July 29’s market roundup was led by SK hynix’s quarterly earnings, a fresh push for the Clarity Act in the US Senate, and a planned capacity upgrade on Solana.
CEX leaders and 24-hour movers
The top 10 tokens by CEX trading volume and their 24-hour performance were listed as follows:
- BTC: +1.42%
- ETH: +2.09%
- AERO: -1.02%
- BANK: -44.01%
- SOL: +0.83%
- XRP: +2.20%
- SNDKB: -13.01%
- DEXE: -4.33%
- ZEC: -1.71%
- BNB: +1.06%
The 24-hour gainers list, with data from OKX, included:
- ZIL: +17.58%
- CSPR: +14.04%
- FLOW: +9.37%
- ADA: +7.9%
- CARDS: +7.79%
- OL: +6.45%
- MENGO: +6.39%
- PROS: +6.25%
- JUP: +6.1%
- WET: +6.09%
The 24-hour crypto-related stock gainers list, citing msx.com, showed:
- SKDD: 14.62%
- MPU: 13.28%
- SOXS: 12.32%
- CLS: 9.99%
- SKHZ: 9.22%
- TER: 7.99%
- AMC: 6.37%
- MIAX: 5.8%
- FIG: 5.49%
- CCXI: 5.47%
On-chain meme tokens in focus
GMGN’s list of popular on-chain meme names featured FRANK and BNUT on Solana, MarsCoin and 币有 on BSC, and PIPEDOG and CASHCAT on Robinhood.
SK hynix posts earnings below expectations
SK hynix reported second-quarter operating profit of KRW 60.5 trillion, below the market expectation of KRW 64 trillion. Revenue came in at KRW 79 trillion, also short of the KRW 84 trillion expected by the market.
The company said average DRAM selling prices in the second quarter rose about 30% from the first quarter. It expects third-quarter DRAM shipments to grow about 10% quarter over quarter and said it will expand HBM4 supply in the second half of the year.
For 2026, SK hynix said it expects DRAM market demand to grow 20% to 30% year over year and NAND demand to rise 10% to 20%. It also plans to lift 2026 capital expenditure toward the high end of the KRW 40 trillion range.
On its analyst call, SK hynix said it has not seen signs of a slowdown in AI investment and expects AI infrastructure spending to remain solid beyond 2027. The company added that long-term supply agreements do not imply oversupply, noting that such agreements are typically five years long and vary by customer. It said those agreements will help strengthen its lead in HBM.
SK hynix also said bit shipment growth in the second half will exceed that of the first half, while product mix affected second-quarter average selling prices. The company said it remains on track for mass production of HBM4E starting in 2027.
Musk’s wealth falls sharply from the peak but stays above $700 billion
Since SpaceX shares peaked in June, Elon Musk’s wealth has dropped by about $650 billion, while Tesla and SpaceX shares have continued to decline. Even after that pullback, the report said his net worth still exceeds $700 billion. Investors are watching whether AI-driven growth can support elevated valuations.
trade.xyz to reimburse liquidation losses tied to SKHYNIX pricing anomaly
trade.xyz said on X that at 23:01 UTC on July 27, the SKHYNIX mark price dropped from $1,127.9 to $917.25. The company said that price was based on an executed trade and was relayed by multiple independent data providers.
According to trade.xyz, the XYZ oracle was functioning in external price mode and tracking what it described as Korea’s main premarket venue, with the oracle system operating according to its specification. Even so, the company said users were dissatisfied with liquidations triggered by the move. Trade[XYZ] said it had decided to compensate liquidation losses attributed to the anomaly, with eligibility details to be announced soon and distribution expected in the coming days.
The platform described the decision as a one-off discretionary action and said it does not guarantee similar treatment in future incidents. It also said it will improve its pricing system for tail events and speed up a review of price formation, including reassessing assumptions tied to external venues and considering price formation from its own order book.
Hyperliquid co-founder iliensinc later said Hyperliquid is a permissionless blockchain and that different teams can deploy and operate markets on top of its infrastructure. He said the xyz:SKHYNIX perpetual contract was deployed and operated by the XYZ team, which is now investigating the incident and will publish an update once it reaches a conclusion.
He also explained that deployers of HIP-3 markets are responsible for providing the mark price, oracle inputs and external perpetual pricing data. Using a BTC-like perpetual as an example, he said the protocol supplies one of the three price components through the median of the latest on-chain trade, best bid and best ask, while the other two components are supplied by the market deployer. All three influence the final mark price.
