BTC trades near $77,000-78,000 as of September 18, holding its multi-week range The Federal Reserve raised rates 25 basis points on September 16; the Bank of Japan followed with a hike to 1.2
Bitcoin traded back above $77,000 on Thursday, absorbing two central bank rate hikes in three days without breaking its range. The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate on Wednesday, and the Bank of Japan followed a day later with a move to 1.25 percent, the highest Japanese rates have been since 1995.
Rate hikes have historically pressured bitcoin and other risk assets, since higher rates make holding non-yielding assets more expensive relative to bonds and cash. Traders had braced for both moves to trigger a selloff. Instead, bitcoin held steady, which suggests the market had largely priced the hikes in during the weeks leading up to both decisions rather than reacting fresh to the news itself.
The bigger overhang going into the week was the CLARITY Act, the crypto market structure bill tracked on Congress’s official record, which failed a Senate cloture vote 49-50 on Tuesday, one vote short of the 60 needed to move forward. The bill would settle a long-running jurisdictional fight between the SEC and CFTC by defining which digital assets count as commodities and which count as securities, a distinction that currently varies case by case and has made compliance costly for exchanges and token issuers alike.
The setback is not final. A motion to reconsider the vote has been filed, and several senators have publicly reaffirmed their commitment to passing a version of the bill. That combination appears to be why bitcoin’s price barely moved on the news: traders are treating this as a delay in the legislative timeline rather than the end of the effort.
Separately, regulators have kept moving without Congress. The SEC’s new Innovation Exemption for tokenized stock trading and the CFTC’s expanded no-action relief for software providers both landed within days of the CLARITY vote, giving the market concrete regulatory progress to point to even while the legislative path stays stalled. The next test for bitcoin’s range will likely come from whether the Senate revisits CLARITY before year end, and from any signal out of the Fed’s next meeting about further hikes.
Bitcoin’s resilience this week stands out against its own history. Prior rate-hike cycles, including the aggressive tightening from 2022 through 2023, coincided with some of bitcoin’s steepest drawdowns, as investors broadly favored cash and short-duration bonds over volatile, non-yielding assets. That bitcoin absorbed two hikes in three days without a comparable move lower suggests its investor base has shifted meaningfully toward longer-horizon holders, including ETF investors and corporate treasuries, who are less prone to reacting to a single week’s monetary policy headlines than the more leverage-driven trading base that dominated earlier cycles.
This post first appeared in Bitcoin Holds Above $77,000 Through a Week of Rate Hikes
