Bitcoin Drops Below $78,000 After Warsh Speech

Bitcoin fell 3.2% over 24 hours to $77,802 by midday Friday, leaving it 0.5% higher on the week after trading as high as $81,479.50 overnight. Gold fell 2.4% and U.S. equities turned negative after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh told the Jackson Hole symposium the central bank has “work to do” on inflation.
By:The Defiant Team•
Markets

Bitcoin fell through $78,000 on Friday afternoon, giving up almost all of a weekly gain that had reached double digits, as investors read Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s first Jackson Hole address as a signal that the Fed is readier to raise rates than to cut them.

The selling ran across risk assets. Gold, which had climbed through most of August, dropped 2.4%, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite gave up early gains to trade lower. Warsh set no path for the policy rate and named a condition the Fed has not met.

Bitcoin last traded at $77,801.86 on Coinbase, down 3.2% over 24 hours and up 0.5% over seven days, after reaching $81,479.50 at 9 p.m. ET Thursday. Ether was at $2,444.32, down 3.1% on the day and up 1.6% on the week. Solana fell 4.2% to $104.38, holding a 14% weekly gain; XRP fell 4.6% to $1.3977 and is now flat over seven days.

Work To Do

Warsh delivered the keynote, titled “In Our Time,” at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium at 10 a.m. ET on Friday, his first as chair.

“The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, the 12-month change in the PCE price index, stands at 3.7 percent, while the six-month change is 4.1 percent,” he said, according to the text published by the Federal Reserve Board. “The comparable measures from the consumer price index (CPI) are also elevated, as are the core measures of both PCE and CPI inflation. None of these measures are perfect, but they all tell a similar story: Inflation is running above our 2 percent target. So the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices.”

He offered a test. “Here is my standard: We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do.”

The speech restated his objection to signalling decisions in advance. “To highlight one example, I have set out to change the form and function of the Fed Chairman’s so-called forward guidance,” Warsh said. “You might know about my long-time discomfort with early pronouncements of future policy decisions.”

One of his numbered principles was monetary aggregates. “Sixth, money matters. It’s not fashionable these days, but my view is that money has something important to do with monetary policy,” he said. “We should pay attention to money created by the central bank and money that comes from the banking and financial systems.”

The symposium’s theme this year is “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy.” Warsh’s remarks made no mention of stablecoins, tokenization or digital assets.

Selling Into Midday

The decline came in two stages. Bitcoin peaked at $81,479.50 in the 1 a.m. UTC hour, or 9 p.m. ET Thursday, its highest since May, and worked lower through the Asia and Europe sessions to close the 9 a.m. ET hour at $79,341

The speech hour brought a spike down to $78,432 and a recovery to $79,561. The heavier selling came after. Bitcoin traded at $79,353 at 11:30 a.m. ET and fell in every five-minute interval but one over the following 45 minutes, reaching $77,800 by 12:15 p.m. ET. From the overnight high, the drop is 4.5%.

Ether traced the same path, from $2,535.55 overnight to $2,444.32, a 3.6% decline from its high.

Gold Goes Too

The SPDR Gold Shares ETF fell 2.35% to $412.68 by 12:14 p.m. ET. The S&P 500 was at 7,720.38, down 0.14%, after trading up 0.36% two hours earlier, and the Nasdaq Composite was at 26,444.99, down 0.36%.

Rate traders had not repriced the September meeting. Polymarket put the odds of no change at the Sept. 15-16 meeting at 69% and a quarter-point increase at 28%, against 1.7% for a cut, on $56.2 million of volume. The hike price stood at 31% on Thursday. The target range is 3.50% to 3.75%.

The 30-year Treasury yield closed at 5.19% on Thursday and the 10-year at 4.67%, with the two-year at 4.20%, Treasury data shows. Friday’s rates publish after the close.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index read 73, or greed, on Friday, against 71 on Thursday and 65 on Wednesday The reading is taken daily and predates the afternoon decline

Senate cloture on the CLARITY Act ripens Sept. 15, the day the FOMC begins its meeting. The Defiant reported this month that traders had pushed passage odds into 2027.

All Ears On Language

Traders went into the morning with no forward guidance to price.

“The Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium has traditionally been the venue at which the Chair prepares financial markets with some forward guidance for the path of monetary policy in the period ahead,” said Thahbib Rahman, Research Analyst at Block Scholes, in a note sent before the speech. “In 2024, Powell delivered the famous ‘The time has come for policy to adjust’ line and in 2025 he claimed that a ‘shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance’. As such, in the past two years, the Jackson Hole speech has typically been supportive of near-term Bitcoin (BTC) price action, both years spot price rallied close to 5%.”

“So, what can we expect from Kevin Warsh today? The current Fed Chair’s explicit aversion to forward guidance leaves a far less certain outcome,” Rahman said.

Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, set out the question the speech would be judged on in a statement issued Friday morning: “Warsh doesn’t need a new framework today, he needs to answer one question clearly: will the Fed raise rates if inflation doesn’t come down.”

ETFs Keep Buying

The funds were still taking money in through Thursday. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $242.3 million, bringing the four sessions of this week to $1.13 billion BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for $277.6 million, while Fidelity’s FBTC lost $83.6 million and Grayscale’s GBTC $27.2 million. Cumulative net inflow since launch stands at $54.9 billion

Spot ether ETFs took in $225.8 million on Thursday, their largest daily figure in six sessions, and $713.6 million over the week. BlackRock’s ETHA drew $130.2 million and Fidelity’s FETH $56.2 million. Spot Solana ETFs took in $56.1 million, also the largest in at least five sessions, lifting cumulative net flow to $1.28 billion. Friday’s figures publish after the U.S. close and will be the first to capture the afternoon move.

DeFi total value locked stood at $88.96 billion, DefiLlama data shows. Ethereum holds $49.76 billion of it, up 5.59% over seven days, and Solana $5.90 billion, up 10.63%. Stablecoin supply reached $303.97 billion, up 0.8% over seven days and 0.89% over 30 days, adding about $2.4 billion on the week.

Ethena And Solana

Ethena’s research team posted a proposal to activate the ENA fee switch on the Ethena governance forum on Thursday afternoon, tying buyback size to USDe supply milestones and directing “95% of the net revenue” from three business lines to ENA buybacks once the first milestone is met. USDe circulating supply stands at $4.04 billion, DefiLlama data shows, against the “>$6bn” threshold in the Risk Committee’s 2024 parameters. No tokenholder vote had been posted in the thread as of Friday afternoon. The Defiant covered the first attempt to switch on the fee in September 2025.

Solana holds the largest weekly gain among the major tokens as its first on-chain validator governance vote closes at the end of epoch 1023 on Friday. SGP-0002, which would double the network’s disinflation rate, sat below the two-thirds threshold it needs on Friday morning after Kraken’s two validators voted 12.2 million SOL against it, according to the Solana validator governance site. The network launched onchain governance this year, and validators rejected an earlier emissions cut in March 2025.

Prices as of 12:20 p.m. ET on Aug. 28, 2026. Token prices and 24-hour and seven-day changes are calculated from Coinbase hourly and five-minute data.

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Source: thedefiant.io