GBP/USD steady near 1.3100 amid US holiday-shortened trading week

The post Fed Decides On Interest Rates Today—Here’s What To Watch For appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Topline The Federal Reserve on Wednesday will conclude a two-day policymaking meeting and release a decision on whether to lower interest rates—following months of pressure and criticism from President Donald Trump—and potentially signal whether additional cuts are on the way. President Donald Trump has urged the central bank to “CUT INTEREST RATES, NOW, AND BIGGER” than they might plan to. Getty Images Key Facts The central bank is poised to cut interest rates by at least a quarter-point, down from the 4.25% to 4.5% range where they have been held since December to between 4% and 4.25%, as Wall Street has placed 100% odds of a rate cut, according to CME’s FedWatch, with higher odds (94%) on a quarter-point cut than a half-point (6%) reduction. Fed governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, both Trump appointees, voted in July for a quarter-point reduction to rates, and they may dissent again in favor of a large cut alongside Stephen Miran, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers’ chair, who was sworn in at the meeting’s start on Tuesday. It’s unclear whether other policymakers, including Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid and St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem, will favor larger cuts or opt for no reduction. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in his Jackson Hole, Wyoming, address last month the central bank would likely consider a looser monetary policy, noting the “shifting balance of risks” on the U.S. economy “may warrant adjusting our policy stance.” David Mericle, an economist for Goldman Sachs, wrote in a note the “key question” for the Fed’s meeting is whether policymakers signal “this is likely the first in a series of consecutive cuts” as the central bank is anticipated to “acknowledge the softening in the labor market,” though they may not “nod to an October cut.” Mericle said he…

Prominent analyst Cheeky Crypto (203,000 followers on YouTube) set out to verify a fast-spreading claim that XRP’s circulating supply could “vanish overnight,” and his conclusion is more nuanced than the headline suggests: nothing in the ledger disappears, but the amount of XRP that is truly liquid could be far smaller than most dashboards imply—small enough, in his view, to set the stage for an abrupt liquidity squeeze if demand spikes. XRP Supply Shock? The video opens with the host acknowledging his own skepticism—“I woke up to a rumor that XRP supply could vanish overnight. Sounds crazy, right?”—before committing to test the thesis rather than dismiss it. He frames the exercise as an attempt to reconcile a long-standing critique (“XRP’s supply is too large for high prices”) with a rival view taking hold among prominent community voices: that much of the supply counted as “circulating” is effectively unavailable to trade. His first step is a straightforward data check. Pulling public figures, he finds CoinMarketCap showing roughly 59.6 billion XRP as circulating, while XRPScan reports about 64.7 billion. The divergence prompts what becomes the video’s key methodological point: different sources count “circulating” differently. Related Reading: Analyst Sounds Major XRP Warning: Last Chance To Get In As Accumulation Balloons As he explains it, the higher on-ledger number likely includes balances that aggregators exclude or treat as restricted, most notably Ripple’s programmatic escrow. He highlights that Ripple still “holds a chunk of XRP in escrow, about 35.3 billion XRP locked up across multiple wallets, with a nominal schedule of up to 1 billion released per month and unused portions commonly re-escrowed. Those coins exist and are accounted for on-ledger, but “they aren’t actually sitting on exchanges” and are not immediately available to buyers. In his words, “for all intents and purposes, that escrow stash is effectively off of the market.” From there, the analysis moves from headline “circulating supply” to the subtler concept of effective float. Beyond escrow, he argues that large strategic holders—banks, fintechs, or other whales—may sit on material balances without supplying order books. When you strip out escrow and these non-selling stashes, he says, “the effective circulating supply… is actually way smaller than the 59 or even 64 billion figure.” He cites community estimates in the “20 or 30 billion” range for what might be truly liquid at any given moment, while emphasizing that nobody has a precise number. That effective-float framing underpins the crux of his thesis: a potential supply shock if demand accelerates faster than fresh sell-side supply appears. “Price is a dance between supply and demand,” he says; if institutional or sovereign-scale users suddenly need XRP and “the market finds that there isn’t enough XRP readily available,” order books could thin out and prices could “shoot on up, sometimes violently.” His phrase “circulating supply could collapse overnight” is presented not as a claim that tokens are destroyed or removed from the ledger, but as a market-structure scenario in which available inventory to sell dries up quickly because holders won’t part with it. How Could The XRP Supply Shock Happen? On the demand side, he anchors the hypothetical to tokenization. He points to the “very early stages of something huge in finance”—on-chain tokenization of debt, stablecoins, CBDCs and even gold—and argues the XRP Ledger aims to be “the settlement layer” for those assets.He references Ripple CTO David Schwartz’s earlier comments about an XRPL pivot toward tokenized assets and notes that an institutional research shop (Bitwise) has framed XRP as a way to play the tokenization theme. In his construction, if “trillions of dollars in value” begin settling across XRPL rails, working inventories of XRP for bridging, liquidity and settlement could rise sharply, tightening effective float. Related Reading: XRP Bearish Signal: Whales Offload $486 Million In Asset To illustrate, he offers two analogies. First, the “concert tickets” model: you think there are 100,000 tickets (100B supply), but 50,000 are held by the promoter (escrow) and 30,000 by corporate buyers (whales), leaving only 20,000 for the public; if a million people want in, prices explode. Second, a comparison to Bitcoin’s halving: while XRP has no programmatic halving, he proposes that a sudden adoption wave could function like a de facto halving of available supply—“XRP’s version of a halving could actually be the adoption event.” He also updates the narrative context that long dogged XRP. Once derided for “too much supply,” he argues the script has “totally flipped.” He cites the current cycle’s optics—“XRP is sitting above $3 with a market cap north of around $180 billion”—as evidence that raw supply counts did not cap price as tightly as critics claimed, and as a backdrop for why a scarcity narrative is gaining traction. Still, he declines to publish targets or timelines, repeatedly stressing uncertainty and risk. “I’m not a financial adviser… cryptocurrencies are highly volatile,” he reminds viewers, adding that tokenization could take off “on some other platform,” unfold more slowly than enthusiasts expect, or fail to get to “sudden shock” scale. The verdict he offers is deliberately bound. The theory that “XRP supply could vanish overnight” is imprecise on its face; the ledger will not erase coins. But after examining dashboard methodologies, escrow mechanics and the behavior of large holders, he concludes that the effective float could be meaningfully smaller than headline supply figures, and that a fast-developing tokenization use case could, under the right conditions, stress that float. “Overnight is a dramatic way to put it,” he concedes. “The change could actually be very sudden when it comes.” At press time, XRP traded at $3.0198. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

The post Fed Rate Outlook via CME FedWatch: January 25bps Cut Odds 26.6%, March 25bps Cut 39.4%, Unchanged Still Most Likely appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Fed rate expectations remain a key driver for crypto markets, with CME’s FedWatch Tool (per FXStreet) showing a 26.6% probability of a January 25bp rate cut and a dominant 73.4% likelihood of no change to the federal funds rate. For the March horizon, the tool assigns a 39.4% chance of a cumulative 25bp cut, a 53.4% probability of holding the rate, and a 7.3% probability of a cumulative 50bp cut, underscoring a tempered policy trajectory that can influence liquidity and risk pricing across crypto assets, including Bitcoin. As traders assess these policy probabilities, monetary policy expectations may shape near-term volatility. Investors should maintain disciplined risk management and monitor credible policy signals to gauge potential shifts in risk sentiment within the digital asset space. Source: https://en.coinotag.com/breakingnews/fed-rate-outlook-via-cme-fedwatch-january-25bps-cut-odds-26-6-march-25bps-cut-39-4-unchanged-still-most-likely