Crypto is nearing a critical period in American politics, with House Speaker Mike Johnson declaring next week “Crypto Week” as two key crypto bills approach make-or-break moments.
Meanwhile, as Fundstrat’s Tom Lee lays out his thesis for Ethereum to hit $10,000, Elon Musk is launching his own bitcoin-friendly America Party and Michael Saylor pauses Bitcoin buys (gasp) in what could be a changing of the guard between BTC and ETH as Bit Digital sells its Bitcoin treasury to go all-in on Ethereum.
Here are the biggest stories in crypto this week…
Fundstrat’s Tom Lee may be the most recognizable guest on CNBC these days. He’s most known for getting a lot of his price calls right. Now, he’s making another big call: That Ethereum is on its way to $10,000.
In one of our post popular interviews of the year, Tom walks through why he joined Bitmine as Chairman to launch an Ethereum treasury company — and why he thinks Ethereum is undervalued today at $2,500. Mainly, it has to do with tokenization, stablecoin adoption, and increasing activity coming back to Ethereum.
“As more things in the financial world and real world become tokenized, then financial institutions, like Goldman and JP Morgan and Amazon, Walmart, as they do stablecoins, are also going to want to stake Ethereum itself,” he said about his bet on Bitmine. “So, we’re essentially getting in front of what other businesses will do.”
And given Ethereum remains well off its prior highs, Lee sees a larger opportunity to get ahead of the market. That may very well trigger an ETH catch up trade as other treasury companies throw their hat into the ring to scoop up Ethereum.
Case in point: publicly traded company Bit Digital, which had already made a name for itself as a Bitcoin treasury company, actually announced they sold all their Bitcoin and converted those holdings into ETH to acquire 100,603 ether as they look to become “the preeminent ETH holding company in the world.” Shares ended the day up nearly 20%.
Core to anyone’s bullish theses on crypto has always been: eventually stocks, bonds, and any asset will be tradeable onchain.
That moment seems to have arrived. Last week, Robinhood announced they tapped Arbitrum to tokenize stock trading in the EU, and even planned to issue tokenized private shares in OpenAI and SpaceX.
Now, it may be a fair question to wonder why tokenizing these assets helps the end user whatsoever (perhaps the topic of a future newsletter) but for now, it at the very least signals that this move to tokenize the trading of traditional assets onchain is happening faster than some may have thought. Bernstein analysts even predicted that the Robinhood news may trigger an “equity tokenization wave.”
Either way, activity is looking up — and it’s Arbitrum’s / Ethereum’s win for now.
It’s notable that Robinhood is tokenizing stock trading in the EU first, since regulatory clarity has been lacking in America — but that could soon change.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has declared next week to be “Crypto Week” as both the stablecoin bill and the market infrastructure bill have their respective days in the House. Of course, the GENIUS stablecoin bill has already passed the Senate, but still needs to clear the lower chamber. Things appear to be progressing exactly as House Financial Chair French Hill told us they would last month (albeit at a slightly slower pace.)
It will be interesting to see how Congress moves forward now — and whether they can get both done (or neither.) Prediction market Kalshi currently has odds at about 72% of at least the stablecoin bill passing before the end of the month (up from 55% last week.)
Before Crypto Week officially kicks off in D.C., there will be an initial hearing in the House Ways & Means Committee on Wednesday morning titled, “Making America the Crypto Capital of the World: Ensuring Digital Asset Policy Built for the 21st Century.”
But as Republicans and Democrats hash out their differences, it’s worth noting that Elon Musk has thrown his hat into the ring to seed a new political party dubbed the “America Party.” Few details are known about how Musk intends to channel his disgust with the recent debt load triggered by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, but one popular belief among Bitcoiners appears to be a central tenet.
Responding to a user’s question on X about whether the America Party will embrace Bitcoin, Musk responded, “Fiat is hopeless, so yes.” Then, he followed Forward party founder Andrew Yang. Could we be witnessing a UBI/Tech alliance nearly a decade in the making?
