Bitcoin is trading at $66,259 as of Tuesday morning, up 1.3% over the past 24 hours and roughly 6% since bottoming near $62,517 earlier this week, according to CoinGecko data. Ether has climbed alongside it, trading at $1,930.83, up 0.4% on the day and 3.3% over the past week, marginally outperforming bitcoin's seven-day gain of 2.5%.
The move extends a rally that began last week on the back of soft U.S. labor market data, and has picked up further this week on renewed optimism that Congress may finally advance crypto market structure legislation before its August recess.
The CLARITY Act, which would establish a federal framework dividing oversight of digital assets between the SEC and CFTC, passed the House by a 294-134 vote in July 2025 and was advanced by the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote in May. Since then it has stalled, with Democratic senators including Angela Alsobrooks and Ruben Gallego withholding support over the bill's ethics provisions.
Reports this week of a potential compromise on those ethics terms have revived hopes that a floor vote could happen before the recess, a deadline lawmakers and industry groups have flagged as critical: missing it risks pushing the bill into next year, when its prospects would likely worsen.
Macro conditions have added a second tailwind. A weaker-than-expected June jobs report, which showed the U.S. economy adding only 57,000 positions against consensus estimates of roughly double that, combined with recent comments from Federal Reserve officials suggesting AI-driven productivity gains could help ease inflation, have strengthened bets that the Fed will cut rates later this year. Softer inflation prints in the weeks since have reinforced that view, adding to the risk-on backdrop that has lifted bitcoin, ether and other major tokens together.
Trading volume has moved with the price. Bitcoin's 24-hour volume sits at $31.68 billion, up roughly 1% on the day, while ether's has risen more sharply, up 11% to $11.7 billion. Both remain well below bitcoin's all-time high of $126,080 set in October 2025 and ether's all-time high of $4,946.05 set last August, with bitcoin still down 47% and ether down 61% from those peaks respectively.
Whether the rally holds likely depends on whether the Senate actually schedules a CLARITY Act vote in the coming days, and whether upcoming economic data continues to support the case for a Fed cut. A stalled vote or a hotter-than-expected inflation reading could just as quickly take the momentum back out of the market.