Daily Crypto Roundup: Bitcoin Tests $60K As Japan Turns To XRP & BTC

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Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Roundup. It is Wednesday the 8th of July, and today's roundup is one of those episodes where the whole market is being pulled in different directions at once. Bitcoin is being dragged back toward the $60,000 danger zone as fresh US and Iran tensions send traders running into oil in the dollar. Japan's collapsing yen is pushing companies toward Bitcoin and XRP as a balance sheet escape hatch. The XRP ledger has a new upgrade, but not everyone is fully on board yet. Citadel has dropped its US lawsuit against crypto market maker, Portofino, but the fight is not over because it is now chasing one of the firm's founders through the UK courts. And American CryptoFed is pressing the SEC as its lock token heads toward a major August deadline. So today is about pressure, politics, upgrades, regulation, and the one thing crypto always comes back to.
Who actually has confidence when things get ugly?
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Bitcoin is sitting around $61,876, down on the day and dangerously close to the level traders are watching.
Ethereum is around $1,625.
XRP is around $1.06.
Solana is just under $78.
BNB is around the mid $560 range. So, it is a red day across most of the major names, and the mood has changed quickly.
And the reason is pretty obvious. The market has gone from thinking maybe the US and Iran situation was calming down, to suddenly pricing in another round of risk.
Oil has jumped, the dollar has firmed, equities have been under pressure, and Bitcoin has slipped back towards $62,000.
This is the thing people sometimes forget about Bitcoin. Long-term, people talk about it as digital gold, hard money, a hedge against money printing, and all of that may still be true over a full cycle. But in the middle of a fast macro shock, Bitcoin still trades like a risk asset. When oil spikes, when the dollar strengthens, when traders are scared of war escalation, a lot of them do not sit there thinking about 2032 adoption curves. They reduce risk. That does not mean the Bitcoin thesis is broken. It means the market is short-term emotional and liquidity driven. The $60,000 level now matters because it is not just a round number. It is where the latest recovery either survives or fails. If Bitcoin holds above it, you can argue this is still a shaky but a live rebound. If it loses it cleanly, then the bears get control again and the conversation quickly moves to lower support. The slightly positive bit is that spot Bitcoin ETFs have still seen inflows. US spot Bitcoin ETFs reportedly brought in just over $21 million on July 7th, making it a third straight session of inflows. That is not a massive number, but it does matter because it shows there is still some institutional demand underneath the market. The problem is, ETF inflows are not enough by themselves if macro risk is punching the market in the face. So, Bitcoin has support, but not strength. That is the difference. Buyers are there, but they are not yet aggressive enough to reclaim the $65,000 area with confidence.
Now while America and the Middle East are moving the short-term price, Japan is giving us a much bigger long-term story. Coindesk reported that Japan's weakening yen is pushing companies into Bitcoin and XRP. The yen is trading near its weakest level in four decades, and Japanese firms are reportedly looking at crypto as a way to diversify reserves away from cash.
SBI VC Trades said corporate demand for Bitcoin and XRP is climbing, while its registered accounts have passed 2 million, roughly double the 2025 figure. That is a serious story, because this is not just another Bitcoin number go up headline. This is about what happens when companies start looking at their own currency and thinking, holding this in cash is becoming a problem.
The reason the yen is under pressure is the interest rate gap. The US Federal Reserve has been much more hawkish, while the Bank of Japan has stayed behind. That makes yen cash less attractive, and it creates the conditions for investors and businesses to go hunting for harder assets. And this is where Bitcoin and XRP come into the conversation. Bitcoin is the obvious one because of the hard money narrative. But XRP being included is interesting because Japan has always had a stronger institutional relationship with Ripple and XRP than a lot of other markets. SBI has been deeply involved in that ecosystem for years, and if Japanese corporate demand is rising, that adds a different layer to the XRP story. It is not just retail people on social media shouting about price targets. It is businesses trying to manage currency risk. That does not guarantee a price explosion, but it does give the asset a real world use case narrative at exactly the time the market needs more than hype. And that brings us straight into the XRP Ledger upgrade. The XRP Ledger's V 3.2.0 server software has rolled out, and it is designed to make the network cheaper to run, more stable and more attractive for institutional use. That sounds good. But the adoption picture is not perfectly clean. Across the wider network, the older version, V 3.1.3, is still ahead by node count. Around 43% of active nodes are reportedly running V 3.2.0, while around 51% are still on the older version. So if you only look at total nodes, the network has not fully moved over yet. But the more important part is the validators. On the default unique node list, 31 of 35 validators are reportedly running the new version, which is about 89%.