BlackRock digital assets head Robert Mitchnick said Bitcoin and Ethereum remain the only two cryptocurrencies attracting meaningful investor demand. This comes as the asset manager evaluates future ETF products. Speaking on CNBC following the launch of BlackRock’s ETHB staked ether…
Crypto is having one of its best days in weeks. Bitcoin has pushed above $73,000, Ethereum has cleared $2,180, and the total crypto market has added $90 billion in value in the past 15 hours alone. Here is what is actually driving it.
The Numbers First
Bitcoin: Up 4.80% to $72,867, adding $60 billion to its market cap in 15 hours
Ethereum: Up 6.11% to $2,170, adding $15.2 billion to its market cap
XRP: Up 4.66% to $1.43, with $3.3 billion in daily volume
Solana: Up 6.94% to $91.61
Dogecoin: Up 5.20% to $0.098
Total market cap: $2.49 trillion, up 4.82%
Short liquidations: Nearly $200 million wiped out in 15 hours
The Fear and Greed Index sits at 37, still in fear territory, which tells you this rally is happening while most of the market remains cautious. That is often when the sharpest moves occur.
What Actually Triggered the Move
Three macro data prints dropped today and the market liked what it saw, at least partially.
Inflation cooling. The PCE Price Index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, came in at 2.8% against expectations of 2.9%. Lower than expected inflation reduces pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates elevated, which is historically good for risk assets including crypto.
Jobs market holding up. JOLTS Job Openings came in at 6,946,000 against expectations of 6,700,000. A stronger jobs market signals economic resilience, which reduces fears of a hard recession that would drag crypto down alongside everything else.
GDP slowing but not crashing. US Q4 GDP came in at 0.7% against expectations of 1.4%. Growth is slowing, which adds to the case for the Fed to ease monetary conditions sooner rather than later.
Put those three together and the market read a clear message: inflation is easing, the economy is not collapsing, and rate cuts may be back on the table. That combination is fuel for crypto.
The Short Squeeze Effect
Nearly $200 million in short positions were liquidated as prices moved higher. When traders who bet against the market are forced to close their positions, they have to buy back the assets they shorted, which adds upward pressure on top of the organic buying already happening. This is called a short squeeze and it accelerates moves that are already in motion.
The result was a fast, clean run higher across the entire market rather than a slow grind, which is exactly what short liquidation events look like in practice.
Where Things Stand Now
The Altcoin Season Index sits at 40 out of 100, leaning toward Bitcoin dominance but showing altcoins beginning to participate more actively. The average crypto RSI is at 61.17, approaching overbought territory but not there yet, which shows there is still room to move before the market needs to cool off.
The important level for Bitcoin is holding above $72,000. If it can close the day above that, the path toward $75,000 and beyond opens up.
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Ethereum and TAO price rally is drawing fresh attention across the crypto market as both assets post strong gains in the latest trading session. Ethereum is gradually pushing higher toward a key resistance zone near $2300 and Bittensor’s TAO token has already confirmed a breakout, surging more than 14% and outperforming most major altcoins.
The move comes as the broader crypto market stabilizes after recent volatility, with traders rotating capital into high-momentum altcoins and AI-related tokens. With Ethereum attempting to break out of a prolonged consolidation range and TAO already leading the move, market participants are watching closely to see whether this momentum could trigger a wider altcoin rally.
Ethereum Price Climbs 4% as Breakout Setup Forms
Ethereum price has climbed around 4% in the latest session, signaling improving momentum after several weeks of consolidation. For weeks, ETH has been trading within a descending resistance structure, forming lower highs while maintaining strong support near the $2,050–$2,100 demand zone. The recent price recovery suggests buyers are attempting to regain control as ETH approaches the upper boundary of this range.
ETH price structure resembles a compression phase, where price gradually tightens between support and resistance. Such patterns often precede strong directional moves once the resistance level is cleared.
