Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency, is taking a breath before the next phase of its rally. While all major metrics are stagnating, some macro indicators hint at a possible 50% upside for the crypto king’s price.

Bitcoin (BTC) price brutally rejected at $113,000

Bitcoin (BTC), the first cryptocurrency, failed to expand its rally to over $113,000. Yesterday, Sept. 5, 2025, its price jumped by 2%, but was stopped by bears. Immediately after touching the resistance level, it dropped back to $110,300.

At press time, Bitcoin’s (BTC) price has stabilized at around $110,900 on major spot trading platforms. In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin (BTC) is up by a negligible 0.24%.

The rest of the cryptocurrency market is also stagnant today. The aggregated capitalization of digital assets added 0.19% and hit $3.81 trillion in equivalent.

The cryptocurrency’s Fear and Greed Index dropped to 48/100, which is considered to be a “Neutral” indicator. As per CoinMarketCap, the cryptocurrency’s RSI sits at 48.46, which also signals about the market being at a crossroads.

In the last 24 hours, the cryptocurrency’s liquidations were below $100 million, which is an indicator of market apathy.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs log $400 million in outflows in two days

Exchange-traded products on spot Bitcoin (BTC) are witnessing outflows in recent sessions. On Sept. 4-5, U.S. BTC ETFs lost almost $400 million in equivalent.

On Sept. 4, 2025, $227 million was withdrawn by investors, followed by $160 million erased the next day. As a result, the aggregated spot Bitcoin ETFs AUM dropped to $144.5 billion.

BlackRock’s IBIT, Grayscale’s GBTC and Bitwise’s BITB are the three most affected ETFs; combined, they lost about $150 million in just one session.

As covered by U.Today previously, spot Bitcoin ETFs have been losing traction since early July 2025. Investors’ pessimism might be a signal of liquidity migration to alternative TradFi products, precious metals and stocks.

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At the same time, Ethereum spot ETFs were hit even harder last week. In seven days, spot Ether ETFs lost over $787 million in AUM, which makes this week the most painful for the segment ever.

Since Ethereum spot ETFs were launched in July 2024, its ecosystem has not been hit by such a massive liquidity outflow.

Bitcoin OI stuck in $79-$85 billion corridor for seven weeks

At the same time, this might be just a rebalance since spot ETH ETFs investors injected $2.8 billion in liquidity during the second week of August.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s open interest — the total USD-denominated value of all derivatives contracts that are not closed yet — has been stagnating since July.

As of printing time, the aggregated Bitcoin futures OI sits slightly below $80 billion in equivalent. In the last couple of weeks, it has remained almost unchanged. After reaching its peak at $88 billion on July 16, 2025, it started slowly declining.

Binance (BNB), the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and user count, is responsible for $14 billion out of this value.

For Ethereum futures, the net open interest has been sitting at $60 billion in equivalent for three weeks in a row. As such, markets might be confused about performance prospects for both assets.

Bitcoin (BTC) to $185,000? Here’s what Tephra Digital BTC/M2 model says

Despite sending mixed signals to its audience, Bitcoin (BTC) can still expand its rally over $150,000 per BTC easily. As a recent model by Tephra Digital asset management firm demonstrates, Bitcoin (BTC) closely follows the M2 metric — the aggregated volume of the U.S. money supply.

The analyst noticed that Bitcoin (BTC) follows M2 and gold price fluctuations with the lag of 100-200 days. Given that fact, the global cryptocurrency community should be prepared for an extremely bullish Q4, 2025.

Based on these assumptions, Bitcoin’s (BTC) price can naturally reach $167,000-$185,000 by the end of this year.

Bitcoin’s (BTC) price set its current ATH at $124,457 on Aug. 14, 2025. As of now, it is trading 11% below the record price.

This week, bitcoin hit a new all-time-high (above $118K) on the back of strong ETF flows and at least $280 million in new bitcoin treasury investments.

