Markers Monday: Washington Votes Twice in 48 Hours — Senate Cloture Tuesday, Fed Wednesday — and Bitcoin Goes In With Perpetual Funding 195 Basis Points Above the September Futures Curve, a 300 Basis Point Swing in One Session; T1 Grades a Fail

Two votes in Washington this week will do more to set the price of bitcoin than anything on a chart. On Tuesday 15 September at 14:15 Eastern, the US Senate holds a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the CLARITY Act, H.R. 3633. It needs 60. On Wednesday 16 September at 14:00 Eastern, the Federal Open Market Committee publishes a rate decision, a Summary of Economic Projections and a dot plot, with the target range sitting at 3.50–3.75% and the market split on whether it is about to go up.

Bitcoin enters that 48-hour window having closed Sunday at $76,808.69, down 0.596% and ending a two-session advance (11 and 12 September, from the 10 September close of 76,528.75). Underneath the price, the derivatives complex did something worth more attention than the close: perpetual funding crossed above the September futures basis, reversing a 105 basis point gap into a 195 basis point gap the other way. A 300 basis point swing in a single session, with no comparable move in spot.

The two votes

Tuesday, the Senate. Majority Leader Thune filed cloture in early August, reported by The Block on 8 August, setting up the 15 September vote. The arithmetic has not improved since this desk counted it on 6 September. Republicans hold 53 seats, Democrats 45, independents 2. Sixty votes means perfect Republican unity still leaves seven to find. It will not be perfect: CryptoTimes reported on 4 September that Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley are expected to defect, with Thom Tillis a question mark, On this desk’s arithmetic, not CryptoTimes’, 53 minus Paul and Hawley is 51, so the requirement becomes nine Democratic crossovers — ten if Tillis also goes. Two Democrats crossed in committee.

Three fights remain live, per crypto.news: ethics provisions aimed at President Trump’s reported $1.4 billion of crypto income; DeFi developer liability under Section 604; and a stablecoin yield provision that the same report ties to roughly $1.35 billion a year of Coinbase USDC rewards revenue. Senate Republicans have circulated a revised 630-page text with more than 100 changes, targeting what it calls “decentralized-in-name-only” protocols. CryptoSlate notes the cloture vote may land before the bill is finished. CoinDesk called it, on 11 September, a Schrödinger’s cat. Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong has said it will pass, per Yahoo Finance.

What actually happens on Tuesday is narrower than most coverage implies: cloture on the motion to proceed only opens debate. It does not pass the bill, and failing it does not formally kill the bill either. It is a whip count conducted in public.

Wednesday, the Fed. Here the honest answer is that the sources disagree more than usual, and this desk prints the spread rather than picking one. Yahoo Finance has reported CME FedWatch showing a 25 basis point hike at nearly 56%; other reads put the market-implied probability at 85%; the Bitcoin News Digest of 13 September cites 85.4%; Polymarket was at 79.5% on Sunday. J.P. Morgan Wealth Management expects a quarter-point hike; Goldman Sachs calls a September hike “very unlikely” and expects a hold through the rest of 2026. In July the committee held 9–3, with three dissents in favour of a hike. A hike takes the range to 3.75–4.00%.

Also Wednesday: the House Ways and Means Committee votes on crypto tax provisions.

The funding-basis crossover

This is the finding of the session, and it is small, specific and checkable.

Binance BTCUSDT perpetual funding printed 0.004788% at 00:00 UTC Sunday (5.243% annualised), 0.005390% at 08:00 (5.902%), 0.006450% at 16:00 (7.063%) and 0.007157% at 00:00 UTC Monday (7.837%). Three consecutive rising prints.

Over the same period the September basis went the other way. Against a COIN-M index of 77,724.74 at 06:10 UTC Monday, the September 2026 quarterly was bid 77,863.6 — a premium of 0.1787% over 11.08 days, or 5.885% annualised, down from 6.297% on Sunday. December was 78,777.2, a 1.3541% premium over 102.08 days, 4.842% annualised, down from 4.938%.

So: funding 7.837%, September basis 5.885%. Funding is now 195 basis points above the curve. On Sunday the curve was 105 basis points above funding. That is a 300 basis point reversal in one session, and it says something quite precise — leveraged long demand is concentrating in the instrument with no expiry, while the dated contracts that require you to hold a view into late September and December are getting cheaper, not dearer.

One caveat this desk will state before anyone else does: funding at 7.837% annualised is not extreme. Of the 200 eight-hourly prints Binance has published since 9 July 2026, 73 were at or above Monday’s, and the most recent higher print was only four days ago — 0.007199% at 16:00 UTC on 10 September. The move is directional, not a blow-off. The crossover matters; the absolute level does not.

