Bitcoin is starting to act as a store of value during times of “US-risk-off” sentiment, marking a potential shift in its relationship with traditional assets, according to the New York Digital Investment Group.

Bitcoin (BTC) felt “noticeably different” over the trading week ended April 25, NYDIG’s global head of research Greg Cipolaro said in an April 25 market note. 

“We’ve been observing subtle shifts in its behavior over the past few weeks,” he added. “The decoupling from traditional risk assets is still very early and fragile, but for those watching crypto markets 24/7, the shift is palpable.”

“Bitcoin has acted less like a liquid levered version of levered US equity beta and more like the non-sovereign issued store of value that it is.”

Cipolaro noted that Bitcoin has gained more than 13% since the beginning of April, while US markets such as the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq have declined amid escalating global trade tensions due to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

He added that the US dollar and long-term US Treasurys have also underperformed since the election and Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, which lumped every country with various rates, the minimum being 10%.

Gold and currencies such as the Swiss franc have been consistent winners as safe havens, Cipolaro said, noting that Bitcoin is emerging as a non-sovereign store of value.

Amid surging volatility in equities, measured with the VIX index, foreign exchange rates (CVIX index), and interest rates and bonds (MOVE index), investors have been on the hunt for these safe haven assets. 

Several asset classes have recently seen high volatility. Source: NYDIG

Cipolaro said investors are also seeking alternatives to US hegemony, whether that is stocks, bonds, forex, or commodities. 

Few large liquid options

However, Cipolaro said investors seeking alternatives outside traditional financial systems have few large, liquid options.

Gold remains the largest non-sovereign store of value at around a $22 trillion market cap, while Bitcoin has just a fraction of that at $1.8 trillion. 

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Additionally, Bitcoin is the only top crypto asset listed that “solely focuses on monetary or store of value use cases,” while the others are better described as the fuel for decentralized application platforms, he said. 

Cipolaro concluded that despite Bitcoin’s recent gains, “there are few signs of the market overheating,” and the recovery is still in early stages.

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The Ethereum mainnet’s gas limit could theoretically grow 100-fold and reach 2,000 transactions per second under a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) put forward by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist.

Feist, who had the blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage solution named after him, put forward EIP-9698 on April 27, which would introduce a “deterministic gas limit growth schedule” starting at epoch 369017, or around June 1.

The proposal would gradually increase the gas limit by a factor of 10 for roughly two years, or 164,250 epochs, when one final tenfold increase would occur.

Ethereum clients would need to vote on the proposal for it to take effect, Feist said.

“By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, this EIP encourages a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency,” he added.

As Ethereum can occasionally reach up to 20 TPS in blocks dominated by simple transactions, a 100x gas limit increase could theoretically increase Ethereum’s TPS to 2,000. Feist’s proposal would better position Ethereum to compete with the likes of Solana, which currently processes a non-vote TPS between 800 to 1,050 and has a theoretical TPS of 65,000.

Source: Fabda.eth

The EIP would expand the current gas limit of 36 million to 3.6 billion, potentially allowing around 6,000 transactions to fit into Ethereum blocks.

Feist’s proposal comes after Ethereum validators agreed to raise the gas limit from 30 million to 36 million in February.

Before that, the last change to Ethereum’s gas limit occurred in August 2021 under the London hard fork, where the figure was roughly doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

Daily change in Ethereum Average Gas Limit over the last five years. Source: YCharts

Feist acknowledged that a rapid increase in the gas limit under his proposal may stress less-optimized nodes and increase block propagation times. 

“However, the exponential schedule with very gradual increments per epoch gives node operators and developers ample time to adapt and optimize,” he said.

Related: Ethereum community members propose new fee structure for the app layer

EIP-9698 marks the Ethereum community’s latest effort to boost scalability at the base layer after predominantly focusing on scaling through layer 2 solutions in recent years.

Critics of Ethereum’s layer-2 focused strategy claim that it has fragmented the ecosystem into several siloed chains with little interoperability, leading to a worse user experience.

EIP-9678 looks to increase gas limit

Ethereum developers are also looking to test a fourfold increase of Ethereum’s gas limit in the Fusaka hard fork under EIP-9678.

Fusaka has been flagged as possibly going online in late 2025, while the next major Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, is scheduled to go live on the mainnet in May.

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Nike has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that accuses the sportswear giant of operating a rug pull for shuttering its non-fungible token (NFT) platform RTFKT in January. 

A group of RTFKT users led by Jagdeep Cheema claimed in the proposed class suit filed in a Brooklyn federal court on April 25 that they suffered “significant damages” as a result of Nike touting its sneaker-themed NFTs to gain investors, then shuttering the platform.

The suit claimed the NFTs were unregistered securities, as Nike sold them without registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It accused the company of using “its iconic brand and marketing prowess to hype, promote, and prop up the unregistered securities that RTFKT sold.”

“Because the Nike NFTs derived their value from the success of a given promoter and project — here, Nike and its marketing efforts — investors purchased this digital asset with the hope that its value would increase in the future as the project grows in popularity based on the Nike brand,” the lawsuit argued.

The class suit claimed investors suffered damages due to Nike shutting its NFT platform. Source: CourtListener

The lawsuit asks for $5 million in damages, claiming Nike broke consumer protection laws and violated various state unfair trade and competition laws.

A US court hasn’t definitively ruled on whether NFTs are securities. Still, in an April 9 letter to the SEC, marketplace OpenSea urged the regulator to exclude NFTs from federal securities laws, arguing they don’t meet the legal definition of a security. 

In its case against Nike, the class group said that the court doesn’t necessarily need to rule on the legal status of NFTs to address the complaint.

NFT market value dips 

In 2021, Nike acquired the NFT firm RTFKT Studios, which created virtual sneakers. 

According to the complaint, holders of the resulting Nike NFTs were told the tokens could be traded peer-to-peer on the secondary market and used to complete challenges and quests that could lead to rewards.

Nike’s crypto kick NFT collection was changing hands for an average of 3.5 Ether (ETH), or around $8,000 when they were first listed on April 18, 2022, but were trading for around 0.009 Ether, or roughly $16 as of April 21, according to OpenSea. 

Nike NFTs have seen a sharp drop in value since they were first listed. Source: OpenSea

Nike shut down RTFKT in January, which the class suit claims decimated investors when “prices plunged and did not recover,” and also took away the chance to take part in the challenges and quests, which the group argued was a primary reason for purchasing the tokens. 

Related: RTFKT’s CloneX avatars reappear after issue blacks out NFTs

The overall NFT market dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2025, with sales plunging 63% year-over-year, to $1.5 billion in total sales from January to March 2025, down from $4.1 billion during the same period in 2024.

Nike did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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