The crypto rally took a long-overdue pause on Thursday as traders took some profits following weeks of relentless advance that lifted bitcoin BTC close to record prices.

The consolidation occurred amid a slew of U.S. economic data releases. April retail sales missed expectations, producer prices rose less than forecast, jobless claims stayed on track, while the NY Empire State Manufacturing Index and Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Survey showed softening business activity—signals that did little to rattle traditional markets. The S&P 500 added 0.4%, while the Nasdaq finished flat.

Bitcoin pulled back to $101,000 early in the U.S. session before rebounding above $103,000 later, modestly down over the past 24 hours.

Altcoins fared worse with the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index declining 3% during the same period. Native tokens of Aptos APT, Avalanche AVAX and Uniswap UNI tumbled 6%-7%.

Crypto investors shouldn’t sweat today’s pullback, analysts told CoinDesk.

«The current pullback appears to be a correction within a broader medium-term uptrend,» said Ruslan Lienkha, chief of markets at YouHodler.

The upward momentum in equity markets moderated after the China-U.S. tariff delay, and short-term traders began locking in profits, he said. «This shift in sentiment has spilled over into riskier assets, including BTC.»

«Anything below 5% [price move] can often be considered just market noise,» said Kirill Kretov, trading automation expert at CoinPanel. «Some of this movement likely comes from profit-taking, as traders secure gains after the recent rally. With liquidity so thin, even modest sell-offs can quickly translate into noticeable corrections.»

Backing away from short-term movements, the broader price action seems healthy with no clear signs of an imminent top.

Vetle Lunde, senior analyst at K33 Research, said BTC just exited one of its longest periods of below-neutral funding rates, a signal of defensive positioning

«This resembles the risk-averse patterns from October 2023 and 2024 and is far from resembling price action near past local market peaks,» wrote Lunde, who was optimistic that the lack of froth with BTC above $100,000 BTC paves the way for potential fresh record highs.

According to Steno Research, crypto tailwinds stem from a stealth expansion in private credit—especially in the U.S. and Europe. In past bull runs, crypto thrived on base money expansion: massive injections of reserves by central banks that fueled asset inflation across the board. This time, however, the balance sheets of the Fed and European Central Bank have continued shrinking through quantitative tightening.

“Many have pointed to China’s liquidity injections as the primary driver of the rally,” Samuel Shiffman wrote in a Thursday report. “But that misses the mark. The real support is coming from Western bank credit growth—a quieter, less visible engine behind this move.”

He said that forward-looking indicators project global financial conditions improving into the summer months, driven primarily by the U.S. dollar weakening. This has historically lead to higher BTC prices.

«We’ve likely got room through June and into early July before the picture begins to change,» Shiffman said. «But once we approach the back half of July, the setup gets trickier. Our leading indicators suggest that the peak in financial easing might not last past August.»

Banks need to be part of crypto for stablecoins to succeed—that was the message from Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president of digital currencies, during a panel discussion at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

«It might sound counterintuitive, but you do want the banks in this space,» Fernandez da Ponte said, adding that their infrastructure—from custody to providing fiat rails—will be essential if stablecoins are to scale beyond crypto-native circles. «You want that connectivity and that fabric to work.»

His remarks came amid efforts to bring regulatory clarity for digital assets in the U.S., with lawmakers inching closer to pass stablecoin legislation that could redefine the market and allow banks to enter the space.

Read more: U.S. Senate’s Stablecoin Push Still Alive as Bill May Return to Floor: Sources

«This is going to be a big unlock,» said Anthony Soohoo, chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, a cross-border money transfer service. «There’s always hesitation: Can I trust this? [The stablecoin legislation] is going to answer a lot of those questions.»

Both executives said they expect a wave of new issuers to enter the market once regulation is in place, followed by a period of consolidation. “It’s not going to be 300 stablecoins, and it’s not going to be just two,” Fernandez da Ponte said.

Currently, Tether’s USDT USDT and Circle’s USDC USDC dominate the market, representing nearly 90% of the $230 billion asset class. PayPal’s PYUSD PYUSD, launched in 2023, lags far behind with $900 million supply. Fernandez da Ponte pushed back on market cap as the primary metric for success. «We look at velocity, active wallets, number of transactions,” he said. “Those are what drive real usage.»

In countries with high inflation and volatile currencies, consumers are seeking out dollar-backed stablecoins as stores of value and tools for cross-border payments. Soohoo said MoneyGram, which operates in over 200 countries with nearly half a million cash-access locations, is helping facilitate that access.

«We see ourselves between physical finance and digital finance,» Soohoo said. «A lot of consumers in local economies want to hold value in dollars but still need to access it as cash to spend in places that don’t take digital currency.»

Stablecoin adoption in developed countries, meanwhile, has been slower. With clear regulation in place, stablecoins can streamline corporate treasury operations and cross-border disbursement, Fernandez da Ponte noted.

«We used to have this mad rush on Friday to make sure money was in the right places before the weekend,» he said. «Now we’re sending money to the Philippines and Africa in ten minutes with stablecoins.»

Both executives noted that real-world use cases, not hype, will determine if stablecoins could reach the trillion-dollar scale in the next years that’s been projected.

«Consumers don’t care about stablecoins. They care about solving problems.» Fernandez da Ponte said. «We’re five years into a ten-year journey, and regulation will define the next half.»

The global head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics firm that helps law enforcement investigate crypto fraud, shared that he believes Coinbase’s handling of the latest hack is a “really great example to other businesses in terms of how to handle” dealing with hacks of exchanges.

At a panel at Consensus 2025, Ari Redbord discussed how easy it is for hacks to happen on crypto exchanges, as the industry is “the perfect storm of weak cyber controls and ultimately it’s a good target.”

Coinbase shared earlier on Thursday that some of its staff had been bribed to steal their customers’ data, and its founder Brian Armstrong had received a ransome note for $20 million dollars in bitcoin.

The team shared in a blog post that because of the breach, it could pay up to $400 million in remediation costs to affected customers, and that they were setting up a $20 million bounty on any information related to the attackers instead.

The news comes as the industry has experienced other major hacks, like Bybit which was hacked earlier this year for $1.5 billion, and defunct crypto exchange FTX in November 2022 for $400 million.

Though these episodes seem to happen frequently, Redbord believes more regulatory involvement can alleviate some of these issues. “There’s a lot we can do with governments in order to go after these bad actors that have nothing to do with crypto or blockchain intelligence,” he said. “We have cyber facilities.”

Read more: Coinbase Could Pay Customers Up to $400M for Data Breach