Positioning up, sentiment down

Open interest on the Binance BTCUSDT perpetual rebuilt overnight. The 00:00 UTC series: 103,385.135 on 12 September, 103,299.613 on 13 September, 104,897.336 on 14 September — up 1,597.723 coins, or 1.547%, in one session. The dollar figure, $8,057.03 million, implies a price of 76,808.72 against a Bitstamp close of 76,808.69, a three-cent agreement that is a useful check on both series. The live reading at 06:10 UTC was 106,788.158, a further 1,890.822 above the midnight print.

The Binance top-trader position ratio went 2.2061 (12 September) to 2.2324 (13th) to 2.3265 (14th). That is the highest of the thirty daily readings Binance publishes, a window that opens on 16 August; the previous high in that window was 2.2560 on 26 August. The desk uses topLongShortPositionRatio, not the account ratio — the two give materially different numbers. The global long/short account ratio went 1.5471 to 1.6539 to 1.6631.

Against all of that, the Fear & Greed index fell: 63 on 12 September, 61 on the 13th, 57 on the 14th — still classified Greed, but two consecutive declines after rising from 56 on 11 September, and down from 71 on 7 September.

Leverage rising while sentiment falls is not a contradiction, but it is a divergence, and it is the kind that resolves violently in one direction or the other when a scheduled event lands. There are two scheduled events in the next 48 hours.

The price record

Sunday 13 September on Bitstamp BTC/USD: open 77,269.21, high 77,417.67, low 76,480.00, close 76,808.69, down 0.596%, volume 981.62. The range of 937.67 was the 236th-widest of 256 completed 2026 sessions — the 21st-narrowest — and the volume ranked 183rd-highest of the same 256.

The 2026 ledger, measured from the 31 December 2025 close of 87,496: 256 completed sessions, 124 advances, 132 declines. Advances were 124 on Sunday too, and the count is unchanged because Sunday was a decline — the provenance check on the series passes.

Month to date, from the 31 August close of 78,571.17: −2.243%. Year to date: −12.215%. The week of 7–13 September, from the 6 September close of 80,338.98: −3,530.29, or −4.394%.

Monday’s partial session at 06:10 UTC: open 76,804.19, high 77,822.92, low 76,370.36, last 77,736.32 — up 1.208% on Sunday’s close — on volume of 407.87. The Binance perpetual last traded 77,654.70, with $7.89 billion of quote volume in 24 hours.

Strategy’s 4,603-coin tranche at an average of 80,318 is $3,509.31 a coin underwater, about $16.15 million, and the 8-K that would settle marker Z1 is due Monday or Tuesday. The last one reported zero bitcoin bought.

Liquid: T1 grades, and it fails

Marker T1 asked whether the Liquid exploiters would return at least 3,500 BTC to the peg address by 00:00 UTC on Monday 14 September. They returned 3,400 on 8 September and nothing since.

The re-pull at 06:11 UTC Monday: the peg address holds 3,601.47207156 BTC across 597 transactions — identical, to the satoshi, to Sunday’s reading. About $276.62 million at Sunday’s close, and 85.65% of the 4,205 that backed the sidechain before the incident. T1 FAILS, short by 100 BTC.

The whitehat address holds 598.50430779 BTC across 1,440 confirmed transactions and 48 in the mempool — up 5,350 satoshis on Sunday. That figure decomposes exactly: 1,650 satoshis from five new ico-20 mints described in today’s lead, and 3,700 satoshis from nine unrelated OP_RETURN messages that all landed at 21:09 UTC on 13 September — five of 300 satoshis and four of 550. It has still not spent an output since 16:09:25 UTC on 7 September, which keeps AA1 open. About $45.97 million.

The four stored Liquid block heights were re-verified and all four match the record exactly: 4,050,335 (aad24e4f…, 13:52:10 UTC 6 September, 5 transactions), 4,050,336 (d4eeaa11…, 21:05:10 UTC 9 September, 4), 4,051,232 (ddb210ed…, 12:19:10 UTC 10 September, 1) and 4,052,304 (2d1ebf83…, 06:11:10 UTC 11 September, 1). No second rollback. The tip is 4,056,633, up 1,450 blocks on Sunday. The method for this check is in Field Guide #46.

A note on a number in circulation: the Bitcoin News Digest of 13 September puts the outstanding deficit at 608 BTC. This desk reads the address directly and gets 598.50430779. Both are published here; the difference is roughly 9.5 coins.