Treasury projects are also cropping up for Ethereum and Solana. Notably, Joseph Lubin’s SharpLink ETH treasury bought 10,000 ETH for that project, and Bitmine announced plans to raise $2 billion for more ETH buying. Off that strong signal, large-cap “alts” like ETH and SOL saw near year-to-date highs, carrying other hot projects like SUI higher as well.

It was a week when the crypto markets seemed to be enjoying themselves as new legislation nears and investment flows from new institutional sources.

The U.S. House said it would take up the Senate version of the GENIUS stablecoin bill, making final passage easier. And industry leaders met on Capitol Hill to lobby for a comprehensive “Market Structure” bill.

It wasn’t all plain sailing for innovators in the space. Robinhood faced skepticism over its tokenized stock plans, and then the Florida AG launched a lawsuit claiming the fintech engaged in deceptive crypto pricing.

The Trump family’s own crypto dealings continued to make news. Trump Media announced a multi-asset ETF application. And, Tron founder Justin Sun bought $100 million of $TRUMP and promised to help the memecoin go big in Asia and Africa.

Next week (dubbed “Crypto Week”) promises to be historic for crypto news. The House considers stablecoin and market structure legislation and the Senate has a hearing planned on digital asset taxation. First a trickle, then a flood.

With the near-passage of the GENIUS Act and a host of companies announcing stablecoin initiatives, stablecoin-related assets have been on a tear.
Circle, issuer of USDC, has seen its stock rise about 500% since its debut on June 5. This week, the company was valued at a staggering $77 billion, which is well above the total market cap of USDC itself (about $62 billion).

Bullish signals for stablecoins were all around:

CRCL is now the most popular foreign stock in South Korea.
The leading stablecoin issuer, Tether, has so much spare cash it can afford to have a determinative stake in Juventus, an Italian soccer team.
Coinbase, which actually makes more money from USDC than Circle, has seen its stock rise to its highest level in four years.
Even Euro-backed stablecoins, long a forgotten cousin of USD coins, are surging. Combined, they’re up 44% on the year, led by Circle’s EURC.

Stablecoins are the “quiet winners” from prediction markets like Polymarket.
And so on.

Traditional payment giants, like Mastercard and Visa, have been responding to stablecoin mania by making a flood of announcements of their own. Mastercard announced new tie-ups with Moonpay, Chainlink and Kraken this week.

Amid all the stablecoin news, we still had space for plenty of other topics.

SEI surged as well (albeit on stablecoin news).
The Federal Reserve officially said crypto no longer carried “reputational risks” for banks, leaving them to provide all the financial services they want for crypto companies.
World Liberty Financial, the Trump family vehicle, reversed a promise to make its token non-transferable.

In the summer months, sometimes it can feel like nothing much is happening. Not this year; crypto doesn’t wait for anyone.

A few weeks ago in October, much of the Ethereum community came together in South America as we reunited for Devcon VI in Bogotá, Colombia!

Today we want to say Thank You(!) to every attendee, volunteer, and contributor that made Devcon VI a success. In this blog post, we will recap the highlights of an incredibly fun event, and reminisce about Community Hubs, the Road to Devcon, insightful talks and panels, beautifully designed presenter rooms, and much more.

Watch the Recap Video to refresh your memory and enjoy the Devcon VI vibe!

What Devcon is all about

For those that are new to the Ethereum family, Devcon is the only annual conference held by the Ethereum Foundation, and it dates back to a small meetup in Berlin (ÐΞVcon-0) about a year prior to Ethereum’s first blocks. For some members of the Ethereum ecosystem, Devcon is a family reunion of sorts, while for others it’s a large stage on which to speak to (and learn about) the latest breakthroughs on content ranging from technical research to application releases and more.

Over the years, it has become clear that Devcon serves the community in other ways too. As we planned for Devcon VI, we worked to define those goals. Now we want to describe them once more and reflect on how we tried to accomplish each of them.

1. Collaboration & knowledge sharing

Devcon is not only a conference that features presentations, but it’s a unique place to get some work done with so many crucial builders in the same rooms. This year, we wanted them to have space to talk, to pull up to a whiteboard, and get to work together.

