Bitcoin (BTC) climbed back toward $78,000 on Friday, two days after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, while Hyperliquid (HYPE) surged 11%.
Key Points:
- Bitcoin recovered the whole of an overnight drop to $75,972 and posted a third straight session of gains.
- Hyperliquid's token led the majors at nearly $89, with Zcash up 8% and Solana up 6%.
- The Fed's quarter-point hike on Wednesday was its first since 2023, and traders had almost fully priced it in.
Bitcoin Rebound Lets HYPE And Zcash Run Ahead
The largest cryptocurrency traded just above $78,000 early Friday after it touched $75,900 during U.S. hours, recovering the whole of that overnight drop.
It was a third straight session of gains, and the coin pushed back above $78,000 later in the European morning.
Hyperliquid's token reached nearly $89, the strongest move among the majors. Zcash (ZEC) added 8% to roughly $1,472, and Solana (SOL) gained 6% to just above $106. Total crypto market value rose 2% to about $2.66 trillion, and not one of the 40 most liquid coins finished the stretch lower, with NEAR up 30% and UNI 26%.
Zcash had started its climb a day earlier, after Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang disclosed his firm's stake in the privacy token, calling it a private complement to Bitcoin.
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FxPro And Blockware Read The Altcoin Rotation
Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said traders are "cautiously shifting their focus towards altcoins," though a widely watched altcoin season index remains subdued. He expects profit-taking into the weekend to delay any attempt on the top of Bitcoin's range near $82,000.
Mitchell Askew, head of Blockware Intelligence at Blockware, argued that Bitcoin hardly budged on two pieces of objectively bad news, the rate increase and a failed Senate vote on crypto market structure. Anyone who planned to sell on those headlines has already sold, he said. He called that a hallmark of the later stages of a bottoming process.
Fed Hike And Clarity Act Frame The Week
The Fed lifted its benchmark rate by a quarter point on Wednesday to a range of 3.75% to 4%, its first increase since 2023, in a unanimous vote that futures traders had given roughly a 93% chance.
Pressure eased elsewhere too, as the 10-year Treasury yield slipped back below 5%, Brent crude fell under $103 from as high as $109 this week, and U.S. equities rebounded on Thursday.
Bitcoin has spent September absorbing blows without giving much ground. It rallied 25% in August to around $81,000 and set a monthly high of $82,284 on Sept. 4, then slipped below $74,887 on Tuesday after the Clarity Act drew 49 of the 60 Senate votes it needed.
The coin is down 1.5% for the month, a shallower loss than September has averaged since 2013, and it holds a gain of about 32% for the quarter, on course for its first positive quarterly close since 2025.
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