Key Ethereum Levels to Watch
Support
$2,030 – Immediate support
$1,980 – Major demand zone
Resistance
$2,350 – Near-term breakout level
$2,550 – Major resistance
$3,000 – Potential bullish target
If Ethereum manages to break above the $2,350 resistance zone, analysts believe it could trigger a stronger rally toward the $2,800–$3,000 region, confirming a broader trend reversal.
TAO Price Surges 14% Following Range Breakout
While Ethereum is still approaching its breakout level, TAO price has already confirmed a bullish breakout, surging nearly 14% in the latest session.
Bittensor’s TAO token has been gaining strong attention due to its connection with the AI-driven decentralized network ecosystem, which has become one of the most talked-about narratives in crypto this year. The recent rally began after TAO successfully reclaimed a key support zone around $210–$220, where buyers stepped in aggressively. Since then, the token has broken above its descending trendline resistance, confirming a bullish breakout pattern. Momentum indicators are also strengthening, with rising volume supporting the move, suggesting traders are actively accumulating the asset during the breakout.
TAO Price Key Levels to Watch
Support
$220 – Immediate support
$200 – Major demand zone
Resistance
$257 – Near-term resistance
$280 – Next breakout target
$390 – Major long-term resistance
If the bullish momentum continues, analysts believe TAO could attempt a move toward $300–$320 in the coming sessions.
Altcoin Momentum Building Across the Market
The simultaneous Ethereum and TAO price rally is also highlighting a potential shift in market dynamics. Historically, strong moves in Ethereum often act as a catalyst for broader altcoin momentum. At the same time, TAO’s surge reflects the growing interest in AI-related crypto projects, which have become one of the most dominant narratives in the digital asset space.
With Ethereum approaching a technical breakout and TAO already leading gains, traders are beginning to speculate that the market could be entering an early phase of an altcoin momentum cycle.
Market Outlook
If Ethereum manages to break above its key resistance zone while TAO maintains its bullish structure, the current Ethereum and TAO price rally could extend further and potentially trigger broader gains across the altcoin market. At the time of writing, Ethereum price was trading near $2,150 while TAO price hovered around $260, reflecting growing investor interest as momentum returns to select altcoins. For now, traders are closely watching whether Ethereum can clear the $2,650 resistance level, while TAO attempts to sustain its breakout and push toward higher price targets.
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A new market analysis from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant hints that Ethereum (ETH) could face deeper downside if the current market downturn continues. The firm estimates that ETH may decline toward $1,500 by late Q3 or early Q4 of 2026 if bearish conditions persist.
What makes the situation unusual is that the warning comes even as Ethereum’s network usage continues to hit record highs, creating what analysts describe as a growing disconnect between adoption and price.
The “Adoption Paradox” Behind Ethereum’s Weak Price
CryptoQuant highlights what it calls an “adoption paradox.” Traditionally, higher network usage has supported price growth in major cryptocurrencies. However, Ethereum is now showing the opposite trend.
Data shows daily active addresses and smart contract interactions recently reached new all-time highs, even surpassing levels seen during the 2021 bull cycle. Despite this surge in activity, ETH has fallen more than 50% from its cycle peak, indicating that strong on-chain usage is no longer translating into price momentum.
This breakdown in the historical relationship between adoption and valuation is now raising concerns among analysts.
Capital Leaving the Ethereum Network
Another factor pointing to potential downside is weakening capital inflows. CryptoQuant’s one-year realized market cap metric, which tracks new capital entering the network, has recently turned negative.
This shows that more money is flowing out of Ethereum than coming in, a trend that often appears during extended market corrections.
At the same time, Ethereum has recorded rising inflows to exchanges, especially when compared with Bitcoin. Increased exchange deposits typically indicate that holders may be preparing to sell, adding further pressure on prices.
The ETH/BTC pair has also continued to weaken, signaling that Ethereum is losing relative strength against Bitcoin during the current market cycle.
Six Straight Red Months Signal Market Stress
Ethereum’s recent price action reflects the broader pressure. As of March 2026, ETH has recorded six consecutive red monthly candles, a rare streak that pushed the asset down toward the $2,000–$2,050 range.