At Devcon VI we hosted workshop rooms, dedicated co-work areas, bookable meeting spaces, and a hacker basement where people came together to meet and work. We also offered a co-working space after the event in the venue.

The hacker basement – Photo by Shintaro Yoshimatsu

2. Teaching, communicating, and generating new ideas

Devcon is a chance to learn, and to teach. People traveled to Devcon to understand the cutting edge in the Ethereum space, and to share what they have learned over the last year with a large audience both at the event, and online.

Over the four days, 60,000 viewers around the world watched the Devcon livestreams (21,780 on the first day alone). Providing quality live streams and videos was crucial for Devcon Satellite Events – educational meetups around the world organized for those who couldn’t make it to Bogotá. The community organized Devcon Satellite Events in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Malaysia, Portugal and Turkey.

Community Hubs were dedicated spaces powered by the community for the community. Whether you started your day with a cacao ceremony in the Regens Hub, you went anon IRL by crafting a mask in the Temporary Anonymous Zone, witnessed the launch of the first Token Engineering Fundamentals program, or visualized your values about decentralization in the Design Hub, we hope that you felt more like a member of a diverse community than simply an attendee.

This was also the first Devcon that featured “Impact Booths”, which were spaces reserved for teams and efforts making a positive impact on Ethereum and the ecosystem at large. Great things happen when clients, rollup-teams, and other impactful groups come together in one place. Allegedly rivalrous rollup teams became friends, others won a rare Gitcoin plushie by revealing their favorite public good, some snagged a pair of the first ever socks.sol swag, or accepted the challenge of exchanging as many ENS POAPs as they could with other attendees to climb the leaderboard.

The Latin American community had its own creative space: a Colombian Chiva Bus. There, participants hosted discussion rounds, podcasts, and kept the music going until well after presentations had wrapped for the night.

The ETH Latam team in front of their Chiva Bus

3. Use our biggest stage to send a message

Devcon is a critical opportunity to communicate with the world about Ethereum. As the largest conference in our industry, the broader technology space and mainstream organizations pay attention to Devcon.

Devcon VI was the first after The Merge took place in September of this year! Ethereum Mainnet now uses proof-of-stake for consensus, and Danny Ryan talked about how busy the last few months have been for the Ethereum core devs, what difficulties they faced when they merged the consensus and execution layers, and what it means that they exist as one chain – Ethereum.

Other talks that are highly recommended to (re)watch are Aya Miyaguchi’s talk about Executing with Subtraction in the Infinite Garden, Kurt Opsahl’s talk The Value of Cryptocurrencies in Supporting Human Rights, and Pia Mancini’s talk The Future is Collective.

Apart from our recommendations, we also want to let you know what were some of the favorite picks by members of the community this year:

4. Using tech built on Ethereum through “dogfooding”

“Dogfooding” is the practice of using one’s own products or services. Devcon is a conference made by and for our community, and we want to make use of tools built by our community where possible and beneficial to attendees. Devcon wants to enable attendees to learn and experiment first-hand with products built on Ethereum.

Beginning with ticketing, 268 people participated in the on-chain raffle and auction before the general ticket sale began.

Smart Token Labs helped to make Devcon VI ticket attestations a reality, which allowed attendees to attest that they were Devcon VI ticket-holders without a wallet address or other personal identifying information being made public. Through their platform, separate third parties offered permissionless perks exclusively for Devcon VI attendees.

Speaking of dogfooding, how did you book your hotel in Bogotá? Attendees were able to pay for their rooms using crypto, thanks to Winding Tree.

You can now watch all talks and panels from Devcon VI on more open and robust platforms too – Swarm and Etherna helped us to make the Devcon Archive more decentralized by hosting the videos from talks and workshops. Check out the Swarm team’s recap for more information on their work at Devcon VI.