US Senate Republicans seek procedural vote on the Clarity Act
Senate Republicans want to move the Clarity Act to a procedural vote before the August recess, but the effort faces a crowded legislative schedule, wavering support from some Republicans and Democratic concerns about crypto-related profits tied to Donald Trump’s family.
The bill’s path depends on votes from moderate Democrats. Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that backing the measure would amount to yielding to special interests and could benefit Trump’s family. The main dispute remains centered on ethics provisions. Democrats want limits on Trump profiting from crypto businesses. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona is working with North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis on a counterproposal that would add a joint enforcement mechanism involving state attorneys general and the Department of Justice.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong added his voice on July 27 in a post on X, urging the Senate to advance the CLARITY Act vote. Armstrong said the bill emerged from years of bipartisan negotiations. He said it would strengthen enforcement authority, add new consumer protections and establish a federal regulatory framework for the digital asset industry. He also argued that the US still lacks federal law that both protects consumers and supports the industry’s development domestically.
Senate Republicans released an updated Clarity Act text on July 22 covering disclosure standards, registration requirements, anti-fraud provisions and expanded anti-money laundering obligations for digital asset market participants. BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon have backed the bill.
Korean market correlations, rates and AI chip IPO plans
Data provided by asset manager Rayliant showed the 60-day correlation between South Korea’s KOSPI and the Nasdaq 100 recently climbed to around 0.50, the highest level since 2021. Market participants warned that the tighter relationship carries risks because rising correlation weakens the diversification and hedging benefits investors have traditionally sought by holding both US and Korean stocks.
Bank of Korea data released Tuesday showed household mortgage rates at banks rose for a second straight month and reached the highest level in two years and seven months as market rates moved higher. The average rate on new bank loans stood at 4.31% last month, up 0.12 percentage points from the prior month. The average corporate loan rate rose 0.14 percentage points to 4.27%, while the rate on new household loans increased 0.04 percentage points to 4.5%. In June, the average household mortgage rate rose 0.04 percentage points to 4.36%, the highest since November 2023. The average rate on unsecured household loans was 5.72%, up 0.23 percentage points month over month. The central bank said retail lending rates have kept rising in recent months because of higher market rates. Earlier this month, it delivered its first rate increase in three and a half years.
South Korean AI chip companies Rebellions, FuriosaAI and DeepX also adjusted their IPO timelines. Rebellions moved its KOSPI listing target to the first half of next year, FuriosaAI is targeting the second half of 2028, and DeepX is aiming for 2027 to 2028.
All three are pursuing pre-IPO or Series D fundraising. Based on their assessed values, Rebellions is valued at KRW 3.4 trillion, FuriosaAI at about KRW 3 trillion and DeepX at about KRW 2.85 trillion, for a combined figure of roughly KRW 9.25 trillion. Their revenue last year was about KRW 32 billion, KRW 5.7 billion and KRW 3.3 billion, respectively. Production and customer order references included Rebellions’ next-generation chips such as Rebel 100 and Renegade.
Apple, Amazon and SpaceX updates
Apple became the second company in history to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization. Its shares rose as much as 1.8% on Tuesday to $342.89, briefly pushing the company above the threshold before the stock later eased. The report said Apple would clear that level on a closing basis if it finishes above $340.43.
Nvidia had earlier reached a record $5.7 trillion market capitalization at the close on May 14, but has since lost about $1 trillion in value. Apple is now the largest company in the S&P 500 by market capitalization.
Business Insider reported that Amazon is overhauling its AI strategy, gradually phasing out many internal models, restructuring teams and concentrating engineers on a new approach aimed at competing at the frontier. Rather than spreading resources across text, image and video models, Amazon is said to be redirecting engineering talent and limited compute capacity toward its top-priority work.
The report said Amazon is winding down most of its flagship models, including the high-end Premier and Omni models, the Reel video generation model and the Canvas image generation model. Some employees described those products as being in “KTLO” mode, short for keeping the lights on. Resources are gradually shifting away from existing Nova models toward a new frontier effort led by researcher Pete Abbeel. Internally, the project is called Frontier Model Research, or FMR, and has become the company’s top priority this year. A new flagship foundation model is expected to be released at the re:Invent conference this fall.
