Bitcoin's recovery from Monday's low under $59,000 stalled as buyers struggled to keep momentum above $61,000. Ether and the wider crypto market, represented by the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) Index, also faced lackluster trading during European hours. The pause coincides with the dollar index (DXY) topping 106, the highest since May 2, keeping investor risk appetite under check ahead of U.S. first-quarter GDP data, durable goods for May and a weekly jobless report scheduled for 12:30 UTC (08:30 EST). "The market may be most sensitive to the weekly jobless claims, given the recent increase and a growing sense, articulated by San Francisco Fed President Daly, that the labor market appears to be at an inflection point," Bannockburn Global Forex's managing director and chief market strategist, Marc Chandler, said in a market update. Crypto traders will closely watch the Biden-Trump presidential debate, set for 21:00 EST, for clues on what the outcome of November's election might mean for the industry.

Consensus is fast building that demand for U.S.-based spot ether ETFs may not be as strong as for bitcoin ETFs. On Wednesday, Galaxy Research said the ETFs, once approved, could see $1 billion of net inflows a month.“We expect the net inflows into ETH ETFs to be 20-50% of the net inflows into BTC ETFs over the first five months, with 30% as our target, implying $1 billion/month of net inflows,” analyst Charles Yu wrote. Galaxy also warned that demand may be limited due to the lack of staking rewards, echoing comments by Bernstein and JPMorgan and said outflows from the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) may act as a drag on the overall inflows. The SEC could approve the funds as soon as July 4, according to a Reuters report on Thursday. Options traders foresee a renewed bullish momentum in ether after that date.

Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital (MARA) has become a multicoin miner to diversify its revenue stream as the recent Bitcoin halving cut profits by 50% and made the industry more competitive. The company has mined 93 million kaspa (KAS) tokens since September 2023, valued at about $15 million, and brought 30 petahash worth of machines online to mine the token, while 30 more will be starting by the third quarter. “By mining Kaspa, we are able to create a stream of revenue that is diversified from Bitcoin, and that is directly tied to our core competencies in digital asset compute,” said Adam Swick, Marathon’s chief growth officer in a statement.

This U.S. presidential election is the first where cryptocurrencies have come up as a major policy issue, and the industry is lobbying (and bracing for) the possibility that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will bring it up when they face off in a Thursday debate.

To that end, crypto advocacy group Stand With Crypto set up an online letter-writing campaign to convince hosts CNN to raise crypto as a talking point. A spokeswoman for the group said Wednesday that almost 2,300 people had signed and sent notes "calling for a crypto question."

"It would be a huge miss for CNN to punt this opportunity to let Americans know where the presidential candidates stand on this important economic issue," spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui told CoinDesk.

- Omkar Godbole