Bitcoin clears $64,000 as cooling U.S. inflation kills the rate-hike trade

The day's main driver was a U.S. inflation report that came in below expectations, effectively deflating the case for further Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. When inflation cools, the argument for keeping rates high weakens — and that tends to benefit risk assets like crypto, because lower rates make holding cash less attractive and reduce the cost of speculative capital. Bitcoin crossed $64,000 for the first time in several weeks on the news, rising 3.3% to $64,552. Ethereum outpaced it, gaining 5.1% to $1,872 — a pattern that often appears when Bitcoin makes a decisive move higher and traders rotate into larger-cap altcoins in its wake. Hyperliquid gained 5.6%, XRP rose 3.5%, and Solana added 3.2%, all broadly tracking the macro tailwind. Zcash was the standout, jumping 9.4% — the largest single-day gain in the top 15. No Zcash-specific news drove the move; it appears to have caught a stronger-than-average bid as Bitcoin's rally lifted privacy-focused assets disproportionately, a pattern seen in prior BTC breakout sessions. DeXe was the day's clear outlier, falling 10.6% with no identifiable catalyst. The researcher found no news or protocol event tied to the decline — this looks like idiosyncratic selling pressure rather than a market-wide story. The Fear & Greed index at 25 (Fear) is worth noting: despite a broad green day, aggregate sentiment remains cautious. That gap between price action and sentiment can close in either direction.

• –Visa, Mastercard, and Ripple are backing x402, a protocol for stablecoin-based agent payments that currently average 32 cents per transaction — a sign that major payment networks are moving toward crypto rails for machine-to-machine commerce.
• –The U.S. and UK announced plans to align regulatory frameworks for tokenized finance (securities and assets represented as digital tokens on a blockchain), a step toward cross-border interoperability between the world's two largest financial markets.
• –The UK government plans to issue its first digital sovereign bond — a government debt instrument recorded on a blockchain — by early 2027, which would make it the first G7 nation to do so.