Bitcoin slips under $79,000, Zcash leads losses as Fed hike odds hold near 60%

BREAKING: $BTC slips under $79,000, with Zcash leading losses, as odds of a Fed rate hike hold near 60%.

Bitcoin just slipped under seventy nine thousand dollars.

And the reason isn't some hack or exchange drama, it's the Federal Reserve. Traders are pricing the odds of a rate hike at close to sixty percent, and when the market starts believing money's about to get more expensive, the riskiest assets get sold first. Crypto is always first out the door.

Zcash is leading the losses, which tells you this isn't a Bitcoin story so much as a whole-market flush. The privacy coins and the smaller names bleed hardest when the tide goes out, and right now the tide is very much going out.

So the whole crypto market is now basically a waiting room for Jerome Powell. A sixty percent hike probability means four in ten traders still think he blinks. One side of that bet is about to be very wrong, and the chart under seventy nine k tells you which way the crowd is leaning.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.