UNI token surges while rest of crypto market looks to Fed's Warsh for guidance

Bitcoin BTC$65,285.01 is facing selling pressure ahead of today's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) interest-rate decision at the first meeting under new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh.

The largest cryptocurrency pulled back below $65,000 after trading near $67,000 just a day earlier, CoinDesk data show. The broader market CoinDesk 20 Index (CD200) has lost 1.2% since midnight UTC, with all but four tokens declining.

“The main focus for the week is the FOMC meeting under new leadership, with market expectations of interest rate hikes already priced in through 2027,” Laser Digital said in its weekly note.

The market is pricing in no change in the fed funds rate at this meeting. Instead, the focus will be on Warsh’s post-meeting press conference for signals on his views on inflation. Warsh has criticized the Fed's frequent press conferences and detailed forecasting and may face questions on his stance.

Among stand-out gainers, Uniswap’s UNI token surged another 20% over 24 hours, buoyed by Standard Chartered’s bullish forecast of $100 by 2030. Meanwhile, NEAR, INJ and several stablecoin-related assets dropped as much as 8%.

Derivatives positioning

• The market remains calm ahead of the Fed decision. Activity has slowed, with crypto futures volume falling 20% in 24 hours to $165 billion and open interest dropping 2.3% to $110 billion. Liquidations fell to roughly $310 million, down 44%.
• The calm is also evident in BVIV, bitcoin's 30-day implied volatility index, which was hovering near an annualized 39% at the time of writing — a level not seen since June 2, just before it spiked to nearly 59% a few days later. Ether's volatility index is showing similar stability.
• Cardano's ADA stands out among altcoins. Open interest has climbed to 2.26 billion tokens, nearing the record 2.32 billion set on June 6 and recovering from the June 13 low of 2 billion.
• The rebound points to renewed capital deployment in leveraged ADA markets, though the move isn't necessarily bullish. The token's price has slipped from over 18 cents to under 17 cents in two days alongside a negative 24-hour cumulative volume delta. The combination leans bearish, pointing to aggressive trading at market orders rather than passive limit orders.
• ZEC and SUI are the other notable open interest gainers over the past 24 hours, while NEAR and BCH led the losers.
• NEAR has dropped over 9%, and the decline in open interest suggests traders are unwinding leverage during the selloff rather than piling into fresh shorts.
• Most major tokens, with the exception of TRX and CC, are showing negative 24-hour CVD, pointing to broad bearish dominance in trade flows.
• In options markets, BTC puts continue to dominate 24-hour volume rankings, though the $80,000 call expiring March 26 next year also saw notable activity. In ether's case, calls are leading volume rankings.

Token talk

• UNI has risen for a seventh straight day, its longest winning streak since August 2023, when it ran eight. The token trades near $2.75, erasing its June losses after jumping by more than 10% earlier in the week.
• The accelerant was a Standard Chartered note. The bank's digital assets head, Geoff Kendrick, initiated coverage on June 15 with a $100 price target for 2030, roughly 40 times the current level, arguing that tokenized real-world assets, meaning stocks and bonds issued onchain, will flood into DeFi and Uniswap will capture the flow as core market infrastructure. He predicts a path through $6.50 by year-end.
• Two fundamentals sit underneath the call. Uniswap's fee switch, live since late 2025, routes a share of trading fees into buying back and burning UNI, and has removed about 106 million tokens, more than 10% of supply, turning a pure governance token into a deflationary one.
• Separately, tokenized stocks that launched on the protocol earlier this month have already seen more than $9.1 billion swapped through its real-world-asset pools.