#OPINIONLEADER#

Stock markets continued the grind upwards this week on the back of hopes for the weekend passage of a progressive and wide-reaching infrastructure bill — adding a gargantuan $550 billion in additional annual infrastructure spending over the next five years; with many of the bill’s supporters in favor of helping fund the bill via increased crypto taxes. However, the slowdown of bond market intervention from the Fed is the anvil hanging over the market. Members of the Fed are more firmly indicating the high likelihood of QE slowing already later this year. The importance of this factor was driven home by the sharp response to Friday’s surprisingly strong job numbers, with longer-term bond yields selling off and yields moving sharply up after trending down most of the week. This drove dollar strength and left gold nursing its wounds at the end of the week, but it couldn’t slow down the S&P500.

Ether, the market's 2nd largest cryptoasset by market cap was in the spotlight Thursday as its latest hard fork, London (including the much-anticipated EIP-1559 upgrade), activated on the Ethereum blockchain. Bullish price action followed as the asset rose ~5% over a 24 hour period. Concurrently, Bitcoin has somewhat cooled off following its impressive green streak over the past week as it tries to find support at 40k following the first upwards difficulty adjustment in months. Recovering hash rates coincide with miners slowly coming back online after relocating following June’s mining clampdown in China.

Positively for crypto’s prospects in reaching a broader audience, Google this week announced the unbanning of Bitcoin related ads. Furthermore, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, announced that they have plans to integrate Bitcoin into existing Twitter services. Details were scarce on exactly how Twitter would implement changes but Dorsey emphasized that Bitcoin would be a “big part” of the company’s future.