In today’s Bitcoin news, the Federal Reserve held the federal funds rate at 3.5%-3.75% on Wednesday in what was almost certainly Jerome Powell’s final meeting as chair, with the 8-4 Federal Open Market Committee vote revealing a more divided committee than the headline suggests.
Bitcoin was trading near $76,000 by late Wednesday in New York, down from $77,000 earlier in the session, resulting in a roughly 40% decline from the October 2025 all-time high near $126,000.
The analytical question is no longer whether the pause delays the bull case by a quarter. Rather, it is a question of whether the three simultaneous tailwinds that were supposed to support the $250,000 Bitcoin price prediction, monetary easing, cryptocurrency regulatory clarity, and AI sector momentum, have stalled long enough to make the thesis structurally ineffective for this cycle.
Just in: The Fed kept interest rates unchanged at 3.50% to 3.75%, but the vote was the FOMC’s most divided decision since October 1992 🇺🇸
Vote: 8-4 in favor of maintaining interest rates.
The opposition went in two opposite directions:
– Miran objected in favor of reducing interest rates by 0.25%.
-Hamack,… pic.twitter.com/shAPgoNFUf– Wolf (@WOLF_Financial) April 29, 2026
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Bitcoin News Today: Fed Pauses, Inflation Calculations, and Liquidity Transfer Channel
The mechanism for transmitting the FOMC decision to the Bitcoin price path works as follows: interest rate stabilization in an environment of sticky inflation compresses risk appetite by maintaining the real opportunity cost across dollar-denominated assets, withdrawing the additional liquidity required by speculative positions in high-beta assets to attract margin capital.
The 2022 episode established the empirical model, where a 65% collapse in Bitcoin’s price occurred in direct correspondence with the Fed’s most aggressive tightening cycle in four decades, with duration-sensitive risk assets simultaneously repricing.
Wednesday’s stabilization was not a tightening, but it was not a relaxation of the $250,000 assumption that had been set. The committee cited “developments in the Middle East” as a material source of uncertainty, code language for an oil supply shock that does exactly what oil supply shocks do to central bank choices.
source: Tradingview
The price of Brent crude was held above $110 per barrel for most of April, as the Strait of Hormuz – through which nearly 20% of seaborne oil flows pass – continued to disrupt shipping. The US national average gas price reached $4.22 per gallon this week, up 6.2% in one month.
Jerry Templeman, a former senior analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who is now vice president of economic and fixed income research at Mutual of America Capital Management, described the disruption as something that “could lead to long-term price pressures seeping through the market,” and concluded that a cut in 2026 appears unlikely absent a severe energy or labor market shock.
CME FedWatch data confirms this ruling, with traders’ rates on hold until December. The structure of opposition to the FOMC is informative but not yet decisive: Governor Steven Meyran pushed for an immediate cut while three others objected to watering down the language, resulting in a vote that signaled real disagreement rather than the committee moving coherently in either direction. This uncertainty is itself a headwind – certainty about market prices, not internal debate.
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Daniel Francis is a technical writer and Web3 educator specializing in macroeconomics and DeFi mechanics. A crypto native since 2017, Daniel brings his background in cross-chain analytics to author evidence-based reports and detailed guides. It is certified by the Blockchain Council and is dedicated to providing “information gain” that cuts through the market noise to find blockchain’s real-world utility.
