTC USD Falls With Nvidia: Chip Stocks = Crypto Signal?

The latest decline in BTC USD happened almost in lockstep with weakness across semiconductor stocks, particularly NVIDIA and other AI-related names. However, looking closely, semiconductor companies are not driving Bitcoin prices directly. But both assets have become part of the same institutional “high risk, high reward” trade.

Crypto is maturing, and we can see that during periods of abundant liquidity and strong economic growth, money aggressively enters assets with high upside potential. Bitcoin, AI stocks, and semiconductor companies all fit the description. It’s good and bad for crypto. It brings institutional money, but weakens community power.

Bitcoin (BTC)

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ETH USD Reality Check as Ethereum Foundation Shrinks

The biggest Ethereum story of the day came from the Ethereum Foundation’s surprise restructuring. According to the Foundation, staffing will be reduced by 20%, while operational spending will be cut by 40%. This is designed to create a leaner organization focused on core research and protocol development.

Vitalik Buterin defended the changes, noting that Ethereum needs greater focus and execution efficiency. In comments shared this week, he emphasized that Ethereum’s mission remains unchanged and that resources should be directed toward areas with the highest impact.

Vitalik addressed it directly on X:“

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%… I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people… The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing… In the longer term, I personally favor a ‘soft lean-and-done’ approach to Ethereum… the ecosystem is adapting… and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.”

Unlike previous bull markets, Ethereum has struggled to dominate headlines this cycle. Spot ETFs arrived, but the explosive rally people expected never fully materialized; the $10k or even $7K targets remain targets. Competition from faster chains, growing institutional interest in Bitcoin, and fragmentation across Layer-2 ecosystems have diluted the narrative that once made Ethereum the undisputed king of crypto alts.

Ethereum (ETH)

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Yet some investors view the Foundation’s cuts as a positive development. A leaner organization may help Ethereum move faster, reduce bureaucracy, and focus on delivering upgrades that directly improve network competitiveness.

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Will Rate Hikes Crush BTC USD and ETH USD?

The other major concern hanging over markets is the Federal Reserve. While the Fed left interest rates unchanged during its June meeting, the tone was noticeably more hawkish than expected. Nine out of nineteen policymakers now expect at least one rate hike this year, compared with none in March projections. Officials have also “leaked” that a single rate hike in 2026 remains a realistic possibility.

Markets have become even more aggressive in their forecasts, with analysts now seeing meaningful odds of additional tightening as early as July or September. Bank of America has even floated the possibility of multiple hikes. For crypto, higher rates typically create a blockage because they reduce liquidity and, of course, make risk assets less attractive. That helps explain why BTC USD and ETH USD reacted negatively to the shift in expectations.

Still, investors should remember that projections are not promises. The Fed has changed course many times, as economic conditions have evolved, and several analysts continue to believe the next long-term move will eventually be a cut, and not another hike. The odds are small for a cut, but it’s not zero, and if people know there will be a hike, today might already be priced in.

Despite today’s weakness, institutional demand remains strong, spot ETFs continue attracting capital, and Bitcoin’s role as a scarce digital asset has not changed because semiconductor stocks had a bad day. If anything, sharp pullbacks driven by macro fears have historically created some of the most attractive entry points of a bull market.

The same argument can be made for ETH USD. Ethereum may not be delivering the explosive gains seen in previous cycles, but its ecosystem remains the foundation of decentralized finance, tokenization, and much of the on-chain economy. If inflation cools and rate fears fade, both Bitcoin and Ethereum could quickly return to being the market’s favorite risk assets.

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The post Crypto News, June 24: Crypto Chaos as BTC USD Tumbles with Chip Stocks, ETH Foundation Axes Staff, Rate Hike Looms appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Uniswap has added a no-code token auction tool to the Uniswap Web App, letting any team configure and launch an onchain token sale from a browser without writing code. The tool runs on Uniswap's Continuous Clearing Auction mechanism, which conducts price discovery entirely onchain. In a CCA, bids… Read the full story at The Defiant

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed suit against Kentucky on Tuesday, bringing the total number of states facing federal litigation over prediction-market jurisdiction to nine. The CFTC's complaint seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to block Kentucky from enforcing state gaming… Read the full story at The Defiant

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Coinbase opened its Luxembourg office on June 24, naming the country its European Union hub under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework. Binance, by contrast, just withdrew its license bid in Greece.

The contrast shows how regulatory track records increasingly decide who keeps EU access before the deadline on July 1. Early movers gain a 27-state passport, while latecomers risk losing the bloc.

