On April 2, 2026, in Beijing time, the IMF released its annual assessment of the U.S. economy, providing a baseline scenario of "gradually decreasing inflation and moderate interest rate cuts": assuming that the U.S. economy slows down rather than crashes, interest rates will drop to the range of 3.25%-3.5% by the end of 2026, and core PCE inflation will only return to the target level of 2% by early 2027. In other words, the market's expectation of a rapid easing and a liquidity flood has been stretched into a manageable, gradual slope with limited intensity. For the cryptocurrency market, the real question is not "whether there will be easing," but rather: in a scenario where such easing space is finely calibrated, how much new liquidity can be released to support the next round of market sentiment recovery?

Gradual Inflation Decrease and Moderate Interest Rate Cuts: The Soft Landing Scenario Provided by the IMF

The IMF's assessment first provides data support for the "U.S. soft landing" narrative: under its baseline scenario, the U.S. economic growth rate is expected to be 2.4% in 2026, with an unemployment rate maintained at about 4% from 2026 to 2027. The meaning of these figures is that growth is significantly lower than the high levels during the post-pandemic recovery phase, but far from entering recession; the labor market returns from overheating to a state that is closer to "normally tight." This moderate downgrade is the ideal path in the soft landing story—demand does not collapse, corporate and household balance sheets can still withstand the pressure, allowing the central bank room to ease slowly instead of being forced to slam on the brakes or aggressively accelerate.

In such a macro canvas, the IMF provided a relatively clear path for interest rates: the federal funds rate will drop to the range of 3.25%-3.5% by the end of 2026. Gliding slowly from the current high-rate platform to this level implies that in the next two years, the pace of interest rate cuts will resemble "a gradual return to neutrality with boundaries," rather than a flood of easing intended to rescue the economy. The interest rate center remains significantly higher than the ultra-low levels before the pandemic, preserving a nice yield premium for U.S. dollar assets, which itself acts as a natural "gate" to the global liquidity expansion.

Accompanying the rate path is the extension of the decline in inflation to a further time horizon. The IMF predicts that the core PCE, which measures the core state of U.S. inflation, will not return to around the 2% target until early 2027. This means that transitioning the monetary environment to a phase of "no inflation worries + interest rates closer to long-term neutrality" will take at least one to two more years. For financial markets, this timeline essentially sets a rough window for the "monetary environment inflection point": before this, the shadow of high rates still looms, and the imagination of easing is locked in a limited corridor.

These predictive figures partly price in the upper and lower limits of the Federal Reserve's policy: the upper limit indicates the current high-rate environment will not further extreme, while the lower limit suggests that even with continued rate cuts over the next two or three years, a return to zero or negative rate eras will be difficult. The cryptocurrency market needs to confront the challenge of recalibrating risk premiums and liquidity elasticity within this framework of "capped easing."

Easing Is Not Free: Deterioration in Employment Is the Cost of Greater Easing

Another critical signal released by the IMF in its report is the implicit constraint on the imagination of a "super bull market"—"Substantial monetary easing requires a significantly deteriorating labor market as a premise." The straightforward meaning of this statement is that as long as there is no severe deterioration in the U.S. employment market, the Fed will have no motivation to pull rates back to extremely low levels, and the kind of "crisis-level" emergency easing that the market anticipates will not easily materialize. Under the baseline assumption of maintaining a 4% unemployment rate, the U.S. economy is not in urgent need of "emergency transfusions."

Keeping the unemployment rate around 4% means that wages and consumption still have some support, and inflationary pressure is not completely squeezed out. For the Fed, this state is closer to a "tolerable slight overheating," rather than an extreme situation that requires violent easing for correction. Under this premise, the rationale for consecutive significant interest rate cuts is insufficient, let alone resuming unconventional tools. This directly restricts the establishment conditions of the classic macro bull market chain: "substantial interest rate decline—systematic elevation of asset valuations—flooding liquidity."

When easing is bound to the premise of "significantly deteriorating employment," the market's imagination of an extreme bull market is tied to a rope: to gain more liquidity, one must accept a worse economic reality. For highly risk-sensitive asset classes like cryptocurrencies, this "conditional easing" expectation will create constraints on an emotional level—bulls find it hard to rationalize the current high premium for long-cycle valuations with stories of "surely another wave of excessive liquidity is coming."

