Bitcoin now trades like an interest rate product as real yields become the new “gravity”
Earlier this month, we saw a very real and tangible shift in the macro picture. Last year’s record employment levels changed significantly, and the market treated that update as fresh information to trade on.
Two days later, the headlines were inflation cooling, yields moving, and Bitcoin moving in the same inter-asset rhythm that until recently belonged to interest rates and major stock indexes.
Bitcoin used to react to cryptocurrency-specific headlines such as large corporations buying BTC, new product launches, and rumors about regulation. But in 2026, prices will first respond to the same macro data that drives bonds and major stock indexes.
The reason is simple. Bitcoin currently sits within a global risk system, and when the market reprices interest rates, it also reprices the price of Bitcoin.
On February 11, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced its annual salary standard revision. As a result of this revision, last year’s employment standards have been lowered, and the March 2025 level has been further revised downward. 862,000 On a non-seasonally adjusted basis. This change has rewritten much of the recent labor landscape in one fell swoop.
Two days later, the January CPI was released. Headline inflation rose 0.2% month-on-month, but slowed. 2.4% YoYMeanwhile, core inflation remained stronger than headlines, with shelters remaining a key driver.
Around this subdued CPI statistic, global markets reported that yields eased and Bitcoin rose nearly 5% to over $69,000. This is the kind of synchronized reaction that perfectly illustrates the new regime.
Combining these results in a new crypto macro stack. Labor data and inflation shape expectations for the Federal Reserve, which the market reflects in interest rate prices, and the force that tends to hit Bitcoin the hardest is real yield movements. You can think of this as four transformations repeated over the week: employment, CPI, Fed pricing, and real yields.
The day the job market changed
When most people think of employment shocks, they think of things like layoffs and poor pay reports. This looked different. The economy continued to move through January and February, but last year’s measure of employment levels has been updated using better recording sources.
Benchmark revisions are more important than most people realize because they change the base on which each subsequent month is built. A typical monthly payroll report will tell you what happened on the most recent hourly basis. Benchmark revisions could reset months of under-estimates and change the outlook for overall momentum.
Markets are concerned about that because softening employment changes the narrative of growth and overheating. Growth expectations are reflected in policy expectations, and policy expectations are reflected in yields.
Bitcoin reacts because yield acts like gravity for all risk assets.
Crypto macro stack explained like a chain
A macro stack is best understood as a chain of translations, which tend to execute in the same order.
it starts with laborThis includes headline salary increases and a less glamorous revision process that could change the historical record.
Then run through inflationCPI arrives on time and acts like a synchronized volatility moment across assets.
From there, Expectations for policythe market continually converts data into an implicit path to the Fed.
The chain ends like this: contagion; infectionreal yields and broad liquidity conditions tighten or soften the financial position of anything traded with risk appetite, including Bitcoin.
In reality, this chain works because most investors, including crypto traders, price assets through the lens of discount rates. Risk assets tend to be revalued when the market determines that future discount rates will decline. When the market determines that the discount rate will be high, the opposite tends to occur.
Over time, the four transformations from jobs to CPI to Fed pricing to real yields have appeared again and again, and Bitcoin continues to live more and more at the end of the pipe.
Layer 1: Shocking data rewriting
BLS payroll numbers are derived from a large-scale survey of employers. Surveys are the quickest and easiest way to collect large amounts of information, but they are also just estimates. Therefore, once a year, the BLS adjusts its administrative records and surveys to cover a much larger number of workers, and that annual adjustment results in a benchmark revision.
That’s why the number 862,000 has become so firmly established. It pushed employment levels lower than the market expected and changed the implied growth path of employment over several months because a lower base changes the slope of the series.
Traders reacted to monthly salary headlines this year under one basic baseline. This revision has created an urgent need to reconsider how tight the labor market really is. Adjustments are made at once, as they involve a broader historical record rather than a single month.
