Key Facts

Key Background

Crypto prices are climbing following a “crypto winter” that slashed the price of bitcoin by nearly 50% from an all-time high of around $125,000 in October 2025 to around $63,000 in February—a prolonged slide that accelerated as the outbreak of the U.S.-Iran war rattled global risk appetite. The crypto downturn punished players like Strategy, which reported that its portfolio lost nearly $14.5 billion in value in the quarter ending March. This isn’t crypto’s first winter: The first came in 2018, when bitcoin crashed from nearly $20,000 to around $3,000 after the crypto craze collapsed under the weight of fraud, regulatory crackdowns and the realization that most projects had no real utility—wiping out roughly 85% of bitcoin's value. The second and most structurally damaging winter arrived in 2022, when the implosion of cryptocurrency ecosystem Terra Luna set off a chain reaction that ultimately took down FTX, the world's second-largest crypto exchange, and led to the highly-publicized arrest of founder Sam Bankman-Fried. At the time, bitcoin bottomed near $15,500, down about 77% from its 2021 peak. The pattern across crypto winters has left the industry spending the subsequent years rebuilding trust and lobbying for regulatory clarity—such as the CLARITY Act currently moving through the Senate—in hopes to prevent the next one. Since February’s lows, the crypto market has since staged a recovery on ceasefire optimism, but investors are still uncertain whether this winter is truly over or just thawing.

Big Number

$1.6 trillion. That’s bitcoin’s current market cap. It is the largest cryptocurrency by a large margin. The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, hovers around $2,000 per token.

Tangent

Thanks to the crypto-friendly Trump administration, Washington has been working on writing rules for the industry after years of confusion, although progress has stalled in the past year. The current centerpiece is the CLARITY Act, a bill that would draw a clear map of which crypto assets are regulated by the SEC and which fall under the more crypto-friendly CFTC. The bill's precursor, the GENIUS Act, passed the Senate and House by July 2025, establishing the first federal framework. The broader CLARITY Act followed, passing the House in July 2025, before stalling in the Senate for nearly a year. In January, the Senate Banking Committee was scheduled to advance the bill, but momentum collapsed when key industry players withdrew support over a proposed ban on stablecoin interest payments—banks argued that letting crypto platforms pay yield on stablecoins would harm traditional lenders. The bill sat frozen from January through mid-March with the Senate pushing back the markup hearing multiple times.

What To Watch For

Coinbase's chief policy officer said on Thursday in an interview with Fox Business he predicts a Senate Banking Committee markup in April and a full floor vote in May—analysts warn that if it doesn't clear committee this month, the probability of passing legislation in 2026 at all drops to extremely low levels as midterm election politics consume the Senate's calendar. A White House adviser told Coindesk on Monday a compromise has been reached on the long-standing stablecoin yield dispute—the core issue that had been blocking the bill since January. The Senate has not confirmed a markup date for the bill.