On Wednesday, on the eve of the publication of the minutes of the last meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed reaffirmed its commitment to doing what needs to be done to return inflation to the target level of 2%. Cryptocurrency prices declined.

After the release, the bitcoin price fluctuated between a minimum of $23,360 and $23,640 as investors tried to understand how the cryptocurrency market would be affected by moving forward in the face of an additional increase in interest rates.

In general, the market seems to react negatively to the high probability of an additional increase in interest rates since history has shown that previous quantitative tightening and rate increases coincided with a downturn in the cryptocurrency market.

From a macroeconomic point of view, yesterday's publication of the FOMC protocol did little to change the overall structure in which the market has been trading for the past couple of months.

According to the analyst Big Smokey: Bitcoin is in a good range for accumulation.

Despite the general weakness demonstrated by BTC and the cryptocurrency market over the past 9 months, according to Morgan Creek CEO Mark Yusko: bitcoin is the only asset that every investor should have in their portfolio.

The altcoin market also trended lower on Wednesday as macroeconomic concerns overshadowed any positive effect caused by the hype around the Ethereum merger.

A few notable exceptions on this day include a 57.85% spike in the price of ABBC Coin (ABBC), followed by a 15% rise in Flux (FLUX) and a 12.5% rise in EOS (EOS).

The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies currently stands at $1.117 trillion, and the dominance level of Bitcoin is 39.9%.