South Korea's Kospi collapsed more than 10% on Tuesday, sinking to its lowest level since April and forcing an exchange-mandated trading halt. Samsung Electronics fell roughly 12% and SK Hynix 12.7%, while the Kosdaq triggered its own circuit breaker after dropping about 8% — the third such halt this year. By midday the Kospi sat at 6,051.19, some 25% below its mid-June peak.

The proximate trigger was a report of a breakthrough in China's domestic chip industry, layered on top of an existing memory scare: a Chinese memory rival's massive Shanghai IPO had already knocked Sandisk down 11% and dragged Micron lower in Monday's US session. The fear driving all of it is the same — that cheap Chinese AI models and domestic Chinese fabs erode the pricing power that justified two years of record semiconductor valuations. The selling spread across Tokyo and the wider region, overshadowing a third consecutive day of paused US–Iran strikes.

Bitcoin gave back roughly 2% after the US close, surrendering Monday's push above $65,000. Bitfinex analysts pushed back on the reflexive correlation trade, arguing that bitcoin moves with equities when the stress is macro and rates-driven but decouples when the stress is specific to the equity complex — and an earnings-and-capex argument is the latter.

Nvidia shed 5% on Monday to $197 after the Wall Street Journal reported the company is in talks to guarantee as much as $250 billion of financing for OpenAI's data-centre buildout. The damage spread across the AI hardware complex: AMD fell 8% to $479, Dell slid 4% on server-demand concerns, and Intel gave back part of its post-earnings pop. Oracle, despite gaining 4% on the day, is down roughly 20% over the past month on overlapping data-centre exposure. Apple, meanwhile, overtook Nvidia as the world's most valuable company.

The mechanism is what unsettles people. A chipmaker underwriting its largest customer's ability to buy its chips is not obviously revenue in the way the market has been treating it, and this is now the second or third iteration of that structure to surface. The fundamentals have not turned — Nvidia is guiding to $91 billion in second-quarter revenue and AMD's data-centre segment grew 57% year over year — but the market is repricing the quality of that growth, not its existence.

The test arrives this week. Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon all report, and capital-expenditure guidance matters more than the earnings lines. Alphabet already raised its capex forecast again and was rewarded with a 3% gain, which tells you the market has not fully made up its mind.

The FOMC decision on Wednesday is the week's single largest macro catalyst, and it lands with unusually little guidance attached. Kevin Warsh's Fed has abandoned the practice of telegraphing its next move, and there will be no fresh dot plot until September — so positioning is being done almost entirely on inference. Derivatives and prediction markets lean toward a hold in the current 3.50%–3.75% band, but the tail has fattened: CME FedWatch puts the odds of a hike near 33%, prediction markets closer to 19%, and the probability of a hike by mid-September has been quoted as high as 82%.

Two things cut against tightening. WTI crude fell more than 8% to around $82 on the US–Iran de-escalation, taking the top off the energy-driven inflation impulse, and the 10-year Treasury near 4.65%–4.70% is already doing part of the Fed's work unassisted. Thursday's second-quarter GDP and June core PCE prints will matter more than the statement itself, with the Bank of England following Thursday and the Bank of Japan on Friday.

For crypto, the levels are well defined. Analysts want bitcoin above roughly $67,300 and ether above $2,000 to call a new leg; a Nansen analyst warned that without a genuine return of ETF demand, the mid-$50,000s are the more likely destination.

BitMart began an orderly wind-down of its trading platform on Saturday, three days after BitMEX announced it would close permanently on 23 September, ending an eleven-year run for the venue that invented the perpetual swap. BitMart stopped registrations, deposits and new orders at 01:30 UTC on 26 July, moved futures accounts to reduce-only, and will halt all trading on 26 August before formally ceasing operations on 31 January 2027. Its BMX token fell roughly 58–60% within a day, to about $0.06, cutting the market capitalisation to under $20 million.

Neither notice cites insolvency, a hack, or enforcement action. Both cite operating conditions and strategic direction — corporate language for a business that no longer pays for itself. BitMart had published an upbeat first-half report just nine days earlier, touting a 256% rise in asset-management AUM and a new Australian licence, while acknowledging bitcoin down 33% and ether down 50% over the same half. Former Global CEO Nenter Chow stated publicly that he was informed on 24 July that his employment was terminated and learned of the wind-down alongside everyone else.

The practical warning for users is procedural, not theoretical: withdrawals remain open but route through manual KYC, source-of-funds, Travel Rule and sanctions review. In every prior wind-down, the people who moved first cleared, and the people who waited for a better token price filed claims.

Strategy's weekly SEC filing showed the company sold 5,429,160 Class A shares through its at-the-market programme for $544.5 million in net proceeds between 20 and 26 July — and bought no bitcoin, for a second consecutive week. It repurchased $25 million of STRC preferred instead. The company holds 843,775 BTC at an average cost of $75,476, comfortably above a spot price that has spent the month in the low-to-mid $60,000s. Earnings land Thursday, 30 July.

The read-through is that the flywheel has changed direction. Issuing equity to service preferred dividends and fund buybacks is