Bitcoin slips below $79K as Fed rate-hike odds hold near 60%, Zcash leads losses

The main driver today was macro: futures markets are pricing a roughly 60% chance of another Federal Reserve rate hike, and a simultaneous rally in the Japanese yen added pressure on risk assets broadly. Bitcoin broke below $79,000 under that weight, closing around $78,613 — a decline of just under 1% but psychologically significant given the round-number breach. Privacy coins bore the sharpest losses. Zcash fell 4.76% and Monero dropped 3.51%; both assets tend to attract heightened regulatory scrutiny, and rate-hike environments that push investors toward lower-risk positions tend to hit that corner of the market harder. Hyperliquid also slid 4.39% with no specific catalyst beyond the broader selloff. Against that backdrop, a pocket of altcoins moved the other way. BNB gained 1.83% and Polkadot surged 9.36%, part of a rotation into select layer-1 and DeFi-adjacent tokens as traders shifted out of large-cap Bitcoin exposure. Rain added 2.53% and Dogecoin edged up 0.64%, rounding out the day's small group of gainers. Ethereum held up relatively well, slipping only 0.23% to $2,483 — a narrower decline than Bitcoin, which compressed BTC dominance slightly. The Fear & Greed index sits at 69, still in greed territory, suggesting the macro pressure has not yet meaningfully dented broader sentiment.

• –Liquid Network recovered 3,400 BTC from white-hat hackers who exploited the protocol for roughly $320M, with negotiations ongoing for the remaining balance — a meaningful reduction in a key overhang on Bitcoin sentiment.
• –Cronos executed a blockchain rollback following the Tectonic exploit to recover approximately $111M, though $9.2M remains unrecovered; the move reignited debate about whether blockchains should ever reverse transactions.
• –The Ethereum Foundation outlined a roadmap to make Ethereum's base layer quantum-resistant by 2029 via the forthcoming Hegotá upgrade, addressing a long-term cryptographic risk as quantum computing advances.
• –South Korea's budget office published a report estimating stablecoin adoption could save the country's merchants up to $3.8 billion annually in payment costs, lending official credibility to stablecoin utility arguments in a major Asian economy.