Many environmentally conscious attendees offset their flights with the carbon offsetter by Discarbon. As of now, participants have contributed to offset the equivalent of 403.9 Tonnes of CO2. Voters on the snapshot proposal chose to retire these credits from the Cordillera Azul National Park REDD+ Project in Perú.

And it goes without mention that everyone collected a lot of POAPs along the way.

Panel: Signing in With Ethereum: the Most Powerful Protocol in Web3?

5. Growing the Ethereum Ecosystem

Devcon is an opportunity to reach, excite and engage more local Ethereum communities all around the world. This year, the Latin American Ethereum community paved the Road to Devcon by organizing about 14 community events around Latin America, all leading up to Devcon VI in Bogotá, where the leaders of the Latam Ethereum community organized ETH Latam Day one day before the main event started. Watch their recap video here.

We believe Ethereum can have real-world impact in South America, and it is amazing to see how strong the Latin American Ethereum community has become.

EF’s Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi recently said that she “strongly believe[s] it’s important for builders to go out there and see all different parts of the world they are trying to change.” Some Devcon attendees used the opportunity that the event provided to explore South America a little further after Devcon. They came to know a community and part of the world that was previously foreign to them, or they arrived earlier and followed the Road to Devcon.

The Road to Devcon map

Devcon is also an opportunity to reach blockchain-related teams and newcomers from other industries. UNICEF was once more a guest and speaker at Devcon, as well as Arkadiy Kukarkin from the Internet Archive, and geopolitics and technology author Bruno Maçães.

Ethereum Foundation’s Next Billion team organized a one-day event for Devcon attendees, government officials, non-profit and civil society organizations, and “anyone interested in learning about how we can use Ethereum as a public good destined to help billions of people coordinate and thrive.” The event focused on the ‘real-world’ factors faced by those who use Ethereum to create impact.

The programming track Opportunity & Global Impact featured many more interesting talks and panels discussing how Ethereum can overcome “gaps in representation across cultures, nationalities, and economic classes.” (Next Billion)

Devcon VI welcomed many people that are newer to the Ethereum ecosystem and that attended Devcon for the first time. With other programming tracks like Governance & Coordination, and Cryptoeconomics, and with a lot of crypto art and music along the way, we hope they felt inspired by our amazing community by the week’s end.

Growing the Ethereum ecosystem also means supporting those who “have the potential to make a positive impact on Ethereum and its community, but who were unable to attend without financial assistance.” The Devcon Scholars Program had its second class this year, and 50 individuals got support to attend Devcon. Read some of their stories and their perspectives on Devcon VI here!

6. Fun!

Playfulness has always been part of Devcon and of the Ethereum ecosystem at large. This is why Devcon swag is colorful, Jonathan Mann is singing The Merge Song on stage, and the opening video features animated dancing bears merging into a panda representing Ethereum.

Calling Devcon a conference misses the mark in light of the colorful stages designed with love for detail, the adult playground with games like giant Jenga, and the hacker basement full of digital art to explore.

Ix Shells and Rosendo Merel Choy – Photo by Shintaro Yoshimatsu

Many of the fun things Devcon VI offered were brought to life by the community itself. The music stage in the Chiva Chillout was a community initiative that was born from a Devcon Improvement Proposal (DIP) by The Fellowship of Ethereum Musicians that turned into a larger project. You can watch a video with highlights from all four days here. Each day, attendees could join a graffiti tour organized by CRYPTOMURALS, and the teams of Social Dist0rtion Protocol and daedalus industries puzzled out the Treasure Hunt Challenge “Time To DAI” for you.

7. Feedback & Continued Improvement

We are always trying to learn and improve as well, and we thank everyone who gave us valuable feedback (you can still give feedback via our attendee survey and earn a POAP.)

There are a few things we learned this year. Wi-Fi was an issue again, especially on the first day, and we know there is room for improvement, and our SIM cards for attendees were more vital than ever! The food can be even more versatile – including better vegetarian and vegan options. Female, Transgender, Non-Binary and other genders made up 20%+ of Devcon VI’s attendees. Still, we can do more to make both Devcon and the ecosystem more representative in terms of gender diversity & inclusion in a still-male-dominated space.

