The price of bitcoin neared $68,400 on Wednesday, reaching its highest level since July and sparking a rally across the crypto sector.

Bitcoin is up more than 9% over the last week and ether is up about 7%. Other popular coins have also rallied, with solana up close to 10% in the past seven days and and dogecoin up 15%.

The gains have made their way to crypto-pegged stocks. Digital asset exchange Coinbase climbed almost 7% on Wednesday, bringing its three-day rally to 19%. The stock is at its highest since August.

Bitcoin miners Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms also moved higher on Wednesday.

One reason for bitcoin’s 53% gain so far this year is a host of new spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds that hit the market in January, welcoming in a host of new investors. Ether ETFs followed in July.

Samara Cohen, chief investment officer of ETF and index investments at BlackRock, told CNBC recently that 80% of buyers of its iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) are direct investors. Of those, 75% have never owned a BlackRock ETF, she said.

“We went into this journey with the expectation that we needed to educate ETF investors on crypto and on bitcoin specifically,” Cohen said. “As it turns out, we have done a lot of education of crypto investors on the benefits of the ETP wrapper.”

WATCH: Trump’s coin sale misses targets

It’s been just over twenty-four hours since the launch of the Donald Trump-endorsed digital coin “WLFI,” and the token is failing to deliver on the ambitious fundraising goals set by its founding team.

World Liberty Financial — which bills itself as a crypto bank where customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in digital coins — began its token sale on Tuesday morning. On Monday, project co-founder Zachary Folkman bragged in a pre-launch stream on X that “well over 100,000 people” were whitelisted to invest.

“We knew that this project was highly anticipated. We knew that there was a lot of excitement in the marketplace,” said Folkman to the 12,000 people tuning into the event on X. “However, these numbers are just, in my opinion, unheard of, and I think we’re setting all sorts of new records in crypto.”

But blockchain data tracked by Etherscan shows that about 9,050 unique wallet addresses hold the token as of Wednesday morning, representing roughly 9% of the total number of people who registered.

Trump pumped the coin in a video post on X on Tuesday evening, promoting the World Liberty website and telling his followers that the token sale was live and that “crypto is the future.”

In a roadmap given to prospective investors first viewed by The Block, the WLF proposal says the coin is looking to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in its initial sale. The platform says, so far, it has sold more than 788 million tokens at $0.015 per token.

That is less than 4% of the 20 billion tokens made available for public sale and amounts to around $11.8 million, still well off the $300 million fundraising target.

WLF did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Part of the problem was that the project website, the exclusive marketplace for the new coin, suffered regular, lengthy outages frequently showing a page saying, “We are under maintenance.”

But there are other roadblocks that may have impacted the coin’s debut. WLFI is a Regulation D token offering, which means retail investors have largely been cut out of the process.

This provision makes it possible to raise capital without first registering a security with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but certain conditions must be met, such as limiting the size of the sale and restricting it to accredited investors, defined in part as having a net worth of more than $1 million. While the offering is one way to reduce legal exposure, it cuts down on the size of the potential investor pool. 

The World Liberty team has also been specific in calling WLFI a governance token that allows holders to vote on decisions regarding the protocol, but would not signify equity in the venture itself.

As of now, however, there’s nothing for WLFI token holders to vote on since the crypto bank connected to the digital coin doesn’t yet exist.

Last week, WLF began the crypto bank approval process with Aave, one of the longest-running and most-trusted crypto lending platforms.

World Liberty has not released an official white paper or formal business plan to the public. A 400-word proposal posted to Aave’s governance forum, which is used to discuss and vote on proposed projects such as WLF, is nearly all that’s been disclosed.

Coin holders get a sort of I-O-U until the platform is approved and goes live. In the meantime, investment in the coin goes to the platform’s treasury.

WLF’s website adds in the fine print that Trump and his family members may receive tokens from World Liberty Financial and that they are “entitled to receive significant fees for services provided to World Liberty Financial, which amount cannot yet be determined.”

U.S. crude futures edged lower Wednesday to trade below $71 per barrel, after selling off steeply in the previous session on reports that Israel will not attack Iran’s oil facilities.

