Market deep dive: The Fed raises interest rates by 75 bps and alt-coin season is back

On Wednesday evening, the Fed decided to raise the US interest rates by the anticipated 75 bps. Jerome Powell released a rather hawkish speech, saying that the level of interest rates will likely need to be raised higher than previously expected and that it is still very premature to think about pausing them. This comes as no surprise as the latest data still shows a strong labour market with sticky inflation. 

On the positive side, discussions of slowing the pace of hikes may come in the next meeting, or the one after. A 50 bps increase on December 14th currently has a probability of 47.2%. Next week’s CPI numbers will give more guidance. 

Equities initially rallied after the event, before descending into the close. BTC$ and ETH$ followed, but were able to recover some losses after the equity market closed. They are currently trading at $20.6k and $1.58k. 

Meanwhile, it seems that alt-season is in motion albeit the bleak macro outlook. Three-fourths of the Top 100 coins have gained this week. The FTX Altcoin Index perpetual has risen to levels not seen since August 14th. The rally is likely attributed to memecoins and “real world” partnerships.

In the last 24 hours, MATIC is up 24%, as Meta announced on Wednesday evening that their Instagram users will be able to mint, showcase, and trade digital collectibles as NFTs on the Polygon network. Furthermore, the collectibles are set to be stored on Arweave. The native coin AR rallied 43% after the news. Other storage network projects such as Filecoin (FIL) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) followed suit, finishing +11% and +33% on Thursday.

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