Bitcoin held near $64,000 after a divided Fed kept rates unchanged

The Federal Reserve kept its target interest-rate range at 3.5% to 3.75% on July 29, 2026, and bitcoin remained near $64,000 after an initially negative reaction. The muted result mattered because the vote revealed a substantially divided central bank without producing the decisive cryptocurrency selloff that a surprise rate increase could have triggered.

The Federal Open Market Committee approved the decision by 9–3. Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissented in favor of an immediate quarter-percentage-point increase. The official statement said economic activity was expanding at a solid pace but inflation remained elevated relative to the Fed’s 2% goal, partly because of energy-related supply shocks.

Those facts made the announcement more restrictive than an uncomplicated rate hold. The target range did not change, but three policymakers formally preferred tighter policy.

A contained market reaction

Yahoo Finance’s BTC-USD series recorded a July 29 opening price of $63,853.49 and an 8:56 a.m. Eastern snapshot of $64,244.18. The difference was $390.69, or approximately 0.61%, calculated from those two publisher-provided observations. Its ETH-USD series moved in the other direction: ether opened at $1,919.73 and stood at $1,904.82 at 8:56 a.m., a calculated decline of approximately 0.78%.

Those observations preceded the 2 p.m. Eastern release and showed that the two largest crypto assets were not moving as a single, strongly directional trade before the decision.

A contemporaneous post-announcement report placed bitcoin near $63,890 and ether just above $1,900, with both described as down approximately 1% following the release. CoinDesk’s live coverage subsequently recorded bitcoin below $64,000 during the Fed chair’s press conference and approximately 0.45% higher over its rolling 24-hour window. Investing.com reported BTC/USD at $63,968.50 at 6:42 p.m. Eastern, up 0.3% under that publisher’s daily comparison.

These figures are snapshots rather than a unified closing-price series. Cryptocurrency trades continuously, and the surviving reports do not establish identical venue baskets, cutoffs or aggregation methods. They therefore support the narrower conclusion that bitcoin stayed close to $64,000—not a claim about an authoritative daily close or the exact size of every intraday move.

Why the vote mattered for crypto

The policy rate affects the return available on cash and government securities, the cost of leverage and investors’ willingness to hold volatile assets without contractual yield. Leaving the range unchanged removed the immediate risk of a quarter-point increase. The three dissents, however, demonstrated that additional tightening remained a live institutional possibility.

For bitcoin, that combination created competing pressures. Avoiding an increase reduced one near-term headwind, while persistent inflation and visible support for tighter policy limited the case for easier financial conditions. Ether faced the same macroeconomic backdrop alongside its separate protocol, staking and market-structure considerations.

The restrained price response should not be interpreted as proof that monetary policy had become irrelevant to digital assets. It showed only that the July 29 decision, broadly anticipated as a hold, did not by itself force a durable repricing during the observed window. Other contemporaneous variables—including energy prices, geopolitical risk and weakness in technology equities—also complicated causal attribution.

Later context

Coinbase Institutional wrote on July 31, 2026, that the divided vote and elevated real yields remained a hurdle for bitcoin. That retrospective assessment helps interpret the event but was not available when the July 29 market reaction unfolded.