The Week in Data, Sep 14 to 20: Bitcoin Rises 5.7% Through the First Fed Hike Since 2023

The Federal Reserve raised rates on Wednesday for the first time since 2023, and bitcoin finished the week higher anyway. BTC opened Monday at $76,800 on Kraken, fell to $74,892 on Tuesday after the Clarity Act stalled in the Senate, and closed Sunday at $81,164. That is a 5.7% gain.

Stocks barely moved over the same five sessions, and the rate-sensitive two-year Treasury yield climbed 13 basis points. Crypto did its climbing late, on a Friday short squeeze.

Markets

Kraken daily candles, Monday to Sunday UTC:

Asset	Week open	Week close	High	Low	Change
BTC	$76,800	$81,164	$81,915	$74,892	+5.7%
ETH	$2,475.95	$2,645.06	$2,665.00	$2,356.45	+6.8%
SOL	$99.25	$111.14	$114.30	$95.73	+12.0%

All three coins set their weekly low on Tuesday, Sep 15. That evening a Senate cloture vote on the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill, fell short of the 60 votes it needed. CoinDesk wrote that the failure "essentially ends market structure legislative work in the Senate for 2026," and Coinbase fell 6.7%. Yahoo Finance reported that the vote knocked bitcoin below $75,000.

On Wednesday the Fed raised its target range by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4%, a unanimous 12 to 0 vote and the first hike since July 2023, according to Fox Business. Chair Kevin Warsh said inflation "is too high and has been for too long." The median projection called for one more quarter-point hike this year and a hold after that.

Bitcoin's big day came Friday. The Sep 18 Kraken candle ran from $76,355 to $80,878, a 5.9% gain, and Yahoo Finance reported more than $445 million of short positions liquidated across crypto, $230 million of it in bitcoin. Spot bitcoin ETFs took in $433 million that day, led by Fidelity's FBTC at $310.7 million, according to SoSoValue data reported by Crowdfund Insider.

That one session carried the ETF week. Funds took in about $160 million on Monday, lost roughly $746 million across Tuesday and Wednesday, added $159.5 million on Thursday, and ended with a net weekly inflow of just $6.2 million.

Sentiment took a similar path. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index from Alternative.me read 57, 69, 51, 50, 56, 71 and 71 from Monday to Sunday: a midweek dip into Neutral with a low of 50 on Thursday, then two days at 71. The newest print is 78, Extreme Greed, the highest in the ten days of history we pulled.

US stocks sat the rally out. SPY closed Friday at $761.69, down 0.3% from $764.29 a week earlier, after dipping to $749.60 intraday on Fed day. QQQ rose 0.9% to $721.45.

Yields carried the hawkish half of the story. The two-year Treasury yield went from 4.63% on Sep 11 to 4.76% on Sep 18. The ten-year went from 4.96% to 5.01% and closed at 5.01% on both Wednesday and Friday. That flattened the gap between them from 33 to 25 basis points.

The rally kept going after the week closed. Bitcoin touched $87,447 on Kraken on Monday and was near $85,350 on Coinbase at the time of writing (early Tuesday UTC); the live ticker follows it tick by tick. SPY rose 1.55% on Monday to $773.50 and QQQ 2.77% to $741.47; NBC News reported record closes for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, led by chipmakers and an 11.4% jump in Meta. Oil fell on hopes of US and Iran talks, and the ten-year eased to 4.96%.

Positioning

Hyperliquid perpetuals held $13.44 billion of open interest across 178 markets at the time of writing. Bitcoin was the largest at $3.77 billion, or 44,184 BTC. Ether followed at $3.09 billion (1.13 million ETH), then HYPE at $2.03 billion. Hourly funding on both BTC and ETH was 0.00125%.

The dashboard's open interest panel only began keeping its own history on Monday, so this issue reports levels, not coin-denominated changes.

ETH/BTC ended the week at 0.0326 on Kraken closes, up from 0.0322 at the open, as ether's 6.8% gain edged out bitcoin's 5.7%. Monday reversed it. On Hyperliquid the ratio read 0.0319 at the time of writing, down 2.4% on the day and 0.5% on the week, inside a 30-day range of 0.0308 to 0.0332.

