Bitcoin Falls Below $76,000 as Traders Cut CLARITY Act Odds Hours Before Senate Vote

Bitcoin gave back Monday's advance through the overnight Asia and Europe sessions and fell further in the first 90 minutes of U.S. trading on Tuesday, as traders cut the odds that the Senate takes up the CLARITY Act at a vote this afternoon.

Two dated federal events fall inside the same 28 hours. The Senate votes on cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 at 2:15 p.m. ET, and the Federal Open Market Committee releases its decision Wednesday afternoon. Prediction markets repriced both overnight. Options markets did not.

Bitcoin last changed hands at $76,018, down 3.1% over 24 hours and 2.6% over seven days, CoinGecko data shows. Coinbase recorded a 24-hour range of $75,538.01 to $79,591.17 against an open of $78,552.45, a peak-to-trough move of 5.1%. Ether was at $2,411.62, down 3.7% on the day and 2.2% on the week. XRP fell 0.8% to $1.39, Solana 2.6% to $99.01 and BNB 0.6% to $716.87. Total crypto market value stood at $2.71 trillion on $90.3 billion of volume, with bitcoin dominance at 56.2%, CoinGecko data shows. Weighted by market value, the 500 largest tokens fell 2.5% over 24 hours. Twenty-nine of the 124 largest non-stablecoin tokens rose and 95 fell.

Odds Collapse Before Cloture

Polymarket priced the CLARITY Act being signed into law in 2026 at 12.5% on Tuesday morning, on $17.9 million of cumulative volume. The same market read 29.5% on Monday afternoon and 18% on Friday, which The Defiant reported in Monday's wrap.

A companion market on how many senators vote for the bill put the odds of more than 50 votes at 41%, down 36.5 points over 24 hours on Polymarket's own reading. More than 60 votes traded at 25%.

Cloture on the motion to proceed needs 60 votes, under a unanimous consent agreement entered Aug. 8 and printed in the Senate Calendar of Business. Republicans hold 53 seats, so seven Democrats carry the motion if every Republican votes to proceed. The Defiant reported that seven-Democrat math when the bill reached the floor calendar, and covered the revised text Senator Cynthia Lummis posted on Sept. 10. None of the seven Democrats who negotiated the bill had endorsed the final text as of Tuesday morning.

Eighteen state attorneys general asked the Senate on Monday to reject the bill as written. In a letter to Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, the group asked Congress to preserve state enforcement over tokenized and non-tokenized securities and to codify state registration regimes for digital assets.

"As written, the Clarity Act would embolden scammers and potentially strip attorneys general of our authority to protect our states' investors and their wallets," New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement accompanying the letter. Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia signed alongside New York.

Traders had pushed passage odds into 2027 in early August, when Majority Leader John Thune let a first cloture filing pass.

Volatility Stays Cheap

Options premiums carried none of that repricing.

"Derivatives markets for now are not expecting the Senate's procedural vote on the Clarity Act to be a major event risk for volatility as other past major macro events have done, such as the US election and launch of spot ETFs," Thahbib Rahman, research analyst at Block Scholes, wrote in a note sent to reporters on Tuesday morning.

"For BTC, all options are trading with an implied volatility of 38-39%, with only a slight uptick for 7-day options relative to 14-day options for example which covers both today's Clarity Act procedural vote and tomorrow's FOMC meeting," Rahman wrote. He put skew close to neutral for seven-day bitcoin options and slightly positive for ether, "an indication that despite the potential of a less supportive macro backdrop, and a delay in the Clarity Act, options traders are yet to turn decisively bearish."

Rahman's note, timed at 7:58 a.m. ET, cited the Polymarket enactment odds at 19%. They fell to 12.5% over the next three hours.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index read 69, or greed, on Tuesday, against 57 on Monday and 56 on Friday, according to Alternative.me. The index publishes once a day at 00:00 UTC and reflects Monday's session.

A Hike And A Five-Handle

Polymarket priced a quarter-point increase at Wednesday's decision at 86.5% and no change at 12.5%, on $172.7 million of volume across the event, against 85.5% and 14.5% on Monday afternoon. A cut of any size traded below 1%. The FOMC meets Sept. 15-16. Traders made an increase the favorite on Aug. 31 after Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech, which The Defiant covered at the time.

