The Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate range at 3.75%–4% on Wednesday, as markets fully expected, but signaled it intends to tackle stubborn inflation. The statement said economic activity is expanding at a strong pace while inflation remains elevated. The vote was 10–2, with Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack dissenting in favor of a hike. After a string of Fed speakers this month signaled comfort with a slower pace of tightening, markets priced out a hike today but fully price one in for the central bank’s early-December meeting. The 10-year Treasury yield rose about four basis points to 5.025%, and bitcoin edged up to around $81,000.
CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said at an agency forum on AI that the convergence of AI, crypto and modern financial infrastructure could transform markets, extending a decades-long move toward autonomous trading. He also raised the questions regulators haven’t answered yet: whether the developer of an AI trading agent has to register, who is liable if an agent goes rogue, and whether markets need a “know-your-agent” identification regime. Selig said the agency’s experience with crypto developers offers a model. The CFTC will hold a roundtable on 24/7 trading on Dec. 15.
Shares of Datavault AI fell 49.55% on Tuesday, closing at $0.067, after the company disclosed that it hasn’t been able to withdraw bitcoin from the Biconomy exchange since June and will restate its results. The 1,309 BTC was credited off-chain as part of a $150 million share-and-warrant purchase by Scilex, and Datavault now says it should have been booked as an amount owed by Scilex. The correction cuts reported assets by $92.2 million at the end of 2025 and $49 million as of June 2026, and forces Datavault to rethink whether it can count on that bitcoin to fund operations. Biconomy didn’t respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.
The Fed announces its interest-rate decision at 2 p.m. ET, with Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference half an hour later, and bitcoin is rising into it, recently trading near $81,400, up more than 2% over 24 hours, with ether, solana and XRP also up more than 2%. The committee is widely expected to hold rates at 3.75%–4%, so the focus is on three things. First, dissent: if three or more voting members favor a hike, that would signal growing urgency to tighten and could weigh on bitcoin. Second, whether Warsh acknowledges the easing in financial conditions, with the 10-year Treasury yield back near 5%, down 36 basis points since Oct. 7. Third, what he says about inflation, which has come in above expectations for two straight months with oil near $100. Stay alert.
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Bitcoin nears $81,000 ahead of Fed decision as ZEC jumps 8%
Bitcoin climbed nearly 2% to just under $81,000 in Wednesday’s Asian morning hours, clawing back the weekend’s slip to nearly $79,000 as traders braced for the Fed’s rate decision. ZEC led the majors, jumping 8% to about $1,320 and back above $1,300 after Monday’s selloff. HYPE added nearly 5% to about $81, XRP and DOGE rose roughly 3%, ether gained 2% to just above $2,350 and SOL climbed about 2% to $102. The bounce came a day after Galaxy told investors that now is the time to accumulate bitcoin: Alex Thorn, the firm’s head of firmwide research, said the bear market likely ended in June and bitcoin is in the accumulation phase that has preceded prior advances, pointing to its move back above the 50-week moving average, lighter selling pressure and rising U.S. debt. Traders will listen to Warsh’s press conference for any hint of a December rate hike, which would make borrowing more expensive and tends to pull money out of risk assets like crypto, while a daily bitcoin close above $82,500 could signal the recovery is gaining momentum.
JPMorgan, Coca-Cola, Dell also say ‘no’ to OKX-ICE tokenized stock trading plan
JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola and Dell Technologies have joined the growing pushback against tokenized stock trading plans from crypto exchange OKX and NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange, with nearly half the companies on the venture’s original roster now opting out. They appeared, along with four other companies including Applied Materials, Adobe and Sandisk, in an updated public notice dated Tuesday from OKXICE, the firms’ joint venture. The seven additions bring disclosed objections to 33, up from 26 in Monday’s notice, and 30 of the 62 companies originally proposed for trading, about 48%, have now opted out, according to CoinDesk’s tally. The venue plans round-the-clock, stablecoin-settled trading through Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX’s X Layer blockchain under the SEC’s five-year “Innovation Exemption,” and companies have 30 days after notification to object. OKXICE co-chair Andrew Cuomo previously said many companies were expected to wait and see how the market develops, describing the SEC’s limited experiment as a sandbox.
Here’s how much bitcoin and the S&P 500 could rally after midterms
Both bitcoin and the S&P 500 have historically posted gains in the year after U.S. midterm elections. Excluding 2010, when the market was tiny and fringe, bitcoin rose an average of 53.7% in the 12 months after the past three midterms, according to CoinDesk’s analysis, while the S&P 500 has averaged a 15.17% gain in the year after midterms since 1950, versus 7.30% in all other years, per Hartford Funds. The piece cautions that history is limited and that bitcoin’s post-midterm surges may owe more to its four-year halving cycle than to politics, since the bear markets that followed each halving landed in midterm years: 2014, 2018, 2022 and now 2026. Bitcoin has already bounced more than 35% from its June low below $60,000, and markets have largely priced in a divided government, with Democrats expected to retake at least one chamber of Congress after the Nov. 3 elections.
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