As our event has grown larger and with over 6,000 in attendance, we recognize that the chances are greater for contention between some attendees. The first rule in the Devcon Code of Conduct is to “be excellent to each other”, and our commitment is to create a comfortable environment for all. We will review our CoC and consider improvements based on what we have learned this year.

What’s Ahead?

We are confident we won’t have to wait three years for the next Devcon. It’s already time for you to get involved by proposing ideas to improve Devcon.

Aya’s talk about subtraction made us reconsider the phrasing of DIPs. Devcon Improvement Proposals are now intended for collaborative community input on what should be changed (subtracted, added, or modified) for the upcoming Devcon7.

Where will Devcon7 take place? In short: We don’t know yet. But the choice will be hard, as we have many incredible suggestions for Devcon7 locations from members of the Ethereum community.

We hope that you’ll be as excited as we are when we share more information in the weeks to come. For now, thank you once again to all of our attendees for joining us in Bogotá, to the presenters, the Impact teams, Supporters, Community Hub organizers, DIP contributors, and volunteers that made Devcon VI possible.

Until we meet again, you can check out more photos by the Devcon team here, and find more photos by Shintaro Yoshimatsu here.

–
EF Devcon Team

With The Merge now firmly behind us, protocol developers have been making progress across a (record?) number of areas over the past few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle tries, history expiry, SSZ and more have all seen significant progress recently!

In order to help move each of these threads forward, and to run through one more series of Shapella stress tests, client team members gathered in person for a week-long interop event in Austria: Edelweiss

Unlike Amphora, which had a singular focus on The Merge, this event had two major tracks, focused on the Shapella and ProtoDanksharding network upgrades respectively. Several breakout sessions were also held to dive into other open problems. Here is a brief overview of what was accomplished, as well as links to artifacts from the workshops & ongoing discussion threads.

Shapella

The week began with a Shanghai/Capella mainnet shadow fork. Flooding the network with withdrawal credential update messages revealed performance issues on the network, and led to a different consensus-layer queueing design to process these messages.

Throughout the week, additional devnets were launched and stress tested with large amounts of credential updates, withdrawals, and even bad blocks. Client implementations ended the week hardened and ready for the fork on the newly-launched Zhejiang testnet.

Assuming the Shapella upgrade happens without issue on Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will be upgraded next!

(Proto)Danksharding

The main EIP-4844 interop goal was the launch of an all-client EIP-4844 devnet. By Friday, all but one client were syncing on the network!

Several design discussions also took place during the week, stemming from a transaction pool design proposal. Questions around allowing “blobless” 4844 transactions, if and how blocks & blobs should be coupled for gossip and how to encode these transactions were discussed extensively and surfaced on last week’s AllCoreDevs Execution Layer call.

Over the next few weeks, teams hope to finalize all spec changes resulting from these discussions and launch a new devnet.

EVM Object Format (EOF)

After having been conditionally accepted and then removed from Shanghai, EOF was one of the topics where opinions about the best path forward diverged the most.

Whether EOF should ban code introspection, aim for a minimal deployment ASAP, or even only ever go live on L2s were all discussed during the week.

No concrete specification came out of the workshop, but teams now have a shared understanding of the design space and potential paths forward. The EOF breakout rooms resumes next week to continue this conversation!

Everything Else

Aside from these three topics, teams discussed the future of light clients on the network, how the EL & CL specs processes could converge (and potentially carve out ERCs from other EIPs), launched a new Verkle Trie testnet, put forward a proposal to SSZ encode EL transactions, discussed changing the validator EL->CL deposit mechanics, and even started a Capella annotated spec!

Next Steps

Less than a week after the event, client teams have begun discussing Shapella timelines for testnets. Keep an eye out on this blog, as well as on clients’ repositories, for announcements in the coming weeks!

For other efforts, such as EIP-4844, EOF, SSZ, expect to see active design discussions in the coming weeks, leading to prototype implementations afterwards.

