Bitget UEX’s latest daily market report said interest-rate options in the U.S. Treasury market are increasingly being used to position for Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2027, while expectations for a September hike have eased sharply from levels seen two weeks ago. The note tied that shift to softer July inflation, retail sales and consumer sentiment, along with a surprise decline of 23,000 in nonfarm payrolls. Swap pricing now implies only about 9 basis points of tightening at the September meeting. The report also pointed to a separate macro driver: U.S. officials said Donald Trump had told his negotiating team, including Vice President Vance, envoy Witkoff and Kushner, to pause contact with Iran. That kept uncertainty around Hormuz-related supply channels in focus and helped support crude prices. In parallel, tighter power-use oversight for data centers in Pennsylvania, Texas and New York has added pressure to the AI infrastructure trade, which Bank of America strategists now view as a midterm-election variable. Across markets, BTC traded around $64,600 and ETH at $1,915, while U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $298 million in net inflows the previous day. U.S. equities fell, led by AI hardware, semiconductors and optical networking names, with Nvidia, Meta, Coherent and Lumentum among the laggards. Apple was one of the few large-cap tech names to close higher.

South Korea’s two biggest crypto exchange operators reported sharply weaker first-half results on Aug. 14, showing how closely exchange earnings still track trading activity. Dunamu, the parent company of Upbit, posted 408.1 billion won in consolidated operating revenue for the first half of 2026, down 49.1% year over year. Operating profit fell 79.7% to 111.5 billion won, while net profit dropped 74.1% to 108.4 billion won. Bithumb reported 168.8 billion won in revenue, down 48.7%, with operating profit of 14.9 billion won, down 83.4%, and a net loss of 108.7 billion won versus a net profit of 55 billion won a year earlier. The backdrop was a broad contraction in local trading activity. Combined second-quarter volume across South Korea’s five licensed KRW exchanges — Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax — fell 49.5% year over year to about $146.4 billion, cutting directly into fee income. The report said Dunamu benefited from better cost control, while Bithumb’s loss included digital asset impairment and administrative expenses related to regulatory penalties. It also pointed to a shift in Korean retail money toward AI and semiconductor stocks such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as well as expectations around a 22% crypto capital gains tax due to begin in January 2027. Both companies are still pushing IPO plans, but their latest numbers put fresh pressure on how public investors may value fee-driven exchange businesses.

Changxin Memory’s market debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market on July 27, 2026, turned a long-running industrial bet by Hefei into one of the most discussed capital stories in China. The company opened at its RMB 8.66 offer price, surged more than 465% by the close, and finished its first day with a market capitalization of about RMB 3.3 trillion. On the following day, its valuation briefly climbed to RMB 3.66 trillion. That move sharply lifted the value of Hefei’s state-owned holdings. Based on the final ownership structure cited in the source article, Hefei’s state capital system was sitting on paper gains of more than RMB 1 trillion, built from cumulative investment of roughly RMB 26 billion to RMB 30 billion over nearly a decade. The article traces that outcome back to 2016, when Zhu Yiming pushed a DRAM industrialization plan that many places declined as too risky, while Hefei agreed to back the project. The report also links Changxin with an earlier BOE investment in 2008 to explain what is now widely called the “Hefei model”: using patient state capital to support strategically important industries through long loss-making cycles, then using the capital market to reprice those holdings. At the same time, the article argues the model is not easy to duplicate. It points to four factors behind Hefei’s result: unusual policy continuity, specialized state investment platforms, favorable timing tied to the AI-driven memory boom, and organizational discipline that many other cities have struggled to match.

AI enthusiasm got another boost this week after Anthropic and OpenAI reported strong financial updates and Nvidia pledged support for data center construction. The rebound lifted U.S. storage stocks and pushed the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index back into a technical bull market. Micron, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Western Digital and Seagate all moved higher, while Kioxia ADR jumped on gains in Japan. Analysts said the latest revenue disclosures from Anthropic and OpenAI, along with Nvidia’s financing role in AI infrastructure, are the main near-term catalysts for chips and memory names.

US storage and memory shares extended losses at the open on August 18 after a sharp pre-market decline, according to BIT(bit.com) market data. Micron fell 7.62%, SK Hynix lost 8.44%, Sandisk dropped 9.18%, Western Digital slipped 8.21%, and Seagate Technology declined 9.08%.

Hyperliquid Policy Center and tradeXYZ have submitted a joint comment letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, asking the agency to include pre-IPO perpetual contracts, or IPOP, in its IPO modernization framework. Under the proposal, investors would be able to trade exposure to a company’s share price before the listing, while the contract would end its pre-IPO function once the company goes public. The letter says IPOP does not represent company shares and does not grant voting rights or other shareholder rights; it only provides price exposure. tradeXYZ said it has completed five IPOP markets on Hyperliquid, including Cerebras, SpaceX, SK Hynix and CXMT. The two groups also want the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to clarify how stock-like perpetual contracts should be classified and to set rules on disclosure, listing standards, market manipulation controls, leverage and position limits.

Korean retail investors bought about $4.5 billion of U.S. stocks in July, according to the Korea Securities Depository, with roughly $840 million flowing into SK Hynix’s U.S.-listed ADR. That ADR is trading about 10% above the company’s shares in Korea, while financing balances on the Korean stock market fell from about 37 trillion won at the end of June to about 27 trillion won in early August. Acadian Asset Management executive vice president Owen Lamont said the price gap could be a sign of excessive speculation, even a symptom of a bubble. The shift into U.S. markets has not reduced risk-taking. AI, semiconductors and leveraged products remain the main bets, and four of the 10 most-purchased U.S. stocks in July were leveraged products, led by Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares (SOXL). Analysts said Korean investors may simply be moving high-risk AI trades from the domestic market to the U.S. rather than exiting risk assets altogether. Industry participants also said Korea’s capital base is not large enough to move the broader U.S. market, but concentrated trading could still amplify swings in volatile names such as AI chips, quantum computing and leveraged ETFs.

U.S. stock index futures and a range of AI-linked hardware names moved lower in premarket trading on Aug. 18, with weakness showing up across storage and optical communications stocks. According to BIT (Bit.com) market data, the Nasdaq fell 0.32%, the S&P 500 lost 0.52%, and the Dow slipped 0.51% before the opening bell. Among individual names, SanDisk, Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Micron Technology, and SK Hynix all declined, while Corning, Coherent, Marvell Technology, Lumentum Holdings, and Nokia also traded lower. The move came as markets revisited Anthropic’s reported revenue trajectory. Bloomberg had previously reported that the company’s annualized revenue run rate reached about $65 billion as of the end of July. That figure landed below some third-party data points and optimistic expectations in AI circles that had pointed to more than $80 billion, prompting questions about whether the pace of growth is slowing. Part of the dispute centers on ARR, or annual recurring revenue. ARR annualizes current revenue pace and is not the same as audited full-year revenue. Sacra said Anthropic’s annualized revenue was about $47 billion in May and rose to $65 billion in July, while also noting that revenue from cloud channels including AWS, Google, and Microsoft may be recognized on a gross basis, a factor that can make the revenue scale appear larger and draw more scrutiny to margins and revenue quality.