HashKey Trading Time: Ethereum Holds Steadily at $3,000, Is Bitcoin’s $115,000 Defense Line in Danger?

1. Market Observation

The "decoration gate" storm of the Federal Reserve continues to ferment. Trump personally went to the Federal Reserve headquarters to put pressure on Chairman Powell on the issue of the $3.1 billion renovation cost and repeatedly urged interest rate cuts. Although Trump has temporarily shelved the idea of firing Powell, White House officials, Republican lawmakers and Trump's political allies have used this project as a political weapon, continuing to attack Powell by accusing him of "mismanagement" and "misleading Congress", trying to weaken his credibility and force him to make concessions on interest rate policy. Nick Timiraos, a reporter for the New Fed News Agency, believes that this move is an unconventional propaganda war by Trump to promote interest rate cuts; strategist Brian Gardner pointed out that this move can also divert public attention from other controversies such as the Epstein case. However, the core contradiction of this storm is that although Trump has demanded a sharp interest rate cut on the grounds of high government borrowing costs and pressure to buy houses, the current financial environment is unusually loose.

Despite unprecedented political pressure, economic fundamentals show that the US financial environment is extremely loose: the Chicago Fed's broad financial conditions index fell to a three-year low, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq hit new highs driven by Google AI demand, the size of money market funds reached 7.1 trillion US dollars, and household deposits remained at a high of 4.46 trillion US dollars. This liquidity flooding situation puts the Fed in a dilemma - inflation is still above target and the job market is strong, but the Trump administration has demanded a rate cut of more than 300 basis points on the grounds of high Treasury bond issuance pressure. Analysts worry that a rate cut at this time may exacerbate the stock market bubble. Meanwhile, OpenAI plans to launch GPT-5 in early August, while Tesla's stock price is under pressure due to a 12% year-on-year decline in second-quarter revenue and a pessimistic outlook.

Stablecoins are still the main narrative in the current market. Jeffrey Ding, chief analyst of HashKey Group, has put forward a prospect for the future application of stablecoins, believing that their large-scale adoption will focus on three major areas: B2B settlement, crypto assets and DeFi ecology, and sovereign financial expansion. He pointed out that stablecoins combined with smart contracts can significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency in cross-border corporate settlement and supply chain finance. Within the crypto ecosystem, stablecoins have become the core liquidity infrastructure. Both centralized and decentralized exchanges use them as mainstream trading pairs. For example, USDT's daily trading volume can even exceed US$100 billion during market fluctuations. In addition, Jeffrey Ding particularly emphasized the potential of stablecoins driven by policies and anchored to national currencies. Such stablecoins can not only improve the efficiency of cross-border trade and settlement between central banks, but also comply with the monetary sovereignty strategy of various countries in the context of promoting the internationalization of their own currencies and de-dollarization, and may become an important tool for the evolution of geo-finance in the future.

For Bitcoin, several analysts have pointed out the risk of a short-term correction. The key range that analyst Crypto Chase is concerned about is in the mid-$113,000 range. Biraajmaan Tamuly pointed out that the bearish divergence between the price and the RSI indicator, coupled with the existence of a CME gap in the range of $114,380 to $115,635, indicates that the price may adjust downward. Rakesh Upadhyay mentioned that Bitcoin is facing strong selling pressure at the $120,000 resistance level. In the past three days, the spot ETF has accumulated a net outflow of $285.2 million, but the bulls have successfully defended the $115,000 support level; if the price can break through $123,218, it may move towards the target of $135,729 or even $150,000. On the contrary, if it falls below $110,530, the bears may have the upper hand. Analyst Gaah also observed that the Bitcoin cycle indicator has entered the "distribution zone", suggesting a high risk of short-term correction, but he stressed that the key indicator has not yet reached its peak, indicating that the current bull market is not the final top. In the medium and long term, Momentum 6 partner Dennis Liu gave a buy range of $89,380 and a target price of $200,000.