Shapella is almost here, and Dencun is clear on the horizon

TL;DR: The EPF concluded its third cohort and is preparing for the fourth cohort. Applications will be open soon. Sign up here to get notified when they open.

The Ethereum Protocol Fellowship recently completed its third successful cohort in February 2023. Its completion marked 4 months of immersive learning, research and contribution to the Ethereum core ecosystem from a group of talented and dedicated fellows. Before we look into the third cohort, let’s recap what Ethereum core development is and how EPF fits into its landscape.

Protocol development

At the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem lies core development, the work on the research and code that powers the Ethereum network, which includes client implementations, specifications, and other foundational aspects.

Maintaining a healthy inflow of core developers is crucial for the continued success of Ethereum. These developers and researchers collaborate to shape the direction of Ethereum’s cutting-edge roadmap, tackle its various challenges, and implement the solutions. Their efforts ensure that the protocol remains up-to-date and can handle the increasing demands placed on it by its growing user base.

However, jumping into core protocol development is not an easy task. There is no official organization that manages protocol development. The rapid progress of Ethereum protocol improvements, coupled with scattered information, can make it difficult for people to keep up. There are many areas and roadmap goals being worked on, each having their own rabbit holes to dive down.

The Ethereum Protocol Fellowship was designed as a solution to make core contribution more approachable with the goal of helping developers join the various teams that work on the protocol.

Protocol Fellowship

The Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF) is a 4 month permissionless fellowship program that helps to streamline the process of becoming a core developer.

The program is structured to give fellows the autonomy and independence required to work as a core developer. Participants choose their area of interest, propose a project, and work on it for the remainder of the program. They receive valuable feedback from current core developers and become part of a community of like-minded individuals eager to learn by doing.

EPF projects are diverse and contribute to various areas, including research, consensus and execution clients, testing, and protocol security. The EPF is fully open and permissionless, allowing anyone to follow along and participate in the program. A portion of the budget is reserved to award outstanding contributions from permissionless participants. Many EPF fellows have made valuable contributions to the Ethereum core ecosystem, and some have secured long-term positions on core teams like Lighthouse, Teku, Prysm, Ethereum Foundation Research, Flashbots, Optimism and others.

Third cohort

Applications for the third cohort opened on September 1st, 2022. After reviewing over 600 applications and conducting many interviews, 23 participants were selected to join the official cohort. However, being a permissionless program, the cohort ended with a total of 36 contributors.

During the 4 month period, fellows had the opportunity to work with 27 core developer mentors from various client and research teams. Their work was regularly reported in over 300 weekly updates. Fellows also participated in weekly standup and office hours calls to share updates, discuss projects, and participate in AMA interview sessions with mentors and core devs.

Altogether, fellows proposed and contributed to 20 projects, some of which are still receiving contributions. These projects not only represent a valuable learning experience but also meaningful contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem.

EPF Third Cohort Projects

EPF Project Details

All resources of the program can be found in its repository. You can follow all activity in the cohort there, checkout projects resources, development updates and fellows’ notes. Projects are not only FOSS contributions but all of the work done within the cohort is fully open, being an actual part of Ethereum’s open research and resources.

But it’s not all about work and contributions. One of the crucial aspects of the EPF is the opportunity to meet many of the inspirational people who participate in core development. During EthDenver, over half of the cohort gathered to participate in EPF Day, a full day of programming with project presentations, panel discussions and social time.

Next Cohort Soon

Following the success of the third cohort, we are eagerly preparing to start the fourth cohort of the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. For anyone interested in diving into Ethereum core development, stay tuned for the application announcement in the coming weeks. To get notified, join the EPF google group.

Meanwhile, you can prepare your application by ensuring a foundational understanding of the Ethereum protocol, contributing to open-source projects through your GitHub account, especially contributions to existing projects in the Ethereum ecosystem, and giving some thought to the type of project you may like to work on.

Join us in shaping the future of Ethereum. Join the EPF.