Russia’s FSB says Telegram founder Pavel Durov faces a terrorism-related charge and an international arrest warrant, while a separate French case remains open.
3 reasons Wednesday’s FOMC interest-rate decision is pivotal for bitcoin (BTC) prices: Crypto Daily
The Federal Reserve (Fed) will announce its rate decision at 2 p.m. ET today, followed by Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET.
Traders typically assign greater weight to FOMC meetings that come with updated economic projections and a “dot plot” of interest-rate forecasts. Today’s gathering lacks both. Yet the outcome still carries outsized importance for three reasons.
Unusual uncertainty over the outcome: Markets are still assigning roughly a 35% probability of a rate increase, CME fed funds futures show. That level of indecision is rare so close to a decision. By now, traders have usually converged on a clear expectation of a hold, hike or cut. Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, is predicting an increase. The firm argues a move would end forward guidance as a policy choice, an outcome Chair Warsh has long favored.
Bond yields are already rising: Both the 10-year and two-year Treasury yields have broken above key trendlines that defined the shallow pullback in place since 2023 (check the Daily Signal). With the breakout complete, the path of least resistance is now clearly established to the upside.
Bitcoin bounces to $64,300 but the real move waits on the Fed: Crypto Markets Today
The crypto market was mixed before the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision later Wednesday. The CoinDesk 20 Index has added 0.41% since midnight UTC, with 10 members advancing and 10 declining.
Bitcoin , the largest cryptocurrency, added 0.75% to claw back some of Tuesday’s losses after a volatile 48 hours that saw it spike to $66,700 last week before crashing to $62,400 in the wake of the rout in South Korean stocks.
Inflation running at 4.1% makes the case for the Fed to raise the fed funds target rate for the first time in three years. Balanced against that, a pause in Iran-U.S. hostilities has taken some of the heat out of oil prices and slightly trimmed the odds of an increase.
Ether (ETH) is down 0.13% on the day. S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 index futures are both positive, while gold holds above $4,000 and silver gained 1.40%, suggesting markets are hedging rather than committing ahead of the announcement.
Derivatives positioning
- Steady positioning ahead of Fed meeting: The crypto taker long-short volume ratio is almost in a perfect balance ahead of the Fed meeting. Open interest (OI) has held steady near $113 billion over the past 24 hours while volume increased by 10% to $205 billion. Taken together, the numbers point to steady positioning but slightly higher churn.
- Spot gains yet to lift futures participation: Both BTC and ETH’s spot prices have risen more than 1% in 24 hours, but the moves have yet to translate into increased participation in futures. BTC’s OI remains steady near 750K BTC. ETH’s dropped for a fourth straight day to 14.14 million ETH.
- UNI is an exception: Most of the top-20 tokens have seen OI hold steady or fall over 24 hours. UNI is an exception, with OI up slightly to 68.53 million tokens, the most since July 13. This validates the 5% upswing in the token’s price in the wake of BlackRock’s decision to bring its tokenized Treasury fund to the decentralized exchange.
- Mixed signals from OI-adjusted CVD: The 24-hour OI-adjusted CVD paints a mixed picture. It’s positive for tokens such as ADA, TRX, XRP, CC, UNI and ETH, a sign of more and more traders going long at market orders rather than passive limit orders. Other coins display the opposite dynamic.
- Implied volatility stays near recent lows: Bitcoin and ether’s 30-day implied volatility indexes remain near recent lows, a sign that traders do not expect any near-term jitters. It also contradicts the unease in the analyst community over the fact that traders still assign a 35% probability of the Fed raising rates on Wednesday. This is unusual as markets typically reach a consensus on what the Fed will do before the decision.
- Puts dominate BTC options volume: In Deribit-listed options, BTC puts at strikes $62,000, $60,000 and $54,000 dominate the 24-hour volume rankings. A put option offers insurance against price drops in the underlying asset. In ETH’s case, calls are at the top of the list.
Token talk
- XRP led altcoin gains on Wednesday, rising 1.72% to $1.086, with rising 1.48%. Both are continuing to recover from their July lows as the major cryptocurrencies consolidate.
- Jupiter (JUP) was the standout 24-hour performer among DeFi coins, rising 5.79% as trading volume ticked up, extending a recovery that has now seen it rise in three of the past four days.
