In today’s Bitcoin news, the Federal Reserve held the federal funds rate between 3.5% and 3.75% on Wednesday in what was almost certainly Jerome Powell’s final meeting as chairman, with an 8-4 vote at the FOMC revealing a more fractured committee than the title suggests.
Bitcoin was trading at nearly $76,000 late Wednesday in New York, down from $77,000 earlier in the session, extending a decline of about 40% from the all-time high in October 2025 near $126,000.
The analytical question is no longer whether the pause delays the bull case by a quarter. It’s a question of whether the three simultaneous tailwinds that were supposed to fuel the $250,000 Bitcoin price prediction, monetary easing, crypto regulatory clarity, and AI sector momentum have stopped long enough to make the thesis structurally ineffective for this cycle.
JUST IN: THE FED LEFT INTEREST RATES UNCHANGED FROM 3.50% TO 3.75%, BUT THE VOTE WAS THE MOST DIVIDED FOMC DECISION SINCE OCTOBER 1992 🇺🇸
The vote: 8 to 4 in favor of maintaining rates.
The dissents went in opposite directions:
– Miran disagreed in favor of a 0.25% rate cut
– Hammock,… pic.twitter.com/shAPgoNFUf– WOLF (@WOLF_Financial) April 29, 2026
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Bitcoin News Today: The Fed Pause, The Arithmetic of Inflation, and the Liquidity Transmission Channel
The mechanism transmitting the FOMC’s decision to Bitcoin’s price path works as follows: Holding rates in an environment of persistent inflation compresses risk appetite by maintaining the real opportunity cost on dollar-denominated assets, thereby removing the additional liquidity that speculative positions in high-beta assets need to attract marginal capital.
The 2022 episode established the empirical pattern: a 65% collapse in the price of Bitcoin occurred in direct correspondence with the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive tightening cycle in four decades, as duration-sensitive risk assets were simultaneously repriced.
Wednesday’s grip was not a tightening, but neither was it a softening of the anticipated $250,000 thesis. The committee cited “developments in the Middle East” as a significant source of uncertainty, code language for an oil supply shock that does exactly what oil supply shocks do to central bank optionality.
Source: Tradingview
Brent crude remained above $110 a barrel for most of April as the Strait of Hormuz – through which about 20% of seaborne oil flows – continued to disrupt transportation. The average price of gas in the United States reached $4.22 per gallon this week, up 6.2% in a month.
Jerry Tempelman, a former senior analyst at the New York Fed and now vice president of economic research and fixed income at Mutual of America Capital Management, called the disruption something that “could lead to prolonged price stress that spills over into the market,” concluding that a reduction in 2026 seems unlikely absent a serious energy or labor market shock.
Data from CME FedWatch supports this judgment, with traders expecting rates to be unchanged through December. The FOMC’s dissent pattern is informative but not yet decisive: Gov. Stephen Miran pushed for an immediate cut while three others opposed softening the text, producing a vote that signals true disagreement rather than a committee moving coherently in one direction or another. This ambiguity constitutes in itself an obstacle: the certainty of prices on the markets, and not an internal debate.
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Daniel Frances is a technical writer and Web3 educator specializing in macroeconomics and DeFi mechanics. Hailing from crypto since 2017, Daniel leverages his experience in on-chain analytics to write evidence-based reports and in-depth guides. He holds certifications from the Blockchain Council and is dedicated to providing “insight gain” that overcomes market hype to find real utility for blockchain.
