On July 28, 2026, Bank of America and BIS spoke on the same day, seemingly standing on different stages: the former provided interest rate and dollar perspectives familiar to traders, while the latter released a technical report on how AI is reshaping macroeconomic outlooks. However, they point to the same core issue — in the era of AI, the Federal Reserve's interest rate decisions no longer follow the traditional script. Bank of America expects that the July meeting will likely take no action and reminds the market that since 1994, the Fed has never raised interest rates suddenly when the probability of a rate hike has been priced as "low". Thus, if a rate hike occurs at this meeting, it would be an "unprecedented" policy shock. In parallel to this historical experience, Bank of America marks the recent rise in oil prices as a current major inflation risk, reinforcing a bullish stance on the dollar. Almost at the same time, BIS entered through another clue: AI-related investments, changes in trade and asset prices are rewriting how central banks understand growth and inflation, with short-term infrastructure investments and consumption possibly pushing inflation higher while long-term productivity gains bringing about deflationary effects, making the interest rate path more difficult to predict and price. Under this overlapping set of signals, the main line of this article is very clear: we do not discuss the technological breakthroughs of AI itself but track how the interest rate path, oil prices, and AI investments converge to the same result — the repricing of dollar assets, and the risk preferences and fund flows on-chain, including BTC and ETH, being forced to be rewritten.

Distortion of Rate Hike Probability: Central Banks Make Decisions Under Market Expectations' Shadow

Since 1994, the Federal Reserve has never chosen to raise rates when "the probability of a rate hike is below 60%"; this historical pattern organized by Bank of America is being treated by the market as the Fed's "invisible constraint." In the context of rising oil prices and recurring inflation pressures over recent months, traders still label a July rate hike as having a "low probability." Bank of America directly judges that the Fed will maintain rates unchanged based on this, emphasizing that if it still chooses to hike, it would be an "unprecedented" decision. In other words, the room for adjustment in the federal funds rate itself has been effectively locked in by the market's consensus on the probability of a rate hike, significantly raising the difficulty for forward guidance to create policy surprises.

For high-volatility assets including BTC and ETH, this "central bank trapped by expectations" structure directly points to a repricing logic of risk premium: if the market believes that the interest rate path can largely be "bet on and predicted," the magnitude of surprises when policies are implemented shrinks, allowing on-chain leverage and duration risks to weigh more on the neutral to bullish side, thus there is room for risk premiums to contract; conversely, in the environment described by BIS where AI disrupts traditional macro signals and the risk of interest rate misjudgment rises, even if the current probability of a rate hike is described as "low," the credibility of that probability itself begins to be questioned. Historically, high uncertainty periods have accompanied rising volatility and higher risk premiums for crypto assets, leading more funds to prefer to cut exposure and increase the discount against BTC and ETH until the direction of dollar interest rates is clearer.

High Oil Prices and Strong Dollar: Discounts on Crypto Assets Under the Shadow of Inflation

In the context of recurring inflation pressures and rising oil prices over recent months, Bank of America has pointed out that higher oil prices are currently the primary source of inflationary upward risk, effectively adding a "bullish inflation" hand behind the Fed. Energy prices themselves are a key weight in the U.S. CPI and the global inflation basket; once oil prices rise, the market's confidence in the path of inflation returning will be undermined. Even if the Fed maintains rates unchanged at the July meeting, it will be more difficult to tilt towards "clearly loose". When Bank of America strengthened this judgment on July 28, it also maintained a bullish stance on the dollar; the logic behind this is straightforward: high oil prices suppress disinflation, forcing the Fed to maintain a tight monetary policy. The yield differential and risk aversion demand between the U.S. and other economies collectively push the dollar higher. Historically, strong dollar cycles often accompany capital outflows from emerging markets and high-volatility risk assets, with global liquidity more willing to shelter in dollar assets.

Under this combination of interest and exchange rates, the "currency substitution" story for BTC and ETH is systematically discounted. As hedging tools against fiat currency devaluation and inflation panic, in an environment of "strong dollar + relatively high interest rates," they naturally pale in comparison: the dollar itself, under a narrative providing higher interest returns and where inflation is not yet out of control, resembles a high-yield safe-haven asset, and the market is not in a hurry to seek decentralized currency substitutes. At the on-chain fund level, this macro preference will specifically manifest as: more funds choose to hold on-chain accounting units pegged to the dollar, treating them as a cash-like safe haven, while utilizing traditional yield assets and on-chain dollar interest rates for low-risk spread trades, reducing exposure to price-volatile assets like BTC and ETH. The result is that in a strong dollar cycle supported by high oil prices, the discount rate of BTC and ETH valuations is raised; they are repriced as risk instruments that need to be discounted in the shadow of inflation and dollar benefits, rather than as hard inflation hedging tools that can ignore interest and exchange rate cycles.