SpaceX, meanwhile, has fallen 20% from its IPO price. Space was down more than 5% in early Tuesday trading at about $107, extending a sharp decline from post-IPO highs reached days after last month’s listing. Its market value has fallen by $1.2 trillion from the June 16 peak, one of the largest value wipeouts on record.
The report said recent geopolitical tensions and concern over supply-demand imbalances and valuation inflation driven by heavy spending across the AI ecosystem have weighed on many large companies in the sector. SpaceX investors are also watching the potential effect of an August 6 lock-up expiry involving $116 billion in value and 911.5 million shares.
Project updates: Solana, Lighter, 1inch and Across Protocol
SolanaFloor said on X that Solana plans to raise the mainnet Block Compute Limit from 60 million CU to 100 million CU in less than 24 hours, an increase of about 66%. The SIMD-0286 upgrade is expected to activate at the start of Epoch 1009.
Lighter founder Vladimir Novakovski published a post titled “Equity and Tokens,” saying all economic value generated by Lighter will belong to token holders.
He said Lighter’s design from the start was to use venture capital to guide the project until token launch. Lighter is a US company with only one legal entity. The entity that issued equity before the TGE is the same one that issued tokens at the TGE. After the equity cap table was converted into a token cap table at TGE, he said the equity cap table will no longer have any other role in the future.
Novakovski added that Lighter completed its final equity round a few months before TGE, with around 5x oversubscription. The $68 million allocation drew more than $300 million in indications of interest. All equity stakeholders, including early investors and former employees, were informed that their equity value would be represented only through allocations on the token cap table and were given the option to sell their shares. In the end, less than 1% of equity holders chose to sell, while the rest stayed and backed the project’s value-accrual approach to the token.
DEX aggregator 1inch launched Aqua, a shared liquidity protocol. Aqua lets users support multiple liquidity positions with a single token balance without depositing assets into liquidity pools. Assets remain in the user’s wallet at all times. Only when a trade is executed does the protocol call the necessary tokens from the wallet in a single atomic transaction, settle the trade and return the received assets and fees to the wallet.
PeckShieldAlert said an address tagged as the attacker in the Across Protocol incident returned 331.8 ETH, worth about $623,900, to the Across Protocol Hub Pool Owner multisig. Across Protocol had previously been attacked on Solana, leading to the outflow of about $3.6 million in crypto assets.
Fundraising and investment activity
Singapore-based asset manager Psalion announced a $50 million fund for early-stage blockchain startups. Psalion said it will back pre-seed and seed-stage companies in infrastructure, real-world assets, stablecoins, DeFi and trade finance.
Axis Robotics said it raised $12 million in a seed round led by Hack VC, with participation from Nomad Capital, Pi Core Team Ventures, 10K Ventures and several angel investors. The company focuses on data needs for Physical AI and robotics models. It uses large-scale simulation, first-person real-world data collection and human-in-the-loop post-training to build a closed-loop workflow for producing structured, diverse robotics datasets at scale. The new funding will be used to speed up construction of a large-scale, parallel, human-in-the-loop global data engine.
Birdai Labs announced a $4 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept. The project builds infrastructure to measure, verify and optimize trade execution quality for high-performance public blockchains, with the aim of reducing value loss caused by ordering and propagation between order placement and execution and returning more value to traders and market makers.
Beezie said it raised $4 million, with Psalion participating through its early-stage Psalion VC Fund III. The company’s core business is generating on-chain digital twins for physical goods so they can become programmable, tradable and composable across different scenarios. It also uses gamified mechanisms to turn trading in physical assets into an interactive consumption experience. The new capital will be used for global expansion.
Korean regulators examine volatility and leverage products
Kim Yong-beom, head of policy at South Korea’s presidential office, said authorities have asked the Financial Services Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service to investigate structural factors behind the recent sharp swings in the Korean stock market. The review will not be limited to leveraged ETFs and will cover the broader market structure.
Kim said the Korean stock market has structural issues of its own, with global moves of the same magnitude often amplified in Korea. He said leveraged ETFs may worsen volatility but are not the only reason. Regulators will also examine derivatives trading share and investor composition.
South Korea’s financial regulators also decided that if overheating in single-stock leveraged products does not ease, they will consider additional measures such as caps on retail participation. One plan under study would limit single-stock leveraged investment to no more than 20% of a person’s total financial investment product exposure.