- FET continued its retreat, falling 4.60% since midnight and 6.78% over 24 hours. The AI token is now down nearly 14% over the past week as the sector’s early-July momentum continues to unwind.
- shed 5.14%, giving back the bulk of last week’s speculative gains as retail enthusiasm fades.
- Monero (XMR) bucked the trend with a 1.82% gain to $347, quietly extending a run of outperformance from the privacy coin sector that has gone largely unnoticed amid the broader market turbulence.
Bitcoin clears $64,000 in Asia hours ahead of Fed decision
Bitcoin’s annualized 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, the so-called fear gauge, continues to hover below 40%, well below highs above 60% seen during the early June and early February price sell-offs.
The index is influenced by demand for options, or hedging instruments.
So, the low reading indicates limited demand for protective options and suggests traders see little reason to brace for sharp price swings in the near term.
This stability contradicts the uncertainty surrounding Wednesday’s Fed rate decision. While most observers expect the bank to keep rates unchanged, some, including hedge fund giant Citadel, expect a hike in borrowing costs.
The CME’s FedWatch tool now assigns roughly a 35% probability to a rate hike at the upcoming FOMC meeting, an unusually high level of uncertainty for this late in the decision cycle. Fed moves are normally almost fully priced for a single outcome – hold, hike, or cut – by this stage.
Citadel bets on a Fed rate hike Wednesday as bitcoin (BTC) analysts call a hold.
Crypto is trading on a cautious note. The upswing in bitcoin, the leading digital asset by market value, has stalled since last Wednesday, with prices pulling back to just under $64,000 from the high of nearly $67,000.
July hike to end forward guidance
Citadel’s rate hike call is less about where the data land and more about tactics, specifically, why Warsh has more to gain from raising rates today than from waiting until September.
A surprise hike Wednesday, Frank Flight, head of macro strategy at Citadel Securities, writes, “would emphatically end the forward guidance era in which every policy move is pre-signaled and act as a cleansing event, forcing markets to price what the data imply the central bank should do rather than what they expect it will do.”
It would also “clearly underline Federal Reserve independence after two years in which it has been repeatedly questioned.”
Forward guidance is a tool central banks use to signal how they expect interest rates to evolve over the coming months, helping households and businesses adjust consumption, investment, and borrowing without sudden shocks.
Over time, however, forward guidance has, according to many, including Warsh, distorted the market’s reaction function to the point where assets began trading off expectations of how the Fed might respond to news and data, rather than on the underlying data itself.
Coinbase wants to be Canada’s ‘everything exchange,’ but says clearer rules are needed first
To Richmond, the delay isn’t about regulators moving slowly, but a structural difference between U.S. and Canadian frameworks.
“It’s not necessarily just a regulatory thing; just the nature of the rules is different,” he said.
Harmonized ‘national instrument’
While there is still work to be done, Richmond is encouraged by the fact that Canadian regulators are actively listening to industry players about digital asset products and are open to creating new regulatory frameworks to support the growing industry.
One example Richmond cited as “a very good piece of legislation” is the new Stablecoin Act, which was enacted by the Canadian Federal government earlier this year, after the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act last year.
In the wake of the Stablecoin Act’s passage, Canada has already seen Tetra Trust — a company backed by heavyweights such as Wealthsimple, Shopify and National Bank of Canada — launching Canada’s first regulated financial institution-issued Canadian-dollar stablecoin CADD.
Canada has already shown that crypto companies can operate inside a regulated market. The next test is whether its rules can accommodate products that move beyond spot trading into payments, derivatives, tokenized securities and decentralized finance.
Richmond said that, rather than having companies interpret these guidelines, “codifying” the existing regulatory practices into a national framework that applies consistently across provincial securities regulators will help reduce legal uncertainties for builders. Essentially, he argued that Canada should consolidate more of its existing crypto requirements into a ‘national instrument’ — a set of harmonized securities rules adopted across provincial and territorial regulators.
Ethereum And Solana Lead H1 2026 Crypto Hack Losses
Crypto losses topped $1 billion in the first half of 2026 as the industry recorded its highest number of hacks in a six-month period, according to onchain security platform Blockaid.
Ethereum and Solana recorded the largest losses from incidents affecting their networks, with roughly $332 million and $326 million in stolen funds, respectively, Blockaid said in its H1 2026 security report published Tuesday.
Blockaid tracked 212 security incidents during the period, with the largest single exploit coming from KelpDAO at $292 million, while the platform verified 3.4 times as many high-threshold exploits in H1 2026 as across all of 2025.
