Spot held a $1,000 band all day and finished the afternoon higher, while nearly half a billion dollars of leveraged positions were cleared out.
Bitcoin traded at $76,012 late Wednesday afternoon, up 0.56% on the session, within a range of $75,171 to $76,228.
Ether rose 0.39% to $2,406.95. XRP rose 1.33% to $1.3011 after trading as low as $1.2536, though it remains below where it sat before Tuesday's failed Senate cloture vote on crypto market-structure legislation.
Those are modest moves. They are notable because of what happened around them. The Federal Reserve raised rates to 3.75% to 4.00%, projected further increases, and triggered a reversal that took the S&P 500 from roughly 7,609 at 2:30 p.m. to a session low of 7,507.77, sent the 10-year Treasury yield to a session high of 5.006%, pushed the dollar index up 0.35% and knocked gold down roughly $114 from its intraday peak.
Bitcoin went up.
The flat tape and the liquidation data tell different stories
Total crypto liquidations across the trailing 24 hours to 15:30 UTC Wednesday, as measured by CoinGlass, were $477 million, of which $363 million were long positions. Bitcoin accounted for $144 million and ether for $136 million.
That is the informative pairing. Spot prices that barely move while nearly half a billion dollars of leveraged positions are force-closed describe a market where the pain is concentrated in derivatives positioning rather than in spot demand. Longs are being flushed, and the flush is being absorbed without a corresponding move in the underlying.
The mechanical reading is that leverage entering the week was heavily skewed long, and that Tuesday's legislative defeat took out stops without breaking the spot bid.
One caution on the figure: liquidation totals published for different rolling windows are not comparable, and this one covers the 24 hours ending at 15:30 UTC Wednesday, spanning both Tuesday's post-vote session and Wednesday's pre-decision trading. It is not a measure of Tuesday's vote-specific move.
Why the non-reaction to the Fed is the notable part
A first rate increase in three years, accompanied by projections of more, would ordinarily register in an asset that trades as a long-duration risk exposure. It registered clearly in crypto-linked equities: Coinbase fell 4.72% and Robinhood 6.37% on the same session. It did not register in the token.
That split is the cleanest available evidence that bitcoin's recent direction has been driven by the legislative story rather than by rates, while the equities that reference it are being priced off the discount rate like any other high-multiple growth name.
XRP's position supports the same point from the other side. It remains meaningfully below its pre-vote level while bitcoin has held, which is what you would expect if regulatory clarity, not macro, is the dominant variable for the tokens.
The next markers
Whether spot holds the $75,000 area now that the Fed's projected path is known, and whether liquidation volumes normalize. Continued heavy long liquidations at a stable price would suggest leverage is still unwinding rather than finished.
## PRIVATE MARKETS