This also explains why, under the IMF’s scenario, even for risk assets, especially high-beta crypto assets, the elasticity still exists, but the upward expectations are capped. Funds can continue to pay for innovation, narratives, and growth, but it's much harder to replicate the "arbitrary expansion of valuations" driven by a plunge in risk-free interest rates as seen in 2020-2021. Within this framework, sector rotation, thematic trading, and structured leverage may become more important than merely relying on "more and more liquidity."

Energy and Commodity Counterattack: Inflation Targets Not a Straight Path Back

The optimistic baseline of the IMF is built on the premise of "controllable downward inflation," while another parallel narrative in the market stems from concerns about the resurgence of commodity and energy prices. As some opinions suggest, "Rising energy and commodity prices may delay the realization of inflation targets", facing a path filled with landmines rather than a straight tree-lined avenue for the soft landing scenario.

Forecasts from Citigroup add a hard data dimension to this uncertainty: it predicts a potential 4.4 million barrels/day oil supply shortage. Without a simultaneous collapse in crude oil demand, such a supply gap is sufficient to reverse price trends, pushing oil prices back into a range that could materially impact inflation. Energy costs permeate through transportation, production, and consumption chains, adding a more sticky baseline noise to core inflation, making the task of returning inflation to 2% both time-consuming and challenging.

Once inflation stickiness proves to be higher than the IMF baseline assumptions, the Fed will be forced to maintain higher real interest rate levels for a longer period. This not only implies a slowdown in rate cut pace and a higher endpoint interest rate but also crucially delays the point in time when all risk assets truly welcome a "bull market." For the cryptocurrency market, this delay is not simply a price correction, but an extension of the entire cycle—the expected valuation repair and expansion, initially anticipated to complete within one or two years, is stretched to a longer period, making narratives and funding potential more susceptible to losing steam midway.

Therefore, one of the key uncertainties in the current macro narrative lies in the tension between the IMF’s optimistic baseline and potential shocks from commodities: the former supports a gently easing path that can be priced and planned, while the latter may at any time prompt a "counterattack" through oil prices and metal prices, forcing central banks to return to a tougher anti-inflation stance. Cryptocurrency market bets on "macroeconomic benefits" under this framework will inevitably require more discounts and stronger dynamic adjustments.

Stock Market Corrections and On-Chain Volatility: Funds Are Being Reorganized

The slight adjustments in macro expectations first provided feedback through price performance in traditional capital markets. At the opening phase on April 2, in Beijing time, the U.S. stock market had already reacted to this round of macro repricing: the Dow fell about 1.2%, and the Nasdaq dropped about 1.6%. This was not a panic sell-off, but rather a renegotiation at high levels—as investors began to reassess the risk-reward ratios of growth stocks, cyclical stocks, and high-valuation themes using the path assumptions of the IMF and other institutions.

In the cryptocurrency market, risk appetite has similarly shown marginal signs of cooling. Take the example of Hyperliquid early contributors selling off $15.5 million in tokens; this incident was quickly amplified on-chain and social media, becoming a sample of the sentiment that "old money begins to lock in profits" and "realizing gains at high levels." Regardless of the personal motives behind the sell-off, it objectively conveys a consensus: in a phase where macro conditions no longer provide unilateral advantages, early participants are more inclined to use cash to lock in previous gains rather than continuing to gamble on leverage.

The responses of traditional stock markets and cryptocurrency assets under the same macro signal exhibit a characteristic of both "correlation and dislocation." On one hand, changes in interest rate expectations and the U.S. dollar's movement will compress the valuation premiums of both asset classes, triggering similar corrections; on the other hand, the narrative elasticity and liquidity depth of crypto assets are more extreme; the same macro fluctuations are magnified here into more violent price swings, on-chain liquidations, and sentiment reversals. The tug-of-war between hedging and speculation results in some funds "shrinking risks" between stocks and bonds but seeking shorter-term, more speculative expressions through options and contracts on-chain.

Thus, simply explaining the current phase as "funds fleeing risk assets" is not accurate. A more rational understanding is that the market is undergoing a " posture adjustment" after the macro premises are recalibrated: positions are being reshuffled, leverage is being reduced, and durations are being shortened, but this also leaves space for future liquidity to flow back and risk appetite to warm up. When expectations regarding inflation and interest rates marginally turn more favorable toward risk assets in the next round, these temporarily retreating capital may return to the arena in a more selective and structured manner.