Coinbase Locks In Its Luxembourg Base

Coinbase won its MiCA license from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in June 2025. That came more than a year before the deadline.

The company already held national licenses in six EU countries, including Germany and France. It has also traded publicly on Nasdaq since 2021, giving regulators years of audited disclosures.

The single license covers more than 450 million people across the EU. Coinbase Luxembourg S.A. now sits on ESMA’s register, joining the firms approved under MiCA across the bloc.

Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad opened the office alongside Luxembourg Finance Minister Gilles Roth.

“Luxembourg has established itself as the EU’s leading hub for institutional crypto and tokenization,” he said in a post.

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Binance Faces a MiCA Reckoning

Binance took the opposite path this week. The exchange confirmed its Greek license bid had collapsed, leaving it absent from ESMA’s register.

Regulators have long weighed Binance’s record. In 2023, it pleaded guilty in the United States to money-laundering and sanctions violations.

Binance paid more than $4.3 billion, one of the largest corporate penalties in US history. Founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty and resigned as chief executive.

It now plans to seek approval in another EU member state. Binance says it meets MiCA standards and points to roughly 1,500 compliance staff.

“Binance is not leaving Europe,” Gillian Lynch, Binance’s head of Europe and UK, told Reuters.

What Comes Next

With days left before the deadline, more than 230 firms have cleared MiCA and can keep serving EU users. Coinbase and rivals including Kraken sit on ESMA’s list.

Binance does not. Its return now hinges on convincing another regulator that its compliance matches its size.

The post Coinbase Opens Luxembourg MiCA Hub as Binance Races EU Deadline appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Binance has withdrawn its MiCA license application in Greece and confirmed it will seek authorization in a different EU member state, with seven days before the bloc's regulatory wind-down deadline takes effect. The exchange confirmed the withdrawal Wednesday in a post on X, saying the target… Read the full story at The Defiant

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A wallet attributed to venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) withdrew 25,560 ETH, worth about $42.62M, from Binance on Tuesday, per onchain intelligence tracker Lookonchain. The move has drawn attention as a potential accumulation play amid a sustained ETH drawdown. Lookonchain identified the… Read the full story at The Defiant

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Five Senate Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Dick Durbin, and Ron Wyden, formally demanded hearings on June 23 into the $500 million UAE investment in Donald Trump crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, calling the deal unprecedented in American political history and demanding sworn testimony from White House officials on what they knew and when.

The letter landed four days after the senators’ earlier CFIUS inquiry went unanswered, and it sharpens the conflict-of-interest argument by tying a cascade of favorable UAE policy decisions directly to the investment timeline.

The demand is a narrative event. Whether it produces testimony, subpoenas, or anything resembling accountability depends entirely on Republican committee chairs who have shown no appetite to pursue the question – and on whether Democrats have the procedural leverage to force the issue. That leverage, it turns out, runs directly through the stablecoin and crypto market-structure bills Republicans are counting on.

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What the Senate Letter Actually Covers, and What It Can’t Force

The deal at the center of this inquiry closed four days before Trump’s inauguration. Lieutenants to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s National Security Advisor, purchased a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million, with $218 million paid upfront to entities tied to the Trump family and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s lead diplomat for the Middle East.

Two executives from G42 – the Abu Dhabi AI firm chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon, joined World Liberty Financial’s five-member board, giving the Emirati side effective veto power over key decisions.

The senators’ letter identifies three subsequent policy decisions that benefited the UAE: a $1.4 billion arms sale approved in May 2025 despite congressional objections over weapons reaching armed groups in Sudan; Treasury’s creation of a ‘Known Investor Pilot’ program to fast-track UAE investment approvals through CFIUS; and the Department of Commerce rescinding Biden-era chip export restrictions, authorizing G42 to receive 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips worth over a billion dollars.

U.S. intelligence officials had previously flagged G42 for providing U.S. technology that enhanced China’s missile capabilities, a detail that makes the chip authorization the most politically combustible element of this sequence.

This is not the first escalation. A February 13 letter from Warren and Senator Andy Kim had already asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to determine whether a formal CFIUS review of the UAE’s stake was required, with a March 5 deadline for written answers. That deadline passed without a public response. The June 23 letter represents the shift from requesting a review to demanding public, sworn testimony, a procedural escalation, though still not a subpoena.