Your monthly salary surprise can quickly disappear if your next report or two changes direction. However, benchmark revisions change the foundations and reshape how the market interprets several upcoming releases. Because the Fed’s reaction function depends not only on inflation but also on labor tightness, this adjustment is quickly reflected in interest rate expectations.
Layer 2: CPI is the trigger and shelter is the part people are missing
CPI Day moves markets because the CPI corresponds directly to the Fed’s inflation directive and policy rate path. When the CPI is released, the market updates its best guess about where inflation is headed and translates that guess into pricing interest rates.
The headline inflation rate slowed to 2.4% year-on-year in January after rising 0.2% month-on-month. Core inflation has been more robust than headlines, and shelter continues to be important as it is heavily weighted in the CPI and tends to be slower moving than many other categories.
Energy fell across the board during the month, keeping headline inflation lower than it would otherwise have been.
Shelter is important because it tends to lag in adjustments, allowing inflation protection to remain sticky even when fast-moving categories cool. This creates a common pattern for CPI days. The first move is to trade anticipation for headlines and immediate surprise.
The next move could change that picture, especially if it changes how persistent inflation feels.
Bitcoin trades in the same inter-asset space, so it often moves on the same daily rhythm.
Layer 3: The part where the FRB is a probability
The Fed sets interest rates at meetings, but the market trades daily. The bridge between these two worlds is the interest rate futures curve, which always incorporates the market’s best estimate of future Fed decisions.
An easy way to see this conversion is the CME FedWatch tool, which represents the market-suggested probability of future interest rate outcomes based on the pricing of federal funds futures. This clearly shows how the probabilities change around CPI, employment data, and Fed communications.
Weak labor data reduces the sense of overheating, and slower inflation eases concerns about continued price pressures. These inputs will push markets toward a path of policy easing in the future, whether that means early rate cuts, further rate cuts, or a slower pace of tightening of financial conditions.
Repricing can occur within minutes, as the futures market updates instantly and those updates are immediately reflected in Treasury yields.
This is important for Bitcoin. This is because FedWatch probabilities are read as a summary of prices derived from futures. Therefore, when the probability moves, it means that the capital moves with it.
Layer 4: The lever by which Bitcoin reacts to most real yields
Nominal yield is the interest rate stated on U.S. Treasury securities. Real yields adjust these rates for inflation expectations. In market terms, real yield represents the long-term real return earned on safe assets.
Real yield is important to Bitcoin because it sets the opportunity cost of owning an asset that offers volatility and upside rather than guaranteed real returns.
As real yields rise, safe assets become more attractive in real terms and risk assets have to offer more compensation to compete. Lower real yields lower the hurdle and can lead to higher ratings for risky assets based on the same cash flow assumptions, or in the case of Bitcoin, the same scarcity and adoption assumptions.
Bitcoin trades 24/7, is extremely liquid, and is often on the volatile end of the risk spectrum, so it often reacts quickly here. If there is a sudden change in real yields following a CPI or labor repricing, BTC could be one of the fastest ways for the market to express that change.
Why Bitcoin now looks like an interest rate product
Two structural changes made this macrochain more important to BTC.
First, the Spot Bitcoin ETF has created a simple and regulated way for investors to hold BTC exposure within their brokerage accounts. This is important because the marginal buyer group already includes allocators and risk managers who think in macro terms such as yields, inflation paths, policy expectations, and risk budgets.
Second, derivatives amplify the number of recalculation days for prices. Futures and PERP convert macro volatility into positioning volatility. Funding rates and basis can rise quickly if the market tilts in one direction, and that positioning can quickly loosen as macro data forces a rethink.
As a result, BTC movements can appear sharper than the underlying macro impulse, even when the initial catalyst is in a bound state.
