#数字货币市场洞察 The Bank of Japan is taking real action this time—at the policy meeting on December 18-19, it's basically confirmed that they'll raise the interest rate from 0.5% to 0.75%. This is the first time since January this year, and the market is already pricing in an 80% probability. There’s also no real opposition from the Japanese government. However, institutions like Goldman Sachs are still on the sidelines, thinking the central bank might want to see more wage data and could delay it until January next year.

If this actually happens, the impact on the crypto market needs to be looked at in two stages:

First, the immediate trouble. The yen has long been a tool for institutional arbitrage—borrowing cheap yen to buy high-yield assets like Bitcoin. Now that financing costs are rising, those arbitrage trades need to exit quickly. Crypto has high liquidity and moves fast, so it’ll definitely be the first to get cut. Even just on expectations, $BTC already plunged 6%, and $ETH dropped an even steeper 9%. If the rate hike really happens, we can probably expect another round of volatility.

But if you zoom out, it’s a different story. Once market sentiment stabilizes, global uncertainties will actually strengthen Bitcoin’s safe-haven logic. After leverage is cleared out, funds will still flow back into assets like this that can be moved globally and are highly liquid. History shows this pattern—it usually tanks first, then slowly climbs back and even hits new highs.