The 10-year par yield traded at 5.00% on Tuesday morning after closing at 4.97% on Monday, the highest close of 2026, Treasury data shows. The last close at or above 5.00% was July 19, 2007. The 30-year closed at 5.34% and traded at 5.37%. The 10-year real yield closed at 2.60% on Monday, its highest reading of the year.

Equities fell for a second session. The S&P 500 traded at 7,580, down 0.5% from Monday's close of 7,620, and the Nasdaq Composite at 26,005, down 0.7%. Gold fell 0.8% to $4,317 an ounce. Brent crude was at $103.26 a barrel, down 2.3% from Monday's settle of $105.68 and 4.1% below its Sept. 10 close of $107.63. The Defiant covered Brent's move through $100 last week.

ETF Buyers Come Back

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $159.9 million on Monday, according to Farside Investors, after four sessions of outflows totaling $462.7 million between Sept. 8 and Sept. 11. BlackRock's IBIT accounted for $134.3 million of Monday's total and Fidelity's FBTC for $53.3 million. Spot ether ETFs took in $121.1 million, following $216.4 million on Sept. 11, with BlackRock's ETHA at $80.5 million. Tuesday's figures publish after the U.S. close.

"Monday's roughly $160 million net inflow into US spot bitcoin ETFs is the clearest evidence of fresh buying through one visible route. It followed $463 million of net outflows last week," said Adam Haeems, head of asset management at Tesseract Group, in commentary emailed to reporters. "That reversal matters, but it is one day's settled flow and the buyers include both institutions and retail investors."

Haeems tied the demand case to Wednesday. "Persistence through Wednesday's Fed decision would strengthen the case. If inflows reverse while real yields stay high, the demand recovery would look fragile."

DeFi total value locked was flat over 24 hours at $87.40 billion and down 1% over seven days, DefiLlama data shows. Stablecoin supply stood at $310.31 billion, unchanged over seven days and up 1.35% over 30 days, net issuance of $4.15 billion since Aug. 16. Neither followed the price move.

Prediction Markets Lead Losses

Rain was the largest decliner among the 150 biggest tokens for a second session. The token belongs to a prediction-market protocol on Arbitrum that sells development kits for launching forecasting venues, and it ranks sixteenth by market value on CoinGecko at $8.93 billion on $22 million of 24-hour volume, a turnover ratio of 0.25%. It holds the only seven-day decline above 20% among the 20 largest tokens; the next largest is Chainlink at 10.4%. No protocol announcement accompanied either session's move.

Filecoin fell 12.1% while holding a 1.9% gain over seven days, on $167 million of volume against a $713 million market value. The Filecoin Foundation's blog has not posted in September.

Arbitrum's ARB rose 3.3% on the day against a 20.1% fall over seven days, the largest weekly decline among the 150 biggest tokens. Standard Chartered set a $10 price target on the token on Tuesday, which The Defiant covered this morning, and the DAO's watchdog sought permanent bans for three grant recipients last week.

Akedo Jumps Without News

Akedo was the largest gainer among the 150 biggest tokens. AKE traded at $0.02703 against an open of $0.01590 on Kraken and at $0.02725 on Gate, lifting its market value to $621 million on $66.2 million of volume. The project runs an AI framework on BNB Chain that generates games from text prompts.

No announcement accompanied the move. Bitget listed AKEUSDT perpetual futures at 10x leverage on Sept. 2, the day AKE set its $0.03638 record, and the token has no listing or product announcement dated this week. CoinGecko's Akedo page was serving a stale render of $0.01593 and plus 4.7% at 11:00 a.m. ET, against the two exchange readings above taken at the same time.

Provenance Blockchain's HASH screened as the fifth-largest gainer at 7.3% on zero recorded 24-hour volume against a $425 million market value, and is left out of the table.

Monero and Stellar were the only tokens among the 20 largest to gain, each adding 1%, to $516.14 and $0.1919. Monero fell 4.1% on Monday. Zcash fell 2% to $1,113.52 and Hyperliquid's HYPE 2.9% to $77.11.

Prices and market data as of 11:15 a.m. ET on Sept. 15, 2026.