In contrast, Ethereum showed relative strength. The Glassnode model showed that Ethereum had solid support in the $2,000 to $3,000 range, with key resistance above at $4,500. Crypto Chase is concerned about whether Ethereum will hit the key liquidity price of $3,476 in the short term and rebound quickly. In the long term, Dennis Liu set a buy range of $2,200 and a target price of $10,000 for Ethereum. However, Markus Thielen of 10x Research warned that Ethereum may be unstable in the short term and there is a risk of a pullback. He believes that Ethereum has risen too fast in the short term and is technically "overbought". More importantly, the cost of borrowing Ethereum on platforms such as Aave has soared, which may force some leveraged traders to close their positions and sell, triggering a price drop. It said that Ethereum's average return in Q3 since 2013 was 8.19%, while the average return in Q4 was 22.59%.

Market funds are flowing from Bitcoin to Ethereum and other altcoins, but a full-scale "altcoin season" has not yet been confirmed. Analyst Crypto Chase believes that Solana will rebound quickly after falling to $173. In the field of NFT, listed company GameSquare announced that it had acquired the rare "Cowboy Ape" CryptoPunk #5577 held by Compound founder Robert Leshner for $5.15 million and planned to include it in its income strategy. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes also said that NFT is the ultimate game of Internet status. He predicted that CryptoPunks will outperform Ethereum in this cycle in terms of US dollars because ETH holders will "show off" their social status through such assets. In addition, after Elon Musk announced yesterday that he would launch an AI version of Vine, the token of the same name VINE soared by more than 100% in a short period of time, and the increase has now narrowed to 50%.

2. Key data (as of 12:00 HKT on July 25)

(Data source: Coinglass, Upbit, Coingecko, SoSoValue, Tomars, GMGN)

Bitcoin: $115,774 (+23.39% year-to-date), daily spot trading volume of $70.943 billion
Ethereum: $3,638.16 (+8.78% year-to-date), daily spot trading volume of $54.538 billion
Fear of Greed Index: 71 (Greed)
Average GAS: BTC: 0.84 sat/vB, ETH: 0.26 Gwei
Market share: BTC 60.8%, ETH 11.6%
Upbit 24-hour trading volume ranking: SYRUP, XRP, NEWTL, HYPER, BTC
24-hour BTC long-short ratio: 48.19%/51.81%
Sector ups and downs: Cryptocurrency sectors generally pulled back, NFT sector fell 7%; AI sector fell 4.3%
24-hour liquidation data: A total of 201,010 people were liquidated worldwide, with a total liquidation amount of US$702 million, including BTC liquidation of US$154 million, ETH liquidation of US$160 million, and SOL liquidation of US$52.77 million
BTC medium- and long-term trend channel: channel upper line (US$118,465.84), lower line (US$116,119.99)
ETH medium- and long-term trend channel: channel upper line (US$3,494.47), lower line (US$3,425.27)

*Note: When the price is higher than the upper and lower edges, it is a medium- and long-term bullish trend, otherwise it is a bearish trend. When the price is within the range or repeatedly passes through the cost range in the short term, it is a bottoming or topping state.

3.ETF Flow (as of July 24)

Bitcoin ETF: +227 million US dollars, turned into net inflow after three consecutive days of outflow
Ethereum ETF: +231 million USD, net inflow for 15 consecutive days

4. Today's Outlook

OKX will delist BADGER, BAL, NIL perpetual contracts on July 25
Binance Alpha will list DePHY Network (PHY) on July 26
Venom (VENOM) will unlock about 59.26 million tokens at 4 pm on July 25, accounting for 2.84% of the current circulation and worth about 13.4 million US dollars;
AltLayer (ALT) will unlock about 240 million tokens at 6 pm on July 25, accounting for 6.39% of the current circulation and worth about 8.9 million US dollars;
Sahara AI (SAHARA) will unlock about 84.27 million tokens at 8 pm on July 26, accounting for 4.13% of the current circulation and worth about 6.9 million US dollars;

The biggest declines in the top 100 by market value today: Pump.fun fell 22.4%, dogwifhat fell 9.3%, Pudgy Penguins fell 8.3%, Fartcoin fell 8%, and Virtuals Protocol fell 6.9%.

5. Hot News

This article is supported by HashKey, HashKey Exchange is the largest licensed virtual asset exchange in Hong Kong and the most trusted crypto asset fiat currency portal in Asia. It is committed to defining new benchmarks for virtual asset exchanges in terms of compliance, fund security and platform security.