Bitcoin Dips Below $26K On Fed’s Powell’s Hawkish Remarks
By Laxmikant Khanvilkar
Bitcoin (BTC) has slipped below $26,000 as investors have digested U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s continued commitment to containing inflation, including raising interest rates further if needed.
In choppy action following Powell’s remarks at the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole Symposium, stock and bond prices also sank into the red before a late-morning turnaround pushed both modestly higher. At one point, the U.S. two-year Treasury yield surged to an almost 17-year high at 5.10% before retreating a handful of basis points. Investors now give a 54.5% probability of a higher fed fund rates by mid-November, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
Bitcoin also initially turned down, sinking to $25,800 from about $26,100 prior to the Powell speech. At cut off time for this bulletin the price had bounced to roughly $25,900. The broader crypto markets are following bitcoin with modest losses.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was trading around $1650.
Solana’s SOL declined the most among crypto majors, dipping near 3% through the past 24 hours. Tokens of prominent Ethereum scaling networks Arbitrum and Optimism also retraced, with ARB falling 4.1% and OP sinking 3.6%.
MKR, the governance token of the $5 billion decentralized finance lender MakerDAO, plunged about 4% to its lowest price in a month as the platform is exposed to an impeding loan default at tokenized credit protocol Centrifuge.
Controversial frog-themed memecoin PEPE plummeted 17% as the project’s multisig wallet, one of the single largest holders of the token, transferred coins to exchanges potentially to dump on the market.
The global crypto market cap is $1.04T, a 0.74% decrease over the last day. The total crypto market volume over the last 24 hours is $28.48B, which makes a 5.79% decrease. The total volume in DeFi is currently $1.91B, 6.71% of the total crypto market 24-hour volume. The volume of all stable coins is now $26.96B, which is 94.65% of the total crypto market 24-hour volume. Bitcoin’s dominance is currently 48.25%, a decrease of 0.02% over the day.
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