Bitcoin fell below $76,000 on Tuesday as traders cut the odds of Senate action on the CLARITY Act hours before a scheduled cloture vote, with a Federal Reserve rate hike the day after now priced as near-certain. The token last changed hands at $76,018, down 3.1% over 24 hours and 2.6% over the week, according to CoinGecko data.
Two dated events, 28 hours apart
The selloff came as two dated federal events landed inside the same 28-hour window. The Senate scheduled a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, the CLARITY Act, for 2:15 p.m. ET Tuesday. The Federal Open Market Committee releases its policy decision Wednesday afternoon after a two-day meeting that opened Tuesday.Polymarket repriced both overnight. The platform put the odds of the bill becoming law this year at 12.5% Tuesday morning, down from 29.5% Monday afternoon. On monetary policy, Polymarket priced a quarter-point increase at Wednesday’s decision at 86.5%, with no change at 12.5%, on $172.7 million of volume across the event. A cut of any size traded below 1%. Traders had made a hike the favorite on August 31 after Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech, which argued inflation remained too high to ease policy.
Broad market under pressure
Coinbase recorded a 24-hour bitcoin range of $75,538.01 to $79,591.17 against an open of $78,552.45, a peak-to-trough move of 5.1%. Ether fell 3.7% to $2,411.62. XRP slipped 0.8% to $1.39, Solana dropped 2.6% to $99.01 and BNB lost 0.6% to $716.87.Total crypto market value stood at $2.71 trillion on $90.3 billion of volume, with bitcoin dominance at 56.2%, CoinGecko data shows. Ninety-five of the 124 largest non-stablecoin tokens fell during the session. The decline was orderly by crypto standards, with no single token accounting for an outsized share of the drop, but breadth told the story: nearly everything above the stablecoin line lost ground.
Bond market adds pressure
The move in crypto tracked a heavier tone in fixed income. The 10-year par yield traded at 5.00% Tuesday morning after closing at 4.97% on Monday, the highest close of 2026, according to Treasury data. The last close at or above 5.00% was July 19, 2007. The 30-year closed at 5.34% and traded near 5.37% Tuesday morning. The 10-year real yield closed Monday at 2.60%, its highest reading of the year. Equities fell for a second session.Higher real yields are a direct headwind for assets with no cash flow, and crypto has traded with rate-sensitive equities for most of 2026. The August consumer price index, released last week, showed inflation accelerating to 3.2% year over year, well above the Fed’s 2% target, and futures markets have moved from pricing a hold to pricing a hike in the space of two weeks.
The reversal is sharp against Monday’s tape. Bitcoin had climbed from below $77,000 to above $81,000 after Fed Governor Christopher Waller publicly backed holding rates steady at the September meeting, a position that put him at odds with the chair. Waller argued recent inflation trends justified patience. That bid faded overnight as attention shifted to the legislative calendar and the meeting itself, and the 10-year yield’s climb above 5% took away the argument that money would keep flowing into risk assets while the Fed deliberates.
What the vote decides
Tuesday’s cloture vote tests whether the bill can reach 60 votes to proceed to debate. Senate Republicans released a revised draft hours earlier, adding a stablecoin circuit breaker and ethics provisions, and the National Sheriffs’ Association dropped its opposition to a neutral stance in a letter to Senate leaders, citing work by Congress and the Trump administration on enforcement concerns. A bipartisan coalition of 17 state attorneys general has urged the Senate to reject the bill, and eight banking groups pushed Monday for tighter limits on stablecoin rewards, arguing the latest draft still leaves room for interest-like payments through exchanges.The House passed the CLARITY Act in July 2025. The Senate version has since been held up by disputes over stablecoin rewards, tokenized equities and ethics language. A failed cloture vote would not kill the bill, but it would push consideration past the FOMC decision and into a calendar crowded by the November midterm cycle, where floor time for market structure legislation becomes harder to find.
Why the sequence matters
For traders, the sequence matters more than either event alone. A bill that fails to advance while the Fed delivers a hawkish dot plot would remove the two most cited near-term catalysts for crypto in the same week. Prediction markets had already done most of the repricing before either event concluded, which is why the spot market’s move came in Asia and early Europe rather than waiting for the vote itself.June’s dot plot pointed to one quarter-point increase this year, to a 3.8% median. Futures traders now price two increases by year-end. If Wednesday’s projections move further in that direction, the yield curve at current levels leaves little room for the kind of liquidity-driven bid that carried bitcoin through August, when it gained 24%, its strongest month since November 2024.
ETF flows had offered a counterpoint earlier in the week. US spot bitcoin funds took in $160 million on September 14 after five straight days of outflows, with BlackRock’s IBIT leading at $134 million. Ether funds added $121 million, their second positive session. Whether those inflows survive a hawkish Fed decision and a stalled crypto bill is the question the rest of the week answers.