Warsh Pushed Bitcoin's $100 Billion ETF Milestone Out of Reach With One Jackson Hole Speech

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh turned Bitcoin's biggest rally in months into its sharpest single-session reversal in weeks Friday, delivering his first Jackson Hole keynote with a blunt inflation warning that sent September rate-hike odds surging from roughly 35% to approximately 60% and triggered nearly $488 million in forced crypto liquidations — ending an eight-session institutional buying streak that had driven the largest cryptocurrency to within striking distance of $100 billion in U.S. ETF assets.

Bitcoin fell from an overnight high of $81,280 to a session low of $76,909 before partially recovering to the $77,700–$79,500 range by afternoon — a decline of roughly 3–4% over 24 hours. CoinGlass recorded $487.68 million in crypto liquidations, affecting 97,691 individual traders, with more than $200 million in positions closed within the first hour after Warsh spoke. Long positions absorbed more than $360 million of those losses — the concentrated casualties of a market that had spent the prior week loading up on risk.

What Warsh Said, and Why Markets Cared

Speaking from Jackson Lake Lodge in Moran, Wyoming, Warsh used his first Jackson Hole address to challenge the premise that the Fed's work on inflation is nearing completion.