Crypto Markets Experience Volatility Amid Regulatory Shifts and Gold Surge

The cryptocurrency market is experiencing a period of volatility, with Bitcoin's price hovering around $90,000 as the dollar drops and gold surges. According to a report by PwC, regulators are starting to treat crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) more like traditional financial markets, applying the same kinds of rules used in traditional markets to ensure fairness, protect users, and set clearer standards for platforms. This shift in regulatory approach is happening across both centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized protocols, with regulators monitoring for bad behavior, requiring more transparency, and making sure users understand what they are buying. As Elise Soucie Watts, executive director of Global Digital Finance, notes, "This is no longer a question of if regulation will arrive, but how quickly firms can now adapt to operating in parallel regimes." Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin has been experiencing a slump, trading just above $88,140 at press time, down about 0.5% over the past 24 hours and down 5% on the weekly timeframe. Ethereum has also weakened, dropping as low as $2,787 on Sunday evening and trading flat over the past 24 hours around $2,936. Despite the slump, there are signs of growth in the market. Tokenized gold has surpassed $4 billion in market value as spot gold reached a new all-time high this week, reflecting growing interest in on-chain commodities amid global market uncertainty. Tether Gold (XAUT) has about $2.5 billion in total assets, while Paxos Gold (PAXG) stands near $1.99 billion, according to DeFiLlama data. The growth in tokenized commodities is not limited to gold. According to RWA.xyz data, the tokenized commodities market is roughly $4.88 billion, up more than 22% over the past 30 days, with monthly transfer volume above $7 billion. Tether Gold and Paxos Gold together hold roughly 86% of the market share. In other news, Ethereum's mainnet activity has seen an unusually high spike, even surpassing metrics across Layer 2s, which were initially designed to be more scalable alternatives to the network. However, researchers caution that the headline numbers around active addresses and transaction count are being distorted by dust attacks and so-called "address-poisoning" campaigns rather than organic activity on the network. According to Token Terminal, Ethereum's Layer 1 chain "outranks all leading L2s in terms of daily active addresses." Last Friday, the network reached 1.2 million active daily addresses, up from a previous high of 589,000 daily active addresses in July. The number of transactions on the network also reached an all-time high that day of about 2.8 million transactions, per BitInfoCharts data. Overall, the cryptocurrency market is experiencing a period of volatility, with regulatory shifts, gold surges, and growth in tokenized commodities. As the market continues to evolve, it will be important to keep an eye on these trends and how they impact the future of cryptocurrency.