Code exploits drove Ethereum incidents, while breaches of keys and signing infrastructure accounted for most Solana losses, according to the report.
Ethereum losses reflected the risks of high-value protocols
Ethereum incurred the highest losses from incidents in H1 2026, with attackers primarily targeting vulnerabilities in applications built on the network.
Blockaid said code exploits dominated Ethereum incidents by count, with major losses also linked to key compromises involving Humanity Protocol and StablR. CoWSwap, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange, was the only major Ethereum incident in the report classified as a user mistake.
Blockchain losses by network in the first half of 2026. Source: Blockaid.
Blockaid identified several common attack methods targeting Ethereum, including bugs in bridges and smart contracts, unauthorized access to privileged accounts and market manipulation techniques.
The report said Ethereum remains a major target because it hosts many of the crypto industry’s most valuable applications, including restaking platforms, stablecoins and decentralized exchanges.
Solana losses surged as attackers shifted focus
Solana incurred nearly as much in losses as Ethereum during the first half of 2026, a sharp increase from the roughly $127 million in stolen funds the network recorded during 2025.
“2025 had $2.58 billion lost across 63 incidents, concentrated in Q1 by Bybit’s $1.5 billion, with Ethereum and Arbitrum the top chains by stolen-fund flow,” Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan told Cointelegraph.
Blockchain losses by network in 2025. Source: Blockaid.
The change did not stem from a rise in smart contract exploits. Instead, compromised keys accounted for more than 98% of Solana’s losses, driven largely by incidents involving Drift Protocol and Step Finance, which Blockaid linked to North Korea-linked cyber groups.
Unlike Ethereum, where attackers primarily exploited vulnerabilities in protocol code, Solana incidents targeted signer infrastructure and organizational security, while a handful of code exploits involving Raydium and Volo accounted for the remaining losses.
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Ondo drops blockchain plans for private, high-speed trading network
The pivot comes as tokenization gathers momentum across Wall Street. Tokenization — the process of representing traditional assets such as stocks, bonds and funds as blockchain-based tokens — is gaining traction as firms look to modernize capital markets with faster settlement and around-the-clock trading. At the same time, perpetual futures, once largely confined to crypto markets, are expanding to traditional assets such as stocks and commodities like oil and gold.
Beyond issuing tokenized assets
Ondo has emerged as one of the sector’s largest issuers, with about $2.6 billion in tokenized U.S. Treasury products across OUSG and USDY and roughly $850 million in tokenized equities, according to rwa.xyz. The firm’s broker-dealer obtained last week FINRA approval to launch regulated markets and services for tokenized securities.
The new network represents the company’s next step in moving beyond issuing tokenized assets to building the infrastructure for trading them.
Ondo Network separates trade execution from settlement instead of processing every trade on a public blockchain. Orders are executed privately for greater speed, while finalized asset transfers settle on public blockchains.
The approach is designed to address a key concern for institutional investors, who want the benefits of blockchain settlement without exposing their trading activity, positions or order flow to competitors.
Fed meeting could matter more for the Nasdaq than bitcoin, analysts say
Markets are split on whether the Federal Reserve will hike rates or stay on hold on Wednesday, but analysts say bitcoin may be less vulnerable than AI-driven tech stocks.
Bitcoin recovered from its intra-day losses to trade flat just below $64,000 on Tuesday, while AI-linked technology stocks stumbled again ahead of one of the most uncertain Fed meetings in years.
Markets currently price a 70% probability that the Fed leaves rates unchanged on Wednesday and a 30% chance of a surprise 25-basis-point hike, CME FedWatch data shows. The split reflects Chair Kevin Warsh’s reduced use of forward guidance, leaving investors with less clarity on the central bank’s next move, according to derivatives analytics firm Block Scholes.
“Tomorrow’s FOMC meeting, Kevin Warsh’s second as chairman of the Fed, is one of the most uncertain in years,” said Thahbib Rahman, research analyst at Block Scholes. Looking at every Fed meeting since 2015, he noted that only two have seen markets more divided over the outcome.
Signs of decoupling
Even with that uncertainty hanging over markets, bitcoin has largely held its ground in July while chipmakers and other AI favorites have come under pressure, raising the possibility that crypto is beginning to diverge, at least at the margin, from traditional risk assets.