An easy way to track your macro stack weekly
The easiest way to track a macro stack is to focus on a few indicators that correspond to each step in the chain and read them together rather than separately. The goal is to follow macro catalysts while leaving room for crypto-specific liquidity and positioning.
start with real yield This is because they are at the end of the communication chain and tend to convey the most accurate summary of the financial situation. A quick look at the U.S. 10-year Treasury note shows whether real yields have risen or fallen over the past week. This often coincides with a tightening or loosening of broader risk appetite.
Next, see how the market has transformed with the latest data. Expectations for policy. CME FedWatch captures changes in implicit interest rate outcomes and allows them to be recognized as changes in probabilities for specific meetings.
When markets bring forward rate cuts or price in easing, it often coincides with a fall in yields. When markets push for rate cuts or price in a more robust path forward, that often coincides with a rise in yields.
then take a look Liquidity and demand specific to cryptocurrencies A means to check whether the transmission channel of macro impulses to Bitcoin is strong or weak. Stablecoin supply provides a rough proxy for deployable crypto dollars moving between exchanges, DeFi, and OTC rails, and often captures whether liquidity is expanding or contracting in the parts of the market that actually fund spot purchases and leverage.
ETF flow Adding one more element allows us to visually read whether there is a stable bid through the regulated wrapper. A consistently positive flow trend can provide support during an eventful macro week. When flows slow or reverse, macro movements can become more violent because there is less structural demand to absorb volatility.
Finally, check the internal dangerous temperature derivatives. Funding and rationale serve as a simple window into determining whether a positioning is crowded. Hot funding is often accompanied by aggressive long positions, which can cause a spike in yields to turn into a faster decline through liquidation. Cooler funding tends to reduce leverage, potentially reducing forced movement even when macro pressures increase.
Taken together, these five checks, real yields, Fed pricing, stablecoin liquidity, ETF flows, and derivatives temperature, serve as a compact dashboard that readers can screenshot and reuse. If most of them are trending in the same direction for a week, BTC tends to trade macro-first because the chain from data to policy price, yield, liquidity, and positioning is complete.
Close: Changes in mental models
Bitcoin still has a long-term story to tell, including adoption, infrastructure, regulation, governance, and its role as a global asset. This is a weekly storyline that often runs through the ranks.
This is why benchmark revisions can be more important than a single salary report, and why CPI results can move BTC within minutes.
The chain continues from labor and inflation, through policy prices, to real yields and liquidity.
Once you learn to observe this chain, BTC price movements will start to look like a fast and fluid expression of your financial situation, rather than a series of disjointed reactions, and the next major CPI or labor update will start to look like an event between assets that Bitcoin trades in real time.
What would Satoshi say?
So, if you told Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 that Bitcoin would one day be traded like a bond, would he believe you?
Bitcoin was designed as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and is not a yield product, a duration proxy product, and certainly not a macro hedge fund trade. The idea that BTC is analyzed through the lens of real yields, CPI index, and 10-year US Treasury volatility likely sounds like a byproduct of institutional adoption rather than the intent of the protocol.
But he probably won’t be surprised.
From its inception, Bitcoin had monetary policies embedded in its code, including fixed supply, predictable issuance, and resistance to discretionary price reductions.
As assets mature and become more liquid, markets will price them against the same macro variables that govern sovereign debt, inflation expectations, liquidity cycles, and real interest rates.
As global investors treat Bitcoin as a long-term, limited-supply financial asset, its sensitivity to bond markets is less an identity crisis and more a reflection of Bitcoin’s role in the broader capital stack.
Satoshi may argue that the market can freely trade Bitcoin. Protocol doesn’t matter. Blocks last every 10 minutes. Supply trending towards 21 million. Adjust the difficulty level. Consensus lasts.
Rather, Bitcoin trading “like a bond” in 2026 could be seen as validation that it is a stateless financial asset large enough to be included in the same discussion as sovereign debt markets.
He might simply answer with what he wrote in 2010. “It might make sense to get some in case there’s an outbreak.”
(Tag translation) Bitcoin
