Bitcoin slides toward $77K as Fed rate-hike bets hammer Zcash 10%

The day's main driver was a shift in expectations around Federal Reserve policy. Traders began pricing in a higher probability of a rate hike — a reversal from the rate-cut narrative that had supported risk assets through much of the year. When rate expectations move in that direction, assets perceived as high-risk tend to sell off first, and crypto is firmly in that category. Bitcoin fell 1.11% to $77,001, struggling to hold the psychologically significant $77,000 level. Ethereum was largely spared, slipping just 0.06% — a notable divergence that may reflect its lower leverage profile on the day. Solana dropped 1.77%, XRP fell 2.96%, and Hyperliquid gave back 4.19%. Zcash bore the sharpest pain. Privacy coins tend to attract speculative leveraged positioning, and when macro sentiment sours, those positions get liquidated quickly. The 10% decline in ZEC was not purely a reaction to Zcash-specific news — it was a cascade of forced selling on top of an already weak tape. The one bright spot was OKB, the exchange token of OKX, which gained 2.10% after OKX announced it was expanding pre-IPO trading of private companies — including OpenAI and Anthropic — to European users. That product expansion gave traders a concrete reason to buy OKB even as the rest of the market sold off. The Fear & Greed Index sits at 56, still in neutral territory, suggesting the market has not yet tipped into panic — but the rate-hike narrative, if it persists into next week's Senate vote on the Clarity Act, could test that reading.

• –Senate Republicans released revised Clarity Act text — with updated DeFi and credit union provisions — ahead of a scheduled Senate vote next week, keeping US crypto regulatory legislation on the near-term calendar.
• –India announced plans to tokenize its $620 billion corporate bond market using digital rupee settlement, a sovereign-scale step toward real-world asset tokenization that goes well beyond pilot programs.
• –Bitwise shut down its Dogecoin ETF less than a year after launch, citing weak demand — a signal that retail appetite for altcoin ETF products remains limited outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• –Sam Bankman-Fried filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn his fraud conviction and $11 billion forfeiture order, keeping the FTX case in headlines with no near-term resolution in sight.