A ChainCatcher article says parts of the global equity market, especially technology shares, are starting to behave more like crypto.
The piece points to July 13, 2026 in Seoul, when South Korea’s KOSPI dropped 8.95% in one session, marking the seventh circuit breaker of the year. SK Hynix, described in the article as a stock many Koreans see as tied to the country’s economic fortunes, fell 15.37% in a day. Samsung Electronics was down more than 10%.
More than 1.2 million leveraged accounts received margin call notices, and brokerage systems automatically liquidated 320,000 to 460,000 accounts, according to the article. It adds that 62% of those liquidated were investors in their 20s and 30s.
The article also cites an incident in Busan in which a man in his 20s, after losing money on a stock idea promoted by a YouTuber, stabbed that creator. It argues that language and scenes once associated with crypto crashes are now reappearing in post-rally tech equity markets in South Korea, the U.S. and Japan.
Crypto traders moved to stocks, but kept the same playbook
The article says that from the second half of 2025 through early 2026, a number of crypto KOLs and veteran market participants lost confidence in digital assets and shifted attention to U.S. stocks. Bitcoin was moving sideways, trading activity had weakened, and repeated meme coin cycles had left many feeling the market had lost its edge.
At first glance, the move made sense. Stocks have revenue, profit, earnings reports and Securities and Exchange Commission oversight. Compared with crypto projects priced almost entirely on consensus and lacking cash flow, U.S. equities looked more mature and safer.
What moved with those traders was not only capital, but method. In crypto, they were used to chasing fresh narratives, hunting for high-beta names, using leverage, and rotating quickly based on social media sentiment. Once in equities, that approach barely changed. The instruments did. Tokens became AI names, memory stocks and leveraged ETFs.
Memory shares soon became a shared trade. The logic, as described in the article, was simple: AI servers need more high-bandwidth memory, HBM supply was tight, memory prices were rising, and Micron, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix were direct beneficiaries. Some crypto KOLs began talking about U.S. stocks, the memory cycle and AI capital expenditure, while 2x long SK Hynix products were treated as more efficient ways to express the same bet.
Bitcoin has looked relatively calmer than some tech stocks
The article compares how long different assets took to lose roughly half their value. Bitcoin took 268 days. Silver needed 169 days for a similar drawdown. SanDisk fell about 55% in 36 days, while SK Hynix dropped about 53% in 34 days.
That, the article argues, is what makes this cycle unusual. Investors once worried that bitcoin could swing wildly within days while equities repriced more slowly through earnings and valuation adjustments. Now, some technology stocks are completing a full boom-bust cycle even faster than crypto.
Charles Schwab data cited in the piece shows bitcoin’s historical volatility at about 42% in 2025, with a maximum drawdown of about 32%. Over the same period, Tesla’s volatility was about 63% with a 48% maximum drawdown, and Nvidia’s was about 50% with a 37% maximum drawdown. The article says bitcoin remains a high-risk asset, but some mega-cap technology stocks have been even more volatile.
It also notes that Bitwise, in its 2026 outlook, predicted bitcoin’s overall volatility could remain below Nvidia’s.
Narrative has become the valuation anchor
The article frames 2026 global tech trading through a phrase long familiar in crypto: in this market, investors trade the narrative.
It does not argue that AI is empty hype. Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and large cloud companies have real revenue and are spending heavily on data centers. But the gap between “AI will create value” and “any company linked to AI deserves to be bought at any price” is large. At the hottest point of the rally, that distinction was skipped.
In the article’s telling, AI servers, optical modules, memory chips, data centers, power equipment and even nuclear energy companies could all rally rapidly once they were placed inside the AI supply-chain story. Businesses could still be at the planning stage and orders might not yet be booked, but the market was already pricing the best-case scenario years in advance.
