Ethereum is preparing for its Pectra upgrade, which aims to boost the network’s scalability and offer better staking flexibility, by launching a testnet on Monday codenamed Hoodi. This comes after two previous testnets, Holesky and Sepolia, encountered technical issues.

If all goes to plan, it could hit mainnet as early as April 25.

The second largest cryptocurrency’s price appears unmoved by this news. Over the past 24 hours, the Ethereum price has gained only 0.5% and is currently trading at just over $1,900, according to CoinGecko data. Zooming out, ETH has lost 13.3% in the past week amid macro pressures from President Trump’s trade war.

The Pectra uprade will be the third upgrade to the network since The Merge in 2022, which saw Ethereum move from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. Pectra looks to boost Ethereum’s scalability, efficiency, and staking flexibility as it expands storage capacity for layer-2 networks. It’ll reduce fees, too.

Previous tests of the upgrade faced challenges, most notably Holesky saw an uptick in invalid blocks. As a result, devs are launching Hoodi on Monday, March 17 in hopes it’ll address the issues seen with the last testnet.

Ethereum has become the butt of many jokes across the broader crypto community, with fans of other networks mocking the network for its slow development rate and ETH’s poor price action. Over the past year, according to TradingView, Ethereum has lost 52% of its share of market cap dominance. That’s left room for coins like XRP to gain 258.98%.

But slow and steady wins the race—or so Ethereum maxis would have other investors believe.

Pectra aims to allow users to pay gas fees with multiple tokens, including stablecoins like USDC. It’ll also allow for third-party fee sponsorship, which allows an entity to pay gas fees on behalf of the user—something that has become hugely important on layer-2 scaling networks.

On top of this, Ethereum validators will have a significantly increased capacity for how many tokens they can stake—from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. The uptick will be coupled with more flexibility for when and how the staked Ethereum can be withdrawn.

Pectra will also lay the groundwork for social recovery, which allows users to rely on trusted contacts to help them regain access to a wallet that they’ve forgotten or lost the key to.

With this, many believe that Pectra will be the biggest upgrade to Ethereum since The Merge and one of its largest in its history.

Once Ethereum’s core developers “feel confident” in the state of testing, a mainnet update will be scheduled at least 30 days after the Hoodi fork. This means that the earliest the network could see the Pectra upgrade go live is April 25.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

President Donald Trump rocked financial markets this week by flip-flopping on his trade tariff policy, leaving equities traders somewhat confused with what to do.

Bitcoin, as a risk asset, couldn’t escape the volatility: the coin has now swung between $94,770 to $82,681 over the last seven days. CoinGecko shows. It’s currently trading hands for $85,925 after rising by less than 1% over the past week.

As the S&P 500 had its worst week in months, Bitcoin certainly felt the pain too, crashing on Monday and Tuesday after last Sunday’s surge prompted by Trump’s crypto reserve posts. The price even fell again on Thursday after President Donald Trump formally announced the creation of a Bitcoin reserve and accompanying crypto stockpile.

Why? Traders may have sold the news late Thursday following plenty of speculation around reserve plans, plus the coin evidently still moves with volatile U.S. equities when there’s macroeconomic uncertainty.

And this week was far from certain: President Trump made a number of announcements on the amount and timing of the tariffs on trading partners, spooking markets in the process.

ETF movements

American investors pulled money out of the new Bitcoin ETFs this week as President Trump’s trade policy made the funds less appealing. Friday was the week’s worst day, Farside Investors data shows, with $409 million worth of outflows, bringing the week’s losses to $740 million.

Still, it’s not as bad as the week prior, when Bitcoin ETFs had their worst day on record. Until markets stabilize, we can’t be sure when investors will want to buy shares in the funds with the same enthusiasm as last year.

Bitcoin reserve announced

It finally happened: President Trump followed through with his campaign promise and on Thursday signed an order to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve.

The reserve—which will function like other government reserves—will hold the nearly 200,000 Bitcoin that the U.S. already has in its possession from seizures.

But the order adds that it will “develop strategies for acquiring additional government Bitcoin provided that such strategies are budget-neutral.”

The news came after hardcore Bitcoiners on Sunday were furious when the President announced via his Truth Social platform that the government would hold a load of other cryptocurrencies, too. But since then, the U.S. leader has made it clear that such altcoins would be held in a different stockpile.

Selling gold for BTC? Not yet

Still, how much more buying and HODLing will authorities do? White House Crypto Czar David Sacks said ahead of the White House crypto summit on Friday that the Trump administration isn’t planning to sell off reserve government assets like gold to buy up more Bitcoin… at least not yet.

Sacks did add that while there was no talk of selling gold for magical Internet money—as a lot of the hardcore maximalists were hoping for—that the Treasury and Commerce Secretaries would soon discuss how to buy more BTC at no cost to taxpayers.

Texas plans move forward

In other news, the state of Texas edged closer to getting its own Bitcoin reserve after the Senate passed a bill on Thursday. The proposed legislation, bill SB21, aims to create a “state-managed investment fund focused on Bitcoin and other high-market-cap cryptocurrencies.”

Sound familiar? That’s because last year, Texas State Representative Giovanni Capriglione proposed H.B. No. 1598 for the Lone Star State—a bill that would allow the local government to stockpile Bitcoin.

SB 21 is another crypto bill, which, if approved, would be unique as it would allow the state “a more flexible and investment-driven approach, potentially allowing Texas to capitalize on crypto market movements.” That means buying other altcoins.

It will now go to the House for another vote. Will it keep the maxis happy, though?

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Ethereum NFT and tokenization protocol Zora will launch its own token—ZORA—this spring. 

The platform, which says it’s “been on a multiyear journey of the best way to bring creativity on-chain through tokenization,” will launch its self-described meme coin on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network. 

“What started as an experiment six years ago has turned into something larger than we could have imagined,” the protocol wrote in a blog post introducing the token. “Thank you to everyone who has realized the vision of Zora with us this far.”

As part of that thanks, the platform is airdropping 10% of its token supply or 1 billion ZORA tokens to its community of creators, collectors, builders and more, based on a March 3 snapshot. 

A second snapshot will take place three days before ZORA’s launch, though the date is still outstanding. 

In addition to the 1 billion tokens set aside for the airdrop, an additional 20% of the token supply will be reserved for community incentives like hackathons and future grants. The team and strategic contributors are allocated 45% of the supply, subject to a six-month cliff and three-year vesting period. A full tokenomics breakdown can be found on the project’s support page.

Since launch, Zora has driven more than $376 million in secondary trading volume, while facilitating NFT or token collection by more than 2.4 million wallets. 

The platform launched its own Ethereum layer-2 network in June 2023 as it battled high gas fees plaguing Ethereum mainnet. It more recently announced a feature that allows any user to generate a token tradable on leading Ethereum decentralized exchange Uniswap with any post.

Edited by Andrew Hayward