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Warsh's Debut: A Sharp Shift in Fed Sentiment
On June 17, Kevin Warsh presided over his first interest rate meeting as the new Chair of the Federal Reserve.
Three months earlier, the March meeting minutes had most officials leaning toward one or two cuts by year-end. Many crypto investors expected Warsh to extend that trajectory: he was Trump's pick, and Trump had long pushed for lower rates, so the assumption was simple — Trump appointee, therefore rate cuts. But even Wall Street's own surveys never bore this out as consensus. Just over half of economists expected him to lean dovish on rates, while a clear majority expected him to be hawkish on the Fed's balance sheet, and confidence in his independence from the White House was close to a coin flip. The dovish read crypto investors leaned on was a real, if narrow, lean — not the consensus it was treated as.
In three months, the median projection had flipped from implying a cut to implying a hike — even with the committee itself still split, eight holding steady, one still expecting a cut, nine leaning toward a hike. Warsh offered little elaboration beyond the statement itself. Asked to explain the shift, he told reporters, "I can't do much better than the committee just did."
The three major U.S. stock indices plummeted, with the Nasdaq falling more than 1%. The cryptocurrency market reacted even more violently; Bitcoin had been rebounding above $65,000, but once the meeting results were out, it fell directly to around $64,000, a drop of nearly 3%.
Looking through the interpretations from various financial media outlets, crypto investors hoping for a plain explanation ended up stepping into an even deeper fog of terminology.
Professional jargon was thrown around everywhere: one moment it was about CPI year-on-year hitting a new high even as the monthly pace actually slowed, and PPI production-side prices not yet fully transmitted; the next it was about May NFP far exceeding expectations, with data from the previous two months getting an upward revision. What frustrated crypto investors most was the Fed's own updated Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) — filled with terms like PCE, core PCE, and dot plot medians, with little explanation of what any of it actually meant.
Looking at the dense professional analysis, instead of gaining clarity, one felt a strong sense of helplessness. To financial media, these data points are intertwined with clear cause-and-effect relationships. But for many readers without a finance background, these abbreviations and logic flows can feel like a brand-new foreign language: every word is recognizable, but the sentence as a whole doesn't add up to meaning.
To truly understand this meeting, it seems one must grasp the entire TradFi (traditional finance) framework, including inflation, interest rates, and how the Fed's decision-making mechanism operates. But today, a crypto investor, just like an investor in traditional financial markets, has to keep an eye on Fed meetings, international situations, the U.S. Dollar Index, and the tightening or loosening of global liquidity. After all, as the integration between crypto and traditional finance becomes increasingly tight, crypto is no longer an isolated island; it is part of the global asset landscape, rising and falling in tandem with the dollar, U.S. Treasuries, and risk appetite.
In the Multi-Asset Era, Crypto Investors Need to Learn TradFi
In the early years, the rise and fall of the crypto market were not closely linked to the tides of the global economy. In recent years, with the popularity of ICOs and the prevalence of meme coins, crypto investors became more accustomed to observing on-chain fund movements, the buying and selling operations of whales, and following current industry technical trends to find investment targets.
Information that traditional financial investors paid attention to, such as Fed interest rate meetings, NFP data, and CPI, was not that important to crypto investors.
However, starting in 2024, the correlation between cryptocurrency price movements and the macroeconomy has become increasingly tight. In January of this year, Bitcoin spot ETFs were officially approved for listing in the U.S., and half a year later, Ethereum spot ETFs followed suit. For the first time, Wall Street money could buy Bitcoin and other virtual currencies through regulated channels at scale.
After traditional asset management giants like BlackRock and Fidelity entered the market, crypto assets became part of mainstream institutional portfolios, increasingly correlated with stocks and bonds and responsive to the same macro forces — interest rates, the dollar, risk appetite — that move traditional markets. The bond between crypto and macro finance is deepening, and crypto investors increasingly need at least a working knowledge of TradFi to make sense of it.
For most crypto traders, this is not an easy task. For example, before the June 17 meeting, many crypto players defaulted to labeling Warsh as a "dove" simply because he was nominated by Trump, who had spent years pushing for lower rates — Trump appointee, therefore dovish, or so the logic went. But hawkish and dovish aren't political labels; they describe how an official weighs inflation against growth when setting policy: lean toward raising rates to control prices (hawkish), or toward cutting them to support a weak economy (dovish). With inflation running at 4.2% year-over-year just before the meeting, and a committee already leaning hawkish on the data, Warsh's own personal preferences mattered less than many assumed. The misread wasn't just missing a vocabulary term — it was weighing who nominated him over what the data showed.
Financial Education Should Be Simpler
If crypto investors want to learn what these concepts actually mean after a meeting concludes, a quick search often turns up dense, thesis-style analyses or textbook-level explanations full of abbreviations. What many ordinary investors are looking for is simpler: a plain-language explanation of what something is and why it matters.
The barrier to entry for traditional financial education is often high. Dense terms pile up, and the tone tends to be academic, written as if the reader already has some financial foundation to follow along. For many who came up in the on-chain world, that foundation — shaped by traditional financial education — is exactly what's missing.
The best education often comes from the simplest questions, such as: What is a stock? Why do companies go public? Why does gold rise when there is a war? What does a rate cut actually mean? What exactly is an ETF? These questions sound basic, almost childish, but learning new knowledge often works this way: the more complex logic only clicks once these simpler questions are answered first.
One answer to this gap is "TradFi 101," an investment education series launched by Bitget in collaboration with industry partners. Rather than assuming a financial background, it starts from these basic questions and builds up — exactly the kind of foundation many crypto-native investors are missing.
TradFi is becoming increasingly integrated with crypto. Major exchanges have already launched traditional financial assets like U.S. stocks and gold via RWA; the barriers between crypto and traditional finance are dissolving, and cross-asset trading is a clear trend. Yet most platforms in the industry focus only on expanding trading categories and product lines, with few willing to address the core pain point: most native crypto players lack a complete, accessible foundation in traditional financial knowledge. Building that kind of systematic education may not bring quick traffic or revenue, but it's the harder, more necessary thing to do.
According to the official introduction, "TradFi 101" breaks down traditional financial learning into 100 specific small questions, categorized into six modules: from the most basic "Re-understanding Money and Markets," to "What Exactly Are Assets Like Stocks and ETFs," to "How Order Books, Margin, and Market Makers Operate," followed by macroeconomics, trading psychology, and finally, the state of deep integration between TradFi and Crypto. Accompanied by animated videos, it breaks the content of a thick financial textbook into vivid, bite-sized segments.
The crypto industry has moved past the era of relying solely on on-chain data, with institutional capital from ETFs and real-world assets connected through RWA pulling crypto firmly into the global liquidity cycle. The financial markets of the future will likely run both ways: traditional assets moving on-chain, and crypto folded into mainstream asset allocation.
As the line between TradFi and crypto keeps blurring, the real advantage will belong to investors who know how to navigate both.
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