According to CryptoQuant analysts, the market is currently going through a “clean-up phase,” where weaker positions are being flushed out of the system. At the same time, extremely negative funding rates across derivatives markets show that bearish sentiment among traders has reached extreme levels.
Could This Phase Build a Future Base?
Despite the short-term risks, analysts believe the current conditions may not be entirely negative. Historically, periods where network usage remains strong while prices stay suppressed have sometimes helped build a stronger long-term price base.
If capital inflows eventually return and market sentiment improves, Ethereum could use this phase of heavy adoption to support a future recovery cycle once broader market conditions stabilize.
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Gareth Soloway, chief market strategist at VerifiedInvesting.com, is staying bullish on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP despite recent volatility, and he says the charts are giving him a clear roadmap for what comes next.
Bitcoin: $80,000 to $85,000 in Sight
Soloway says Bitcoin is forming a classic bullish consolidation pattern. The key signal he is watching is an inside bar formation off a strong green reversal candle. As long as Bitcoin does not post a daily close below that candle’s low, the bullish structure remains fully intact.
Bitcoin recently pushed above a key trend line but failed to confirm the breakout, which Soloway says was not a bearish signal. In his framework, confirmation requires a follow-through close, not just a single push above resistance. Without confirmation, the move simply becomes part of the ongoing pattern.
With Bitcoin trading around $70,000, Soloway is now watching for a confirmed breakout. If it happens, his upside target zone sits at $80,000 to $85,000, roughly $8,500 to $13,500 from current levels.
Ethereum: Break Above $2,150 Opens the Door to $2,700
Ethereum is showing the same pattern structure as Bitcoin, a bullish flag forming inside a green reversal candle range with no daily close below support. Soloway says the level to watch is $2,150. A confirmed break above that triggers a move toward the $2,600 to $2,700 target zone.
XRP: Target Zone of $1.77 to $1.90
XRP is also setting up similarly, with a clean green reversal candle and inside bar action. Soloway’s upside target sits between $1.77 and $1.90, where a downward-sloping trend line and prior resistance converge.
His core message is simple: ignore the noise, follow the charts, and trade probability not emotion.
Vitalik Buterin walked into a cryptography conference expecting to find use cases for Ethereum. He walked out having questioned whether that was even the right way to think about it.
In a post on X today, the Ethereum co-founder described attending Real World Crypto, a conference focused on cryptography rather than cryptocurrency, as a clarifying experience. The people in the room shared values around privacy, open-source software, and censorship resistance. But they carried none of the assumptions that typically come with being inside the crypto bubble.
So Buterin tried an experiment. He asked himself: if you strip away all loyalty to Ethereum, all community identity, all existing narratives, and simply ask what this technology is genuinely useful for, what answer do you get?
The answer surprised even him.
Not Smart Contracts. Not DeFi. A Bulletin Board.
The most fundamental use case for Ethereum, Buterin now argues, is something cryptographers have needed for decades: a public bulletin board.
The concept is simple but critical. Many secure systems, including online voting protocols, software version control, and certificate revocation, all need somewhere to post data publicly that anyone can read and no one can quietly delete or alter. They do not need complex computation. They do not strictly need money changing hands. What they need, at the most basic level, is reliable data availability with no single point of control.
That is exactly what a blockchain provides. And it is a need that predates crypto entirely.
The timing of this realisation matters. Ethereum recently completed an upgrade called PeerDAS, which increased the network’s data availability capacity by 2.3x, with a roadmap to scale it another 10 to 100 times higher. The infrastructure Buterin is describing is actively being built, at a time when fees on the network are at historic lows.
Payments Second, Smart Contracts Third
Buterin did not abandon the rest of Ethereum’s value stack. He reordered it.
Payments come second in his framework, and again the framing is practical rather than financial. If you are running a permissionless service, whether it is an API, a messaging app, or a data protocol, you face a spam problem the moment you make it free. ETH-denominated micropayments, particularly through zero-knowledge payment channels, solve this without requiring users to hand over a phone number or submit to identity verification. Payment as infrastructure, not payment as a product.
