Good morning everybody.
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Thursday, September 17th, 2026.
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve did exactly what markets had been expecting. The Fed unanimously raised its target rate by 25 basis points to 3.75% to 4%, its first increase since 2023.
And Bitcoin basically shrugged.
We’re sitting around $76,900 this morning. That’s why I’ve been saying for days that the rate hike itself wasn’t the big question. It had been priced in. The bigger question is what happens next as the higher rate works its way through mortgages, corporate borrowing, investment and the broader economy.
Meanwhile, institutional adoption keeps moving in the opposite direction. Circle launched its Arc blockchain. Deutsche Bank is preparing crypto custody. Kraken’s parent is expanding derivatives. Congress is already moving on other crypto legislation after CLARITY failed.
There’s a lot happening underneath a Bitcoin price that looks pretty boring.
Bitcoin’s Problem Right Now Is Demand, Not Yesterday’s Rate Hike
People texted me yesterday wondering why Bitcoin didn’t move dramatically when the Fed raised rates.
Because everybody knew it was coming.
The Fed vote was 12-0, and the official statement explicitly said inflation remains elevated.
Markets had already assigned more than a 90% probability to a quarter-point increase before the announcement.
So why is Bitcoin hanging around the bottom of its recent range?
Demand.
Several sources of new demand have cooled simultaneously. On-chain capital inflows have slowed. ETF flows have weakened or turned negative. Stablecoin supply has been relatively flat. Corporate treasury buying has cooled.
That’s more interesting to me than the Fed announcement itself.
Bitcoin is sitting around the $76K-$77K area, which is basically the bottom of the range we’ve been watching.
If we decisively break below $76K and stay there, my next level is around $72K.
Until that happens, I still consider this sideways.
And considering everything Bitcoin has absorbed lately, I’m actually pretty impressed.
CLARITY failed.
The Fed raised rates.
Oil is still above $100.
ETF flows have weakened.
The 10-year Treasury has been around 5%.
And Bitcoin is still sitting at $76K.
Eight years ago, some of these headlines could have produced absolutely ridiculous moves. Today we’re arguing about whether Bitcoin is worth $76K or $78K.
That’s progress.
The four-year-cycle question is still hanging over us, though. If the historical cycle remains intact, October remains the window I’ve been watching for another significant low. But we’ve also discussed the possibility that the low around $60K was already it. Paul McNeil thinks the bottom is in. He’s considerably more bullish than I am.
For now, we wait.
Wall Street Keeps Building Crypto Infrastructure
This is where today’s news gets considerably more bullish.
Circle officially launched the public mainnet for Arc, its new Layer 1 blockchain built specifically around financial markets, payments and agentic economic activity.
This isn’t some tiny experimental chain.
Circle says Arc launched with more than 100 applications and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders. Aave V4, Morpho and Uniswap are available from day one. Its founding validator group includes BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, ICE, MoneyGram and others.
That’s significant.
Then we have Deutsche Bank.
The bank officially announced yesterday that it plans to launch regulated digital-asset custody for institutional and corporate clients in Europe this year, subject to the remaining regulatory timeline.
This fits exactly what we’ve been watching all year.
Big banks aren’t looking at crypto anymore and saying, “How do we make this disappear?”
They’re asking:
How do we own the custody? How do we own settlement? How do we own tokenization? How do we make money from the infrastructure?
That’s also why I keep coming back to the banking fight surrounding stablecoins.
Traditional financial institutions understand that this technology can be enormously profitable.
So they want in.
The fight is increasingly about who controls the rails.
CLARITY Failed, but Congress Didn’t Stop Working on Crypto
I’m not going to rehash yesterday’s entire CLARITY discussion.
The Senate failed to advance it. Trump’s crypto interests gave Democrats a powerful ethics argument, the banking lobby had its own concerns about stablecoin competition, and four Republicans ultimately voted against advancement as well.
But Congress didn’t suddenly stop working on crypto.
The House Ways and Means Committee voted 38-5 to advance bipartisan digital-asset tax legislation. Among other provisions, the proposal would establish a de minimis exemption for certain crypto transaction fees worth $10 or less and clarify taxation of mining and staking rewards.
That’s notable because it happened immediately after CLARITY collapsed.
So we’re already seeing a distinction between “CLARITY failed” and “Congress has abandoned crypto.”
Those are not the same thing.
The transcript also discusses House movement on legislation intended to codify a federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve rather than leaving it solely as executive policy. But as I said on the show, House committee action isn’t the same thing as becoming law. There still needs to be a viable legislative path through both chambers.
Something happened.
But it’s nothing until it’s something.
Security, Prediction Markets and Zcash
We’ve also got a bizarre security story today.
Hackers hijacked HBO Max’s verified Reddit account and used it to run 108 malicious advertisements over roughly 48 hours.
The ads promoted fake software and directed people into a social-engineering attack called ClickFix. Instead of exploiting some magical zero-day, victims were tricked into copying malicious commands into Windows PowerShell, the Run dialog or macOS Terminal themselves.
That’s another reminder of something we’ve discussed repeatedly.
The cryptography doesn’t necessarily have to fail.
Sometimes the easiest vulnerability is the person sitting at the computer.
Prediction markets are also facing another legal test. According to today’s transcript, South Korean authorities booked 26 Polymarket users over alleged illegal gambling, with 18 referred to prosecutors. Authorities allege roughly $12.7 million in wagers were involved.
Here’s my opinion on Polymarket and Kalshi: I think it’s gambling.
They can call them event contracts or prediction markets, and there are genuine legal differences in how these products are structured and traded. But from the user’s perspective, you’re putting money behind whether you think an uncertain event will occur.
With that said, I also don’t think adults should be broadly prohibited from deciding what they do with their own money.
Both things can be true.
Finally, look at Zcash.
ZEC surged sharply overnight, trading around $1,369 at one point. Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang disclosed that his firm owns Zcash and described it as a “private complement to Bitcoin.”
That helped put privacy back in the conversation.
Zcash isn’t anywhere close to its historical peak. As I mentioned during the show, its old all-time high was nearly $6,000. So anybody still holding from those days has a long way to go.
But a 20%-plus move gets people’s attention.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $76,922, up approximately 1.5% over 24 hours.
Ethereum is approximately $2,463, up around 2.5%.
BNB is around $730, up approximately 2.5%.
XRP is approximately $1.30, up around 2.3%.
Solana is around $101, up approximately 3.8%.
TRON is approximately $0.334, essentially flat.
Zcash is around $1,366, up approximately 12.7% on the 24-hour reading I used during the show, after trading even higher on some market feeds.
Hyperliquid is around $80.44, up approximately 2.6%.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.62 trillion, up around 1.3%.
Fear & Greed: 64.
My Take
I’m not particularly worried about Bitcoin sitting around $76K today.
The Fed did what everybody expected. CLARITY failed. ETF demand has weakened. Oil remains expensive. We’ve got plenty of macro headwinds.
And Bitcoin is still here.
The level I’m watching is $76K. If we lose it decisively and stay below it, then I’m looking toward roughly $72K. Until then, we’re still hanging around the bottom of the same range.
But the price isn’t the most interesting part of today’s news.
Circle has more than 100 applications launching around Arc. Some of the biggest financial institutions in the world are participating in its ecosystem. Deutsche Bank is preparing institutional digital-asset custody. Congress is still advancing crypto tax legislation immediately after CLARITY failed.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
Bitcoin can trade sideways while the infrastructure underneath the entire industry keeps expanding.
Those aren’t contradictory things.