Bitcoin Holds Near $78K as Senate Vote and Bridge Exploit Rattle Markets

Bitcoin opened Monday at $76,806 before climbing to nearly $78,000 in early trading, shrugging off a broad macro storm that rattled equity markets. The resilience comes as the Federal Reserve's two-day policy meeting gets underway Tuesday, with the CME Group's FedWatch tool now pricing an 86.5% chance of a 25-basis-point rate hike, up sharply from 69.4% just last Friday. Ethereum tracked Bitcoin's intraday recovery, opening at $2,475 and recovering to around $2,514 by mid-morning.

Adding to the pressure on risk assets, oil prices surged more than 11% over the past five days following reports of attacks on a Saudi Arabian pipeline over the weekend. Despite those headwinds, Bitcoin climbed roughly 1.9% since midnight UTC while Nasdaq 100 index futures fell 1.65%, driven by separate calls to slow AI development. Bitcoin dominance rose to 58.88%, a signal that capital is rotating out of altcoins into BTC as a relative safe haven amid the turbulence.

CLARITY Act Vote Looms as DeFi Exploit Hits Bitcoin Bridge

On the regulatory front, the crypto industry is watching Washington closely ahead of a Senate vote scheduled for September 15 on the revised CLARITY Act. Senate Republicans unveiled a 630-page updated draft of the bill targeting what it describes as decentralized-in-name-only crypto protocols, with over 100 changes from the prior version. The outcome of that vote is widely expected to reshape how digital asset projects are classified and regulated in the United States.

Meanwhile, a security incident at cross-chain liquidity protocol Symbiosis exposed a critical flaw in Bitcoin bridge infrastructure. An attacker exploited a vulnerability in the BridgeV2 smart contract on September 11, minting roughly 46.1 billion unbacked syBTC tokens, a quantity more than 2,000 times Bitcoin's entire circulating supply. Despite the staggering token creation, the attacker managed to convert only about 4.39 wrapped BTC through Uniswap, realizing approximately $336,000 in proceeds.

Symbiosis said it recovered around 15 BTC, now secured in a team-controlled multisig wallet, and offered the attacker a 20% white-hat bounty to return the remaining funds. Bitcoin swaps on the protocol have since resumed through third-party partners Chainflip and THORChain while the native bridge stays offline. The incident marks the third similar Bitcoin bridge unbacking attack in recent weeks, following exploits on Liquid Network and Nomic.