The U.S. benchmark tumbled more than 4% on Tuesday, after Israel told the U.S. that it will limit its retaliatory strikes to military targets in Iran, senior Biden administration officials told NBC News.

Crude oil prices have given up most of the gains made in the wake of Iran’s Oct. 1 ballistic missile attack on Israel, as fears of an oil supply disruption in the Middle East have eased.

Here are Wednesday’s energy prices:

• West Texas Intermediate November contract: $70.28 per barrel, down 30 cents, or 0.43%. Year to date, U.S. crude oil has fallen nearly 2%.
• Brent December contract: $73.94 per barrel, down 31 cents, or 0.42%. Year to date, the global benchmark has declined about 4%.
• RBOB Gasoline November contract: $2.0378 per gallon, little changed. Year to date, gasoline has decreased about 3%.
• Natural Gas November contract: $2.464 per thousand cubic feet, down 1.36%. Year to date, gas has pulled back about 2%.

This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Breather from rally
U.S. markets fell Tuesday, weighed down by a drop in semiconductor stocks and a 8.1% slide in UnitedHealth. Asia-Pacific stocks were mostly lower Wednesday. Asian chip stocks, like Tokyo Electron and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, retreated on news of ASML’s disappointing forecast and reports of the U.S. possibly imposing export controls on AI chips.

ASML slumps
Shares of semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML plunged 16% on a downbeat earnings report. For 2025, the Netherlands-based company thinks net sales will come in at the lower half of its previous projection. ASML missed expectations on net bookings by 3 billion euros for the September quarter, though net sales beat expectations.

Better than ChatGPT
Alibaba updated its artificial-intelligence translation tool, based on a model called Marco MT, on Wednesday. The Chinese e-commerce giant said its product performs better than those by Google and DeepL, according to an assessment by benchmarking tool FLoRes. Fifteen languages are supported by Alibaba’s AI-powered translation tool.

Banks beat expectations
Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup beat earnings and revenue estimates for their third quarter. Goldman was the standout performer: Its profit jumped 45% from a year earlier. Year on year, Bank of America experienced a 12% drop in net income and Citigroup’s net income fell 8.6%.

[PRO] Repositioning for slower rate cuts
September’s strong jobs report and higher-than-expected inflation reading mean that the U.S. Federal Reserve is unlikely to repeat its jumbo 50-basis-point rate cut at its November meeting. Here’s how strategists are repositioning in view of changing rate cut expectations.

Weighed down by ASML’s 16% dive and a report by Bloomberg on potential AI-chip export controls, semiconductor stocks like Nvidia and AMD fell 4.7% and 5.2% respectively. That gave the VanEck Semiconductor ETF its worst day since Sept. 3. As a result, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite lost 1.01%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which just yesterday was basking in its accomplishment at closing above the 43,000 level for the first time, fell 0.75% to dip into the 42,000 territory again. UnitedHealth’s 8.1% drop dragged down the Dow.

Last, the S&P 500 retreated 0.76%.

Still, investors are the most bullish in four years, according to the October BofA Global Fund Manager Survey. They’re also optimistic about the economy: 74% investors believe the U.S. will avoid a recession.

Anticipation of more rate cuts by the U.S. Federal Reserve and hopes that Beijing will unleash more stimulus to boost its economy are driving up investor sentiment, according to Michael Hartnett, an investment strategist at BofA.

Indeed, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, who’s a member of the Federal Open Market Committee this year, noted that the central bank is “a long way from where [rates are] likely to settle.” That means “the decisions that are really in front of us are ones about how quickly to adjust towards that level” – not whether to keep rates high in light of how strong recent economic data has been.

Another positive sign for markets is how the S&P and Dow hit all-time highs on Monday, but the Nasdaq was still a few percentage points away from its peak. “This subtle divergence is technical evidence that the market has been moving away from the Magnificent Seven mega-caps,” wrote Piper Sandler’s chief market technician Craig Johnson.

– CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Samantha Subin, Yun Li, Lisa Kailai Han and Alex Harring contributed to this story.