Bitcoin weathers September storm as rate hikes and Clarity act setback test bulls

Bitcoin

is more than halfway through its historically weakest month, yet September’s usual sell-off has been relatively contained so far, despite the recent barrage of policy and macroeconomic headwinds.

Observers say the resilience signals bullish undercurrents.

After bitcoin rallied 25% in August, reaching around $81,000, expectations were that it would surrender much of those gains. That’s because September has delivered an average loss of roughly 3% since 2013.

Instead, bitcoin is down just 1.5% this month. With under two weeks remaining, it is still up about 32% for the quarter, putting it on course for its first positive quarterly close since the third quarter of 2025.

As of this writing, bitcoin is trading at $78,000, roughly back to where it was before Wednesday’s Fed rate hike, which was largely seen as a headwind for crypto and other risk assets.

That’s not all. This week has provided plenty of reasons for the market to fall, but it hasn’t.

On Tuesday, the Clarity Act failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate, attracting just 49 supporters. Bitcoin briefly fell below $74,887 on Tuesday only to stabilize quickly. The relatively contained sell-off suggested that traders had already priced in much of the risk of failure.

“What stands out to me is that Bitcoin has hardly budged at all in response to two objectively bad pieces of news. A 25-basis-point hike and the CLARITY Act failing to pass are both headlines that, in a different market environment, would have sent price meaningfully lower. Instead, we got basically nothing,” Mitchell Askew, head of Blockware Intelligence at Blockware, said in an email.

Seller fatigue

She explained that when bad news stops affecting the price, it’s a sign of seller exhaustion.

“Anybody who was going to sell bitcoin based on events like these has already sold. They no longer have coins to sell. That is an incredibly positive sign for the medium to long term, and it is exactly what you tend to see in the later stages of a bottoming process,” she noted.

Energy markets added to the pressure early this week, as West Texas Intermediate crude climbed above $106 a barrel on Tuesday, reaching a five-month high as geopolitical tensions in the Middle East persisted.