Smart contracts come third. And here Buterin made his most provocative admission: technically, for almost every application that does not directly involve ETH itself, smart contracts are just a convenience. You could build the same things using the chain purely as a bulletin board, handling computation off-chain through cryptographic proofs. But standardisation is hard, and the smart contract model solves the interoperability problem elegantly enough that it remains the right practical choice.
Global Shared Memory
Buterin’s final framing is the one likely to travel furthest. Stripped of all the financial complexity and ecosystem politics, Ethereum is, in his words, global shared memory.
A place where anything can be written, everything can be read, and nothing can be unilaterally erased. Not by a company. Not by a government. Not by Buterin himself.
Most of the internet does not work that way. It runs on servers owned by someone who can change their mind. Ethereum is the rare exception, and Buterin is now arguing that the world’s developers and builders have not fully grasped how useful that exception actually is.
The bulletin board has been there the whole time. The question is whether enough people will start using it for what it was always capable of.
The Ethereum price might finally be catching its breath. After weeks of brutal leverage-driven chaos, the market appears to be shifting gears away from forced liquidations and toward something far less dramatic: actual demand.
Recent data suggests the violent liquidation cycles that dominated late February are fading. Short liquidations, which previously spiked during the market’s most chaotic moments, have now dropped sharply to around 700. In simpler terms, the short squeeze fuel that once powered explosive moves has largely burned out.
And without that forced buying pressure, the market has to do something unfamiliar and that to move organically with spot demand.
Ethereum Price Leaves Liquidation Chaos
But let’s rewind a bit. Back in mid-February, leveraged traders were getting absolutely steamrolled. Long liquidations surged as overexposed positions were wiped out, sending waves of forced selling through the market.
Now that storm has calmed. Per analyst PelinayPA, current long liquidations are hovering near 1,000, dramatically lower than the aggressive flush seen earlier in the year. Meanwhile, short liquidations have also cooled, suggesting traders on both sides are finally dialing back the leverage.
That matters more than it sounds. When both long and short liquidations shrink simultaneously, it usually signals a transition phase. Less leverage means fewer forced moves. Fewer forced moves mean price action becomes… well, normal. The ETH/USD market appears to be entering that quieter stage.
Spot Demand Slowly Takes Over
Well, here’s where things get even more interesting. As seen over the past 15 days, price action has quietly climbed even while liquidation volumes continue to fall. That’s a subtle but important signal. When prices rise without massive liquidations, it usually means one thing: spot buyers are stepping in.
Not leveraged gamblers. Actual investors. Of course, the momentum isn’t screaming “bull market” just yet. The Ethereum price chart still shows a market searching for direction rather than exploding higher.
Technical indicators confirm the cautious tone. The RSI is sitting near the 50 midline, which basically screams neutrality. Meanwhile, the CMF is hovering around zero, suggesting that capital flows are balanced rather than aggressively bullish. In other words, momentum exists but it’s still tentative.
Institutional Access Changes Narrative
Moreover, A significant development just hit the market: the official launch of BlackRock’s Ethereum staking ETF, ETHB. The new fund offers investors exposure not only to the asset’s market price but also to on-chain staking yields.
And the pricing? A 0.25% fee, matching the structure of its non-staking counterpart, ETHA.
NEW: BlackRock is launching their Ethereum Staking ETF today — $ETHB. It will have the same fee as $ETHA at 0.25% bps but has a fee waiver down to 0.12% for the first year or first $2.5 billion in assets. pic.twitter.com/aR3FVRChPz
That’s not just another ETF headline. It potentially opens the door for institutional and retail investors to access staking returns through a familiar financial vehicle something traditional markets tend to appreciate.
So, what does all this mean? For now, the Ethereum price appears to be transitioning out of a liquidation-driven phase and into a slower environment defined by spot accumulation and institutional accessibility. Not explosive. But potentially far more sustainable.
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