Fed Hikes Rate by 50bps, Sends BTC Below $18K as Crypto Rally Cools Off (Market Watch)

The decision of the US Federal Reserve to hike interest rates by 50 basis points put an end to the most recent crypto rally. Bitcoin’s price tumbled below $18K as the entire market took a beating.

Bitcoin’s Price Tumbles Below $18K

On December 13th, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published the numbers for the Consumer Price Index, which is used to gauge the levels of inflation in the country. They came in at 7.1% for November, which was below the expected 7.3%. Naturally, this led to an increase in the market, and BTC’s price soared to over $18K shortly after.

However, during the FOMC meeting yesterday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced another interest rate hike of 50 basis points, which had the exact opposite effect on the price.

As seen in the above chart, BTC’s price reached an intraday high of around $18,387 (on Binance) but failed to sustain the rally and is currently trading at around $17,600.

Altcoins Have it Worse

The entire market is painted red, but it appears that altcoins have it worse than Bitcoin. The BTC dominance is a testament to this. it increased by 0.4% in the past 24 hours, indicating the growing share of BTC relative to that of the rest of the market.

The above is also visible in this heatmap:

It’s clear that altcoins lost more compared to BTC. ETH is down bu about 2.5%, BNB lost over 3%, and so did DOGE and LTC. TON lost a lot of the gains from the past few days and is currently down about 8.5%. This also makes it the worst performer from the top 100 coins by market cap. However, it’s worth noting that it’s still up by almost 30% in the past seven days.

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On the other hand, XDC and IMX managed to pull ahead, charting 7% and 4.7% gains, respectively.

The total cryptocurrency market capitalization was pushed below $900 million on this latest dip.