From Fed Pricing to Cryptocurrency Price Fluctuations: How Crypto Fits into the Macro Chain

To understand how predictions from institutions like the IMF ultimately map to price fluctuations in BTC and ETH, it's important to clarify the chain: first, the IMF's judgment on inflation and growth becomes one of the inputs for the market to estimate the future policy path of the Fed; next, this policy path expectation is reflected in the interest rate curve through tools like interest rate swaps and government bond yield curves, also influencing the strength of the dollar; finally, changes in interest rates and the dollar are transmitted through risk premiums and global capital allocation into the valuations of various risk assets, including cryptocurrencies.

Interest rates and the strength of the dollar are two critical gears in this chain. High interest rates and a strong dollar typically raise the opportunity cost of holding cash and dollar assets globally, compressing tolerance for high-volatility assets; conversely, a decline in interest rates and weakening of the dollar releases some funds to chase higher returns, thereby increasing marginal demand for mainstream crypto assets like BTC and ETH. In the environment outlined by the IMF of "gradually decreasing interest rates, gradually returning inflation," these two gears are unlikely to reverse sharply, but are more likely to fluctuate within a relatively narrow range, making the market's preference for risk assets more dependent on local events and structural opportunities.

In such a setup of "gentle easing + high-rate tail risks still present," the funding behavior model will undergo subtle changes: most institutions will not simply "ride the macro dividend" through long-term spot allocations but will prefer using options, leverage, and high-volatility products to capture short-term fluctuations. For cryptocurrencies, this means that the derivatives market may remain active, even if the incremental activity in spot transactions and medium-to-long-term holdings is limited. Volatility itself becomes the traded item, rather than merely a "byproduct" of fundamentals or macro expectations.

In terms of strategies for practitioners and investors, one important insight is to focus on marginal changes in interest rate expectations rather than static levels. Given that the IMF has already sketched out a rough range for the next two to three years, what truly drives asset price fluctuations is how the market continuously adjusts its expectations within this range—every reassessment of the endpoint interest rate, the timing of the first rate cut, and the pace of rate cuts will reflect onto cryptocurrencies through the interest rate curve and the dollar index. Rather than stubbornly holding onto a specific "target rate," it is better to closely monitor those marginal events that cause the curve to bend and expectations to shift.

The Macro Script Is Not Fixed Yet: What Crypto Needs Is Time, Not Miracles

Summarizing the baseline currently provided by the IMF, we can outline the macro backdrop for the cryptocurrency market for the foreseeable future: moderate interest rate cuts, gradually decreasing inflation, and incremental liquidity but far from a "flood." This kind of environment supports a "sustainable warming of risk appetite," rather than a repeat of the extreme optimism and decoupled valuations seen in 2020. The space for imagination is compressed, the speed of bubble generation will be slower, and narratives must withstand longer periods of scrutiny.

Two major variables that could potentially rewrite the script remain undetermined: one is whether the labor market experiences a sudden change; if the currently perceived stable employment suddenly deteriorates significantly, then the "flood of easing" gates might be forced open; the second is whether commodities continue to exert inflationary pressure; if oil prices and other key raw materials remain high for an extended period, the achievement of inflation targets will continue to be delayed, and the high rate plateau will also consequently be prolonged. The direction and intensity of these two forces will ultimately determine whether the macro environment of the next few years aligns closer with the IMF’s gentle blueprint or slides into a more turbulent reality.

In this uncertainty, the cryptocurrency market resembles more a pacing phase in a marathon rather than a sprint close to the finish line. Both project teams and investors are unlikely to rely on "waiting for a major turning point" for an overnight turnaround; instead, patience, rhythm, and position management will be more important than betting on a specific macro date. For assets that genuinely have fundamental support, a clear business model, or on-chain demand, such an environment may even be advantageous for gradually accumulating value and consensus with less bubble interference; while for speculative products that depend solely on liquidity surges and emotional amplifiers, they must accept the fate of being tested more frequently or even eliminated.

The macro script is far from finalized, but it is certain that the next genuinely substantial cryptocurrency bull market will not simply replicate the past paradigm of "everything being upheld by torrents of funds." The IMF's bets on moderate interest rate cuts remind the market to adjust in advance for a liquidity era that is more restrained and emphasizes structure and efficiency.

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