Prediction markets

Four of Polymarket's most-traded markets at the time of writing, with the one-week odds change Polymarket reports:

Market	Yes	1-week change	24h volume
Fed raises rates 25 bps after the October meeting	52.5%	+16 pts	$413K
Bitcoin reaches $87,500 in September	64.5%	+49 pts	$240K
Ethereum dips to $2,250 by Dec 31	29.5%	-29.5 pts	$424K
NATO and Russia military clash by Oct 31	21.5%	+9 pts	$247K

The October Fed market traded $1.79 million over the week. Its odds, near a coin flip, sit alongside a Fed median that has one more hike before year end, with October and December still to come. The bitcoin strike is close: Kraken's Monday high stopped $53 short of $87,500. Background on how these odds work: prediction market.

The planet

USGS recorded 116 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or greater between Sep 14 and Sep 20 UTC. Two made its significant list: a M6.5 169 km west of Nikolski, Alaska, on Sep 17 at a depth of 98 km, and a M6.4 49 km north-northeast of Kainantu, Papua New Guinea, on Sep 20 at 104 km. Both carried a green PAGER alert, the lowest on USGS's impact scale.

GDACS tracked four tropical cyclones at the time of writing (Dujuan, Fay, Odalys and Polo), all Green, with no population in Category 1 winds. The only Orange alerts GDACS still lists as current are floods in India and China that date to late July and early August.

The Smithsonian and USGS weekly volcano report for Sep 10 to 16 listed 20 volcanoes, and Krakatau was the only entry flagged as new eruptive activity: Indonesia's PVMBG counted 14 Strombolian eruptions from Sep 6 to 11 and kept the alert at level 3 of 4. In Colombia, the SGC described intensifying activity at Puracé, with ash plumes up to 1.2 km above the summit and ashfall in nearby communities. Lewotobi Laki-Laki went the other way, lowered to alert level 2 on Sep 16.

Space

The Space Devs logged 12 orbital launches from Sep 14 to 20 UTC, all successful. Six were Chinese, and four flew on Sep 17 alone.

Date (UTC)	Vehicle	Mission
Sep 15	Vega-C	Sentinel-3C and ESA's FLEX
Sep 15	Zhuque-2E	SpaceSail Polar Group 15
Sep 15	Gravity-1	SpaceSail Polar Group 16
Sep 16	Soyuz 2.1b	Progress MS-35 to the ISS
Sep 17	Long March 12	SatNet LEO Group 25
Sep 17	Falcon 9	USSF-259 (classified)
Sep 17	Kuaizhou 11	SpaceTY-51 and 52
Sep 17	Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat	Glonass-K1 (payload unconfirmed)
Sep 19	Electron	StriX Launch 12 for Synspective
Sep 19	Long March 2D	PIESAT-2 13 to 16
Sep 20	Falcon 9	Starlink Group 15-27
Sep 20	Kinetica 1	Nine rideshare satellites

The internet

None of the four status pages we pulled (Cloudflare, GitHub, OpenAI and Anthropic) logged a critical incident. Cloudflare's page recorded 20 incidents, 12 minor and 8 with no listed impact, mostly regional network slowdowns. Every incident rated major involved an AI product: two at OpenAI, the longer being about 80 minutes of ChatGPT Work mode errors on Sep 17; about 85 minutes of error spikes on two Claude models on Sep 15; and about 10.5 hours of degradation with a Gemini model at GitHub on Sep 16.

On TerminalFeed itself, the feed health monitor showed 112 of 115 checked feeds live and 3 idle, none stalled, at the time of writing. The status page has the live board.

The week ahead

Fed speakers, all week: Williams, Jefferson and Barkin on Tuesday, Barr on Wednesday, Williams and Hammack on Friday.
Wednesday, Sep 23: flash S&P Global PMIs for September.
Thursday, Sep 24: Xi's US state visit and a Trump and Xi summit, US initial jobless claims, and rate decisions from the SNB, Riksbank, Norges Bank and Banxico.
Friday, Sep 25: US durable goods orders for August.
Launches: Rocket Lab's StriX Launch 13 and SpaceX's USSF-385 on Sep 26, after Chinese flights on Sep 23 and 24. Starship Flight 14 is listed for Sep 28, not yet confirmed.

The Fed expects one more hike; Polymarket gives October roughly even odds. Bitcoin rallied through the first one. The BTC page will show whether that holds.