BIS Warning: The AI Investment Tide Turns the Inflation Path into a Maze

While the market was still engaged in traditional games surrounding oil prices and the dollar, BIS's report drew another hidden line into the interest rate narrative: AI is reshaping the macro outlook through three dimensions — investment, trade, and asset prices. The report emphasizes that infrastructure investments surrounding computing power centers, data centers, and related equipment, coupled with end-side consumption expenditure on AI services, will traditionally push demand and costs upward in the short term, lifting inflation; however, the true deflationary effects — improved productivity and reduced unit costs — will take longer to materialize. This means that the same wave of AI is divided over time into segments of "first inflation, then deflation," scattering traditional inflation and growth signals, leaving central banks seeing more noise of overheating demand and shadows of supply dividends in the current data.

BIS's warning points to a more dangerous scenario: if policymakers overly believe in the supply-side dividends brought by AI too early and too much, treating them as a natural buffer against inflation while underestimating the current demand-side pressure driven by investment and consumption, it may lead to maintaining excessively low rates for quite some time. Nominal rates being too low and real rates being suppressed by "AI optimism" will encourage the market to heavily leverage, pulling dollar assets and various risk assets to heights based on erroneous inflation expectations. When real data proves that the deflationary effects of AI arrive more slowly and with less intensity, the central bank will have to correct errors through more intense rate hikes and tightening, leading to a severe repricing of the entire interest rate curve, dollar exchange rate, and risk assets (including crypto assets); this policy time misalignment itself becomes a new macro risk source.

The Cost of Interest Rate Misjudgment: Reshuffling On-Chain Leverage and Fund Flows

Once the interest rate goes in the wrong direction and is confronted by actual data, the central bank can only correct it through more drastic rate hikes or sharp turns; historically, such compensatory actions have almost always been accompanied by mandatory liquidations of leveraged assets and significant pullbacks in risk assets. BIS has already indicated that AI-related investments and price changes are disturbing traditional macro signals and increasing the risk of interest rate decision misjudgment, which means that the probability of such a sharp adjustment occurring is rising. In this environment, the perpetual contract funding rates for BTC and ETH and the on-chain lending rates swing violently along with expectations of dollar rates and risk appetites. What once appeared to be safe high leverage and circular pledging could, with one policy "corrective", push the entire market into a chain of forced liquidations and passive contractions of margin calls.

The instability of interest rates and the dollar exchange rate will continuously rewrite the return-volatility trade-offs of both on-chain and off-chain funds. When dollar rates are forced to rise significantly and the dollar strengthens, the "risk-free returns" of on-chain assets and centralized exchange margin accounts priced in dollars will rise, and funds will prefer to withdraw from high-volatility assets like BTC and ETH, returning to the dollar side to reap interest differentials; conversely, if policies long underestimate inflation pressures and keep real rates disproportionately low or even negative, the market will hedge currency purchasing power risk by shorting the dollar and increasing allocations to crypto assets, but this is also under the condition of higher interest rate uncertainty, amplifying volatility exposure. The consequences of interest rate misjudgment lead not only to steep lines in macro data but also compel a rearrangement of the entire on-chain leverage structure and the mix of dollar-priced funds between risk and return, embedding each substantial reshuffling of the crypto market deeply within the time misalignment of central bank policies.

In the Noise of AI and Inflation, the Trading Coordinates of BTC and ETH

With rising oil prices, AI investments stirring growth and inflation signals into noise, and compounded by Bank of America's emphasis on strong dollar expectations and the historical constraint of "never raised rates in a low probability environment since 1994," the Fed is being pushed into a "impossible triangle" where it cannot simultaneously satisfy the inflation defense line, stabilize asset prices, and maintain dollar credibility. In the time window of July 28, 2026, Bank of America and BIS almost simultaneously raised the weight of interest rate misjudgment risks, signaling to the market that the interest rate path will be less smooth and the pricing coordinates of dollar assets and risk assets are undergoing a whole migration. For BTC and ETH, this means that the fluctuations around the July meeting's rate decision and language will amplify in the short term. However, in the mid-term, a clearer narrative emerges: when the central bank may underestimate the inflation caused by rising oil prices and AI or overestimate the long-term benefits of AI, as "hedging positions against the central bank's misjudgment," they have the opportunity to capture premiums of distrust against dollar purchasing power. Moving forward, trading needs to place the Fed’s statements regarding inflation and AI, the trends of oil prices and the dollar index, the performance of AI-related assets in the stock market, along with the net inflows and changes in leverage positions of on-chain dollar-pegged assets, all within the same coordinate system. Continuous tracking of these coordinates will determine the power distribution of the next round of crypto risk assets.

Join our community to discuss and grow stronger together!
AiCoin exclusive Hyperliquid benefits: https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/AICOIN88
AiCoin exclusive Aster benefits: https://www.asterdex.com/zh-CN/referral/9C50e2
On-chain Telegram community: https://t.me/AiCoinWhaleData
On-chain community: https://www.aicoin.com/link/chat?cid=N6OVMor5g
AiCoin on-chain Twitter: https://x.com/aicoinwhaledata

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。