Monat: Juli 2025

• Crypto markets saw over $200 million in liquidations in one hour during Fed Chair Powell’s hawkish remarks.
• Bitcoin (BTC) briefly dipped below $116,000 before recovering to above $117,000.
• The US Federal Reserve held interest rates steady, with Powell citing potential inflationary pressures from tariffs.

A wave of volatility swept through the cryptocurrency markets on Wednesday, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s hawkish remarks on inflation and tariffs sent leveraged traders scrambling.

The sudden market tremor resulted in over $200 million in liquidations in a single hour, with Bitcoin briefly dipping below the $116,000 mark.

The US central bank, as expected, left its benchmark interest rates unchanged in its latest policy decision.

However, it was Chair Powell’s subsequent comments that captured the market’s full attention. He insisted on the potential for inflationary pressures to re-emerge, particularly from the impact of trade tariffs.

This cautious stance was maintained even as two Federal Reserve officials dissented from the decision, signaling their preference for an immediate rate cut.

The crypto market’s reaction to Powell’s hawkish tone was swift and sharp. In the hour that he spoke, liquidations of leveraged positions spiked to over $200 million across all digital assets, according to data from CoinGlass.

Bitcoin (BTC) felt the immediate pressure, dipping below $116,000.

However, the sell-off proved to be short-lived. Later in the session, Bitcoin managed to bounce back above $117,000, though it was still down 0.8% for the day and continued to trade at the lower end of its tight, three-week range.

Ether (ETH) experienced a similar whipsaw, initially sliding by as much as 3% before recovering to trade at $3,750, ending the period with a modest loss of 0.6% over the past 24 hours.

Altcoins initially posted even steeper declines, with Solana’s SOL, Avalanche’s AVAX, and Hyperliquid’s HYPE tokens all dropping by 4%-5% before paring their losses.

Meme coins like BONK and PENGU plunged by as much as 10% each before also bouncing back.

This volatility in the crypto space contrasted with positive developments in the traditional stock market, where tech giants Meta (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) posted strong quarterly earnings, lifting their stocks by 10% and 6%, respectively, in after-hours trading.

‘Behind the curve’? Analysts see a Fed pivot on the horizon

Despite Powell’s cautious rhetoric, some market analysts believe the Federal Reserve may be misjudging the economic landscape.

“The market is increasingly starting to think the Fed may be behind the curve,” commented Matt Mena, an analyst at digital asset issuer 21Shares, in a market note.

“Last week’s PCE [Personal Consumption Expenditures] print marked the second soft reading in a row, and consumer spending is weakening,” Mena wrote.

With unemployment edging higher and real yields still restrictive, maintaining such tight policy risks overtightening into a broader slowdown.

Mena suggested that the current market setup is reminiscent of the last quarter of 2023, a period characterized by “softening inflation, rising political volatility, and a Fed constrained by lagging indicators.”

He argued that “the stage is set” for the Federal Reserve to eventually pivot to lower interest rates, a move that he believes could be a powerful catalyst for Bitcoin, potentially driving its price to $150,000 by the end of the year.

For now, however, the market remains caught between the Fed’s current hawkish stance and the growing expectation of an eventual, and perhaps necessary, policy shift.

The post Crypto markets see $200M in liquidations as Fed’s Powell gives hawkish remarks appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Polygon’s Heimdall consensus layer was down for 1 hour today due to a consensus bug.
• The Bor layer stayed live, and transactions continued uninterrupted.
• The bug follows the recent complex Heimdall V2 upgrade.

Polygon, one of Ethereum’s leading Layer 2 scaling solutions, suffered a temporary outage on Wednesday, July 30, 2025, that halted its Heimdall consensus layer for approximately one hour.

Notably, the unexpected disruption came just weeks after the network’s most technically complex upgrade since its inception in 2020.

Validator exit triggered the rare failure

The outage began around 09:30 UTC when Heimdall, the consensus layer responsible for managing validators and syncing Polygon’s proof-of-stake chain with Ethereum, suddenly became unresponsive.

According to an official statement from the Polygon Foundation, the incident was caused by a validator unexpectedly exiting the network — a rare event that the system had not been programmed to handle.

This unusual validator exit led to a “consensus bug” that halted checkpointing and caused a temporary break in chain progression.

Polygon confirmed that the chain’s “liveliness”— or its ability to process and execute transactions — remained intact throughout the disruption, thanks to the Bor layer, which continued to produce blocks without interruption.

Bor stays live, but RPCs falter

While the core functionality of the network was preserved, the user experience told a different story.

According to an update from the Polygon Foundation, due to the outage, several RPC providers experienced sync inconsistencies across their Bor nodes.

This created confusion for users and dApps who rely on explorers and API endpoints to verify network status and transactions in real time.

Some users mistakenly believed the entire network was offline.

Polymarket, a major prediction market platform built on Polygon, briefly showed error messages during the downtime, further adding to the perception that funds or trades were stuck.

Polygon’s team later clarified that while validator data and checkpoint information were temporarily inaccessible, the chain itself never stopped processing transactions.

In their words, the situation “triggered a false alarm” due to the network’s limited handling of validator exits.

A bug weeks after a major upgrade

The timing of the incident was notable. Earlier in July, Polygon launched Heimdall V2, an upgrade built on CometBFT and Cosmos-SDK v0.50.

The upgrade aimed to reduce finality times to around five seconds and boost scalability.

However, the update also added new complexity to the system, introducing potential points of failure.

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal described it as the most technically complex hard fork since the protocol’s launch in 2020.

The outage has now raised questions about whether the complexity introduced with Heimdall V2 may have outpaced the system’s preparedness for rare scenarios.

This isn’t the first time Polygon has faced such disruptions. In March 2022, an error in Heimdall V1 resulted in several hours of downtime.

Similarly, in March 2024, Polygon’s zkEVM network suffered a 10-hour outage tied to sequencer issues.

User confidence under pressure

The incident comes at a time when trust and uptime are critical.

With over $1.4 billion in total value locked on Polygon, many users rely on the protocol’s availability to move and withdraw funds without disruption.

Although transactions continued behind the scenes, the RPC and explorer issues impacted user trust and caused visible friction.

Polygon’s native token, POL, fell nearly 3% during the incident and was trading at $0.22, reflecting trader unease amid rising competition in the Layer 2 space.

Although the chain remained technically live, the perception of downtime — especially for traders — can be just as damaging.

Other blockchains have faced similar issues. Just a day earlier, Hyperliquid reported an outage caused by a spike in traffic, and Solana has dealt with multiple outages over the years that resulted in financial losses for DeFi users.

Polygon says fix is in place

Polygon’s development team acted quickly, identifying the issue and deploying a patch within an hour. By 11:01 UTC, the Heimdall consensus layer was fully restored.

The Polygon Foundation has since confirmed that it is working closely with RPC providers to resolve any lingering sync issues and restore complete availability for all users.

However, the team has not yet detailed whether future upgrades will include mechanisms to better handle validator exits.

The post Polygon team blames temporary outage on suspected “consensus bug” appeared first on CoinJournal.