World Liberty Financial’s spokesperson David Wachsman has stated that neither Trump nor Witkoff was involved in the investment transaction and that both have had no connection to World Liberty Financial since taking office. Democrats say that framing does not resolve the underlying conflict of interest, particularly given that a Trump-affiliated entity retains a claim to 75% of token revenues, approximately $400 million earned to date.

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The Legislative Hostage: USD1, Stablecoin Bills, and the 60-Vote Problem

The sharper pressure point is legislative. Republicans need at least seven Democratic Senate votes to clear the 60-vote threshold on both pending crypto regulation bills, the CLARITY Act on market structure, and the stablecoin legislation moving through the Banking Committee.

Senate Democrats have already signaled that stronger ethics and foreign-influence safeguards are conditions of their support, and the window to move these bills before the August recess is narrowing fast.

The conflict-of-interest dimension is especially acute for the stablecoin bill because World Liberty Financial is actively marketing USD1, its dollar-backed stablecoin backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents, while the regulatory framework that would govern that product is being negotiated in the same Congress.

A prior investment by MGX, another UAE state-backed vehicle, boosted the Trump family stablecoin market capitalization by nearly $2 billion overnight. Warren and Waters sent a separate letter to SEC Acting Chair Mark Uyeda demanding preservation of all records related to WLF and the Trump family, citing the revenue structure as an unprecedented conflict for any administration overseeing crypto regulation.

Senator Chris Murphy put it plainly on the Senate floor: the UAE investment ‘steered millions of dollars to Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff right before the Trump White House greenlit an unprecedented deal to sell advanced AI chips to the UAE.’ That framing, foreign government money in, favorable U.S. policy decisions out, is the core argument Democrats are taking into any hearing they can force. Representative Ro Khanna has gone further, referring the Delaware LLC used in the transaction to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware and calling the arrangement a potential constitutional violation.

The Trump administration and Republicans have not publicly criticized the World Liberty Financial deal, and the Trump crypto agenda broadly remains a White House priority, as seen in recent executive actions on crypto security policy. That political alignment means committee chairs have no incentive to schedule hearings voluntarily. Senate Democrats can slow or withhold votes on crypto legislation, but they cannot unilaterally convene a hearing or issue a subpoena from the minority.

The execution events that would actually matter here, a formal CFIUS review opened, a subpoena issued, a floor vote withheld, have not happened. What has happened is a sustained escalation of documented, on-the-record demands that build a paper trail, raise the political cost of inaction, and hand Democrats a concrete procedural threat: no ethics safeguards, no votes for the crypto bills Republicans need.

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The post Is The Senate Finally Pulling the Plug on Trump Crypto Activities? appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Nearly seven out of every 10 tokens launched on the Solana-based meme coin launchpad, Pump.fun, since January 2024, stopped trading on the same day they were created, according to a new analysis by CoinGecko.

The study examined more than 18.67 million tokens launched on the platform, excluding only those that never recorded any trading activity. It found that almost 69% of tokens, or around 12.8 million, saw their final trade on the day they launched and did not remain active beyond a single calendar day. Overall, only 850,000 tokens, or 4.55% of all launches, survived for more than 90 days.

Meme Coin Graveyard

In its latest report, CoinGecko said the high failure rate reflects how easy it is to create tokens on Pump.fun. The platform’s low barriers to entry allow creators to launch large numbers of tokens and quickly move on to new projects if early interest does not materialize.

Another 2.18 million tokens survived just one day after launch before activity ended. These projects carried over into the next calendar day but failed to sustain attention. CoinGecko said this pattern is consistent with tokens that briefly gained visibility through trending feeds or influencer mentions before interest quickly faded. Together, about 15 million tokens stopped trading either on the day they launched or the following day, which means more than 80% of all tokens analyzed failed within two days.

There has also been a steady decline in token survival beyond the first few days. Around 770,249 tokens, or more than 4%, remained active for two to three days, while 642,614 tokens, or 3.4%, survived between four and seven days. Another 460,697 tokens, representing 2.5%, continued trading for eight to 14 days.

Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and PEPE Slide

The broader meme coin market has been struggling for months after losing the strong momentum seen during the previous cycle. Several recovery attempts this year have failed to gain traction, which has left many popular tokens well below their earlier highs. The recent market turmoil has added further pressure.

The OG meme coin, Dogecoin (DOGE), for instance, has lost almost 25% over the past month. Shiba Inu (SHIB) was also down by nearly 20% during the same period. Meanwhile, Pepe (PEPE) shed over 27%.

The post Nearly 70% of Pump.fun Tokens Die on Launch Day: CoinGecko appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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