Bitcoin is facing selling pressure ahead of today’s interest rate decision from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in the first meeting under new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh.
The largest cryptocurrency fell back below $65,000 after trading near $67,000 a day earlier, according to CoinDesk data. The broader market CoinDesk 20 Index (CD200) has lost 1.2% since midnight UTC, with all but four tokens down.
“The main focus of the week is the FOMC meeting under new leadership, with market expectations for interest rate hikes already priced in through 2027,” Laser Digital said in its weekly note.
The market does not anticipate any change in the federal funds rate at this meeting. Instead, the focus will be on Warsh’s post-meeting press conference to get signals about his views on inflation. Warsh has criticized the Fed’s frequent news conferences and detailed forecasts and could face questions about his position.
Among the most notable gainers, Uniswap’s UNI token surged another 20% over 24 hours, supported by Standard Chartered’s bullish forecast of $100 by 2030. Meanwhile, NEAR, INJ and several stablecoin-related assets fell as much as 8%.
Positioning of derivative products
- The market remains calm ahead of the Fed’s decision. Activity slowed, with crypto futures volume falling 20% in 24 hours to $165 billion and open interest falling 2.3% to $110 billion. Liquidations fell to around $310 million, down 44%.
- The calm is also evident in BVIV, Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, which was hovering around an annualized rate of 39% at the time of writing – a level not seen since June 2, just before reaching nearly 59% a few days later. The Ether Volatility Index shows similar stability.
- Cardano’s ADA stands out among altcoins. Open interest climbed to 2.26 billion tokens, closing in on the record of 2.32 billion set on June 6 and recovering from the June 13 low of 2 billion.
- The rebound indicates further deployment of capital into leveraged ADA markets, although the move is not necessarily bullish. The token’s price fell from over 18 cents to under 17 cents in two days, alongside a negative 24-hour cumulative volume delta. The combination is bearish, pointing toward aggressive trading on market orders rather than passive limit orders.
- ZEC and SUI are the other notable gainers from open interest over the past 24 hours, while NEAR and BCH lead the losers.
- NEAR has fallen more than 9%, and the drop in open interest suggests traders are reducing leverage during the sell-off rather than jumping into new shorts.
- Most major tokens, except TRX and CC, are showing negative 24-hour CVD, indicating broad bearish dominance in trade flows.
- In the options markets, BTC puts continue to dominate the 24-hour volume leaderboard, although the $80,000 call expiring on March 26 next year has also seen notable activity. In the case of Ether, calls top the chart in terms of volume.
Symbolic discussion
- UNI advanced for a seventh straight day, its longest winning streak since August 2023, when it had eight. The token is trading near $2.75, erasing its losses from June after surging more than 10% earlier in the week.
- The accelerator was a Standard Chartered note. The bank’s head of digital assets, Geoff Kendrick, initiated coverage on June 15 with a price target of $100 for 2030, about 40 times the current level, arguing that real-world tokenized assets, i.e. stocks and bonds issued on-chain, will flow into DeFi and that Uniswap will capture the flow as the core market infrastructure. He projects a path to $6.50 by the end of the year.
- Two fundamentals lie beneath the appeal. Uniswap’s fee change, in effect since late 2025, directs a portion of trading fees toward the buyback and burning of UNI, and removed approximately 106 million tokens, or more than 10% of the supply, turning a pure governance token into a deflationary token.
- Separately, tokenized stocks launched on the protocol earlier this month have already seen over $9.1 billion traded through its real-world asset pools.
