Bitcoin Jumps Back Above $23,000 After FOMC Meeting, Crypto Market Back Above $1 Trillion

Despite a 75 basis points interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve, cryptocurrency market rejoiced moving past the $1 trillion market cap once again. The Fed rate hike was quite on the expected lines with equity and crypto markets celebrating the announcement.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) surged to more than $23,000 in a sharp 7% upswing. As of press time, Bitcoin is trading at $23,110 levels with a market cap of $441 billion.

The Fee commentary was interesting for the crypto market as chairman Jerome Powell suggested that the U.S. Central bank could slow down the pace of rate hikes. More importantly, the Federal Reserve has hinted that there will be no monetary policy revision during August 2022. This gives the crypto market a good time of two months of relaxation from any quantitative tightening measures.

Bitcoin has been facing a strong resistance at $22,8000 during the recent pullbacks and has failed to close above these levels. A weekly close above it could mean that Bitcoin will be prepared for the next rally upwards.

Apart from Bitcoin, altcoins too have made a very strong move on Wednesday. BTC competitor Ethereum (ETH) rallied once again all the way past $1,600 levels. Furthermore, the address activity on Ethereum network also shot past more than 1 million active addresses on Wednesday. This was the highest-ever single day address activity in four years since 2018.

There’s been a strong growing optimism surrounding the Ethereum Merge event that is likely to happen on September 19. Interestingly, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that doesn’t believe that The Merge has been priced-in until it happens.

During a recent interview with Bankless, Buterin said that “I basically expect that the merge is going to be kind of not priced in, by which I mean like not even just like market terms but even just kind of like psychological and narrative terms”.

He further hinted that for the ETH price rally to actually kick-in, we might have to wait for six to eight months post mid-September. Also, post The Merge upgrade, Ethereum will become a deflationary cryptocurrency as the EIP-1559 seeks to burn ETH instead of giving it to miners.

In the last 24-hours, the altcoin space has added more than $40 billion to the broader cryptocurrency market.