A week defined by macro crosscurrents, a consequential Ethereum development update, and one headline ETF filing. Here’s what happened.
BTC/ETH price action
Bitcoin spent most of the week oscillating between $93,000 and $97,500, unable to decisively reclaim the $100K level that briefly held last month. Wednesday’s Federal Reserve minutes, which signalled a more cautious timeline for rate cuts than markets had priced, pushed BTC briefly below $92K before a recovery closed the day flat. By Friday, Bitcoin was trading around $95,200.
The pattern is familiar: macro sensitivity remains elevated. Bitcoin has tracked risk assets more closely this cycle than many holders would prefer, and the correlation with the Nasdaq has been difficult to shake.
Ethereum had a quieter week on price, ranging from $2,850 to $3,050. ETH underperformed BTC on both the downside and the recovery, reflecting ongoing uncertainty about the ETH/BTC ratio at a time when Ethereum’s value proposition relative to its L2 network continues to be debated.
Total crypto market cap ended the week around $3.4 trillion, roughly flat on the previous Friday.
Ethereum’s Osaka upgrade gets a testnet date
The Ethereum core development team announced that the Osaka upgrade - the next major hard fork after Pectra - has a confirmed deployment date on the Sepolia testnet for April 8. Osaka is expected to ship the first iteration of Verkle trees to testnet for extended evaluation.
The Pectra upgrade, which shipped in May 2025, included EIP-7702 and several validator improvements. Osaka’s primary focus is the Verge phase of Ethereum’s roadmap: Verkle trees would allow stateless clients and dramatically reduce the storage requirements for running a full node.
The testnet announcement is a positive signal for development velocity, though mainnet timelines remain subject to the results of the testing period.
Spot Solana ETF filing
Franklin Templeton filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC this week for a spot Solana ETF, joining a growing list of asset managers seeking exposure products beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The SEC has approved spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, and the regulatory climate under the current administration has been broadly more receptive to crypto financial products than its predecessor. Whether that extends to Solana - which faces more complex questions around its validator set, network history, and the SEC’s prior characterisation of it - remains to be seen.
Solana (SOL) rose approximately 6% on the news before giving back roughly half those gains.
Regulatory developments
The EU’s MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) regulation is now fully in force, and the compliance implications are becoming clearer for exchanges and issuers operating in the European market. Several smaller exchanges have begun withdrawing from specific EU jurisdictions where compliance costs are proving prohibitive.
In the US, the House Financial Services Committee advanced a draft stablecoin bill that would create a federal licensing framework for stablecoin issuers. The bill distinguishes between bank-issued and non-bank-issued stablecoins and has bipartisan support, though the Senate timeline is uncertain.
Institutional moves
BlackRock’s IBIT Bitcoin ETF crossed $60 billion in assets under management this week - a milestone that underlines just how quickly the product has scaled since its January 2024 launch. For context, IBIT reached $10 billion faster than any ETF in history , and it hasn’t slowed materially since.
Fidelity reported that its digital assets division saw record institutional account openings in February, with interest concentrated in Bitcoin and Ethereum custody rather than active trading.
The week in a sentence: Macro pressure kept prices range-bound, but the structural build - ETF inflows, regulatory progress, protocol development - continued without fanfare.
Chain Brief publishes weekly market briefs every Friday. This is not financial advice.