The U.S. military will begin a maritime blockade covering all Iranian ports and coastal areas at 20:00 GMT on July 14, or 04:00 Beijing time on July 15, according to the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC). The measure applies to all vessels regardless of flag and spans Iran’s entire coastline, including ports and oil terminals. JMIC said the blockade will not interfere with neutral vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to non-Iranian destinations, while humanitarian cargo will be allowed through after inspection. As tensions between the U.S. and Iran escalated again, crude prices moved sharply higher. Bitget market data showed WTI crude at $78.825, up 6.97% on the day, while Brent crude was at $82.78, up 9.01%.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he still believes the United States could reach an agreement with Iran, while also saying Tehran has resumed contact with Washington. Speaking to reporters at the White House on July 13 local time, Trump said Iran wants a deal and has re-engaged with the U.S. He also said the U.S. military would continue heavy strikes on Iran to sharply reduce its ability to affect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. In the same remarks, Trump said the U.S. is restoring a blockade "targeted only at Iran," adding that ships doing business with Iran would not be allowed to pass, while other countries and vessels could continue normal transit. The remarks were cited by CCTV International News and carried by BlockBeats on July 14.

On-chain tracker Onchain Lens said a whale moved 30,100 ETH out of Coinbase Prime and into a newly created wallet. The transfer was valued at $52.84 million at the time cited in the report. No additional details about the wallet owner or the purpose of the transaction were disclosed in the source. The move stands out because of its size and because the funds were sent to a new address rather than an existing known wallet.

SK Hynix posted a drop of more than 15% in South Korea on July 13, a move that quickly spilled into Taiwan and U.S. memory names. Nanya Technology closed down 2.87% at NT$423 after opening higher, while Macronix, Winbond, and Powerchip also fell between 2% and 5%. In the U.S., SK Hynix’s ADR sank 9.3% on Monday, nearly wiping out the 13% first-day gain it recorded after its recent $26.5 billion listing, and shares of Micron and Western Digital also moved lower. ABMedia said the sell-off was tied to concerns that enthusiasm around artificial intelligence had run too far and that earnings could come in below expectations. Korea Investment Securities said that while AI demand remains strong, price increases for high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, have lagged those of conventional chips, raising the risk that SK Hynix’s operating profit may miss market expectations. Bloomberg reported that foreign investors sold a net 1.7 trillion won, or about $1.1 billion, on the Kospi on Monday, with SK Hynix making up most of that selling. The report also said the Kospi dropped 9% and triggered a circuit breaker, while technical indicators show SK Hynix has entered oversold territory.

Circle minted about 750 million USDC on Solana again, according to monitoring data cited by ChainCatcher from Onchain Lens. The tracked address was identified as Circle (7VHU...4BmE). Based on the same monitoring update, Circle has minted about 68.26 billion USDC on Solana in 2026 so far. The report did not provide additional transaction details beyond the mint size, the network, and the running annual total. The update was published by ChainCatcher as a whale-movement newsflash.

Circle has minted about 750 million more USDC on Solana, according to monitoring data from Onchain Lens. The tracked wallet, identified as “7VHU...4BmE,” was cited in the update. With this latest issuance, Circle’s cumulative USDC minting on Solana in 2026 has reached about 68.26 billion tokens. The update was carried by Odaily as a brief market-moving on-chain alert focused on large-scale token issuance activity. No additional transaction details were provided in the source brief.

OpenAI has published a new prompting guide for GPT-5.6 Sol, and its central recommendation runs against a year of prompt-writing habits: stop stuffing system prompts with extra instructions. The company says the better approach is outcome-first prompting—state the desired result, define success criteria, specify stopping conditions, and leave out process detail the model already handles on its own. According to OpenAI, internal coding-agent tests showed that leaner system prompts improved evaluation scores by about 10% to 15%, while reducing total token use by 41% to 66% and lowering costs by 33% to 67%. The guide argues that repeated rules, style notes that do not change behavior, and examples that add no functional value now act as noise rather than support. The update also marks a clear shift from the GPT-5 guide released in August 2025, which favored heavier scaffolding such as XML persistence blocks, detailed context-gathering templates, and narrated tool preambles. GPT-5.6, OpenAI says, needs fewer rails. The guide also introduces the text.verbosity parameter and a new section on Programmatic Tool Calling for workflows where code can filter, batch, or aggregate outputs before handing compact results back to the model.

Dragonfly partner Haseeb said on X that DeFi has not entered the “hacker doomsday” some had feared, even as models including GLM 5.2, Fable and GPT 5.6 are already live and being used by attackers. Citing chart data, he said 2026 DeFi losses are running at an annualized $1.89 billion based on year-to-date figures and the current pace. Total losses so far this year stand at about $986 million, below 2025 levels and still within the historical range. Haseeb said the more meaningful shift is in attack composition: the number of hacks has increased, but the size of each attack has fallen faster. He added that attackers are focusing more on smaller protocols and abandoned projects, while larger protocols have completed more security hardening. In his view, overall fund safety across DeFi has not deteriorated in a clear way.