Rates, flows and mining

Rates. The US Treasury CMT page was outside this desk’s provenance set at fetch time on Monday and was logged as blocked, not guessed. The last verified CMT record stands at 4.96% on the 10-year, 4.63% on the 2-year and 5.35% on the 30-year for 11 September. Third-party prints for the same date disagree at the margin: Advisor Perspectives and others have carried 4.96%, 4.97% and 4.98% for the 10-year and 5.36% for the 30-year. Bloomberg, on 11 September, headlined the 10-year at the cusp of 5%. Marker AB1 — a 10-year CMT close at or above 5.00% by Friday 18 September — therefore needs four more basis points and will be graded on a CMT close, not an intraday touch. H3, a 30-year at or above 5.25% on 17 September, is passing by ten.

Flows.Farside’s table now carries both carried rows: 10 September −$282.7 million (ARKB −164.3, GBTC −36.4, FBTC −33.6, IBIT −24.5, HODL −15.3, BITB −12.6, MSBT +4.0) and 11 September −$13.2 million (IBIT −19.2, HODL +2.2, MSBT +3.8). That is a four-session run of −$462.7 million. September’s net across eight sessions stands at +$307.3 million, so marker H2 — September net above zero — is open and positive with 13 sessions left, on a cushion that has fallen three-fifths in a week, from +770.0 after 4 September.

Mining. Chain tip 966,927 at the snapshot. The difficulty adjustment is 62.65% through its epoch with 753 blocks to the retarget at height 967,680, projecting +4.485%. That is down from +4.902% on Sunday and up from +3.10% on Friday. The previous retarget was +1.307%.

Marker board

X1 has almost fully recovered. On Sunday it was 1,806.355 coins below its bar with four days to run. One session closed 1,597.723 of that, leaving it 208.632 short — 0.199% — and the live 06:10 reading of 106,788.158 is 1,682.190 above the bar. It settles on the 00:00 UTC print on Thursday, not on the intraday number. Sunday’s lesson about G2 — do not call a marker before its settlement date — cuts in both directions.

What to watch, in order

• • Tuesday 14:15 ET: the cloture roll call. Watch the Democratic count, not the result — nine crossovers is the number that matters on a Paul-and-Hawley defection, ten if Tillis goes too, and it is visible in the tally.
  • Tuesday: FOMC day one, and Strategy’s 8-K window (Z1).
  • Wednesday 14:00 ET: the decision, the SEP and the dot plot (AF1). L1 settles on Wednesday’s close, which needs +5.802% from here. AE1, AG1, AI1 and AJ1 all settle at 00:00 UTC Wednesday.
  • Wednesday: House Ways and Means crypto tax vote.
  • Thursday: X1 on the 00:00 UTC open-interest print; AA1 on whether the whitehats spend; H3 on the 30-year.
  • Friday: the Bank of Japan; the CLARITY deadline; AB1’s cut-off, four basis points away.
  • Saturday 19 September: the difficulty retarget, projecting +4.485%.

The honest summary of the setup: bitcoin is 12.2% down on the year, 2.2% down on the month, holding a floor near $76,000 that has been tested three times in four sessions — lows of 76,040.02 on 11 September, 76,480.00 on the 13th and 76,370.36 in Monday’s partial, with top-trader positioning at the highest of the thirty daily readings Binance publishes — a window opening 16 August — and less enthusiasm behind that positioning than a week ago — heading into two binary events in 48 hours. Neither of them is priced with any confidence by anyone, including the people whose job it is to price them.

Method: prices, funding, open interest, basis, mining and on-chain figures in this article are pulled directly by Bitcoin Mastery at the timestamp stated — Bitstamp BTC/USD daily candles for closes, Binance BTCUSDT spot and USDT-margined perpetual for intraday, open interest, funding and account ratios, Binance COIN-M quarterly contracts for basis, mempool.space for difficulty, hashrate, address balances and individual Bitcoin transactions, blockstream.info’s Liquid API for sidechain block heights, hashes, timestamps and transaction counts, alternative.me for the Fear & Greed series and Farside Investors’ table for ETF flows. Transaction counts, fee totals, byte totals and OP_RETURN payloads are recomputed from the full confirmed transaction list of the address concerned, not read off a summary. Where a third-party figure is cited we name the source and its date; where two sources disagree we print both. Every streak or extreme figure is published with the first date of its series in the same sentence.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile and you can lose money. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, digital asset, token or exchange-traded fund, including MSTR, L-BTC, ORDI or the LEAF token where discussed above. Token sales of the kind described in this article are unaudited, frequently anonymous and have no obligation to deliver anything in return for a payment; treat any coin sent to one as capable of going to zero. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.