It gives several regional examples. In South Korea, the story became one of AI semiconductors and national destiny. As the KOSPI kept climbing to new highs, more families reportedly opened brokerage accounts for underage children and treated Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as long-term gifts. In China’s A-share market, the TMT sector’s market value reached 41.78 trillion yuan in the first half of 2026, accounting for about 31.45% of the total A-share market capitalization. On some trading days, tech names made up nearly half of all turnover. In the U.S., the article says valuation has been concentrated around a small group of technology giants for an extended period. Once funds, options traders and retail investors crowd into the same names, portfolios that appear diversified are effectively making the same AI bet.
The article compares that setup with an earlier crypto episode. Dogecoin’s 2021 surge did not come from a technical breakthrough, it says, but from a post by Elon Musk. In the same way, the 2026 rise in tech stocks was not driven by every company suddenly delivering explosive earnings growth, but by ChatGPT convincing the market that AI would rewrite everything.
Distribution channels matter as well. The article says stock information used to come mainly from earnings reports, research notes and institutional roadshows. Today, more investment decisions are being shaped by YouTube, X, short video platforms and paid groups. Detailed company work gets compressed into a few lines, while platform algorithms reward stories of overnight gains, options windfalls and leveraged bets that turned into financial freedom.
Leverage amplified the fragility
The article argues that the most dangerous combination in crypto was never volatility on its own, but volatility plus leverage. It says global equities in 2026 are reproducing the same pattern.
On May 27, 2026, the Korea Exchange approved 16 single-stock 2x leveraged ETFs tied to names including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. From approval through mid-July, South Korean retail investors made cumulative net purchases of 14 trillion won in single-stock leveraged ETFs, while foreign investors bought about 2 trillion won over the same stretch.
The article says these products contain several structural risks. They rebalance daily, so the more violent the swings, the greater the value erosion. It uses a simple example: if a stock drops 10% and then rises 11.1%, the stock returns to breakeven. A 2x leveraged product tied to the same move would first lose 20% and then gain 22.2%, leaving it still down about 2.2%.
In a sharp decline, the problem gets worse. To maintain target leverage, the product has to cut exposure after losses. That selling puts more pressure on the underlying stock, which then triggers additional de-risking, stop-loss activity and margin stress.
The article says Goldman Sachs later identified the “rapid deleveraging” of these products as the main driver of abnormal intraday volatility in the KOSPI, with 62% of institutional net selling tied to ETF-related liquidation. Two months later, South Korean regulators halted all new listings of single-stock leveraged ETFs, raised minimum margin requirements from 10 million won to 30 million won, and required the collateral to be posted in cash.
By then, according to the article, 2.3 trillion won had already been forcibly liquidated, wiping out wealth across hundreds of thousands of households.
The same article says even the much deeper U.S. market is dealing with leverage aftershocks. It cites JPMorgan analysts as saying there is still room for deleveraging in U.S. equities and that the market may need three months to recover to pre-April levels. It also says the ratio of leveraged ETF assets in memory-chip stocks to the market value of their underlying companies is three times the average for stock ETFs, and that the same ratio for broader leveraged equity index ETFs is high relative to its own history.
The shift is in trading behavior, not in what stocks are
The article closes by saying the “crypto-ization” of stocks does not mean equities and cryptocurrencies are now the same asset class.
Stocks still represent companies, assets, revenue and cash flow. They still come with financial disclosure, audits and regulation. Even after sentiment fades, a genuinely profitable company retains a value that can be modeled.
What has changed, the article argues, is the trading layer. In the past, investors bought a company’s future profits. Now, more of them are trading the popularity of a theme. Traditional equity markets focused on price-to-earnings ratios and cash flow. A more crypto-like stock market focuses on narrative and imagination. Traditional leverage came through margin financing. The newer version runs through ETFs, derivatives and quantitative strategies. Traditional stock information came from research and company reports. The newer channel runs through X, YouTubers and online groups.
The article describes this as an odd crossing point. Bitcoin is trying to become more like a stock-market asset through ETFs, institutional adoption and lower volatility, while some technology stocks are becoming more like bitcoin through narrative-driven pricing, crowded positioning and easy leverage.
It ends by citing a line posted by a South Korean retail investor on a trading forum: “I want to go back to the days before I traded stocks. Give me my money back.” The market, the article says, does not issue refunds.