Previously disclosed official statistics showed that as of July 13, cumulative forced liquidations in July had reached KRW 344.2 billion. More than 1.2 million leveraged retail accounts had hit margin call thresholds, and roughly 320,000 to 360,000 of those accounts had already been fully liquidated by brokerages. Some accounts even ended up owing money to brokers.
Yonhap also reported that Financial Services Commission Chairman Lee Eog-weon on Tuesday urged asset managers to spread single-stock leveraged ETF rebalancing trades throughout the trading day to curb sharp price swings caused by large orders before the close. Fund managers usually carry out most of that rebalancing between 3:20 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. local time in order to target twice the daily return of the underlying stock. If concentrated near the close, those trades may accelerate rallies and deepen declines.
Lee said, “There are concerns in the market that concentrated rebalancing before the close can amplify market volatility. The timing of trades needs to be dispersed.” He added that some products involve more than 20 liquidity providers, leading to excessive turnover, more trading between the providers themselves and broader arbitrage activity.
People and public comments
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded to the open-weight model debate by saying the company has never argued for a total ban on open models. OpenAI, Google and SpaceX had joined an open-source petition, while Anthropic was the only major frontier model company not to sign.
Amodei said open-weight models can lower costs, increase competition and support customer self-deployment. He said open models without dangerous capabilities can be treated as a “public good.” At the same time, he argued that open models are not necessarily safer and that defenders do not automatically gain more advantage than attackers. Once model weights are public, safety restrictions can be removed and cannot be taken back.
Anthropic proposed three alternatives: restricting the flow of advanced chips and manufacturing equipment to China, cracking down on industrial-scale model distillation, and requiring all models above a certain capability threshold to undergo cyberattack, bio-risk and alignment testing, whether open or closed.
A separate discussion in China followed a Weibo trend about “Lei Jun making a floating profit of CNY 700 million from subscribing to ChangXin Technology shares.” Xu Jieyun, special assistant to Xiaomi Group’s chairman and deputy general manager of the company’s strategic marketing department, responded by saying, “Friends can just take it as fun, don’t take it seriously. It can’t really be calculated that way. This is a corporate investment action, and a specific subsidiary entity can’t simply be mixed together with personal wealth. Also, congratulations to ChangXin again.”
According to an earlier ChangXin Technology filing, a Wuhan-based company participating in the strategic placement received 18.2448 million shares. Based on the issue price of CNY 8.66 per share, that company made CNY 736 million on the first trading day after listing. The investor was Wuhan 1810 Enterprise Management Co., Ltd., founded in 2021 with an office in Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone. The company is a wholly owned Xiaomi Technology subsidiary. Equity records show that Lei Jun is chairman of Xiaomi Technology and holds 97.48% of Xiaomi Technology shares.
The report added that semiconductor supply-chain companies including Montage Technology, ESWIN Materials, Piotech, Anji Microelectronics, Tongfu Microelectronics, Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, Yitang Shares and Shanghai Silicon Industry also each received 18.24 million shares in the placement, with each allocation worth CNY 158 million. Based on first-day closing prices, the floating gain for each exceeded CNY 700 million.
On Monday night, Hyperliquid and Multicoin said jointly that they would support the CFTC’s prediction market framework. Commenting on that cooperation, former Multicoin co-founder Kyle Samani, who has since left the firm, wrote on X: “If you are building in the Solana ecosystem, you should understand that Multicoin will obstruct everything you do.”
Fangchengshi founder Vida said on X that he sold nearly $7 million in put options on the day, with most of them set to be exercised in one month. He said the sell-off in storage names appears close to an emotional extreme and that implied volatility in storage stocks is at a historical top percentile, while AI-related demand continues and fundamentals have not changed.
Vida added that he prefers lower risk and steadier returns. Using a one-month MU 660 put option as an example, he said selling 15 contracts now could immediately generate $47,000 in profit, and if MU falls below 660 in a month and triggers assignment, he would buy with $1 million.
Zhuoer Jiang said on X that after this cycle ends, he will stop shorting ETH and switch to shorting BTC instead. He said his earlier strategy was to stake ETH into WBETH as collateral and open an equal-sized short in perpetuals, which in effect was equivalent to selling ETH spot, without leverage or a liquidation line, while retaining ETH staking yield and earning long funding rates. He said he will later use WBETH as collateral to short an equivalent amount of BTC spot based on the exchange rate. In his words, BTC has already broken below its ascending channel, while ETH remains near the lower edge of its own ascending channel.