Bitcoin Price Wobbles as Leverage Falls Ahead of CLARITY Vote and Fed Decision

Bitcoin open interest fell by 13.5% in 10 days, dropping from 321,497 BTC to 278,151 BTC even as the underlying price declined only about 5% over the same window. That gap between derivatives unwind, and spot price action signals deliberate repositioning.

Bitcoin price currently trades under $77,000, down from its September 3 high of $82,300 but little changed day over day. The open question is if the leverage reset has actually cleared the path to a clean support test at $76,000-$77,000, or simply transferred the burden onto spot demand and ETF flows.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has scheduled a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act for today, 2:15 p.m. Eastern, the first full-chamber test of comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation. Republicans hold 53 seats, meaning they need at least seven Democratic votes to advance the bill, and possibly more if any Republican breaks ranks.

The revised 630-page draft, published September 10, folds in more than 114 Democratic provisions, including a new registration category for "non-decentralized" DeFi protocols with identifiable operators overseeing consensus rules or functionality. Distributed ledger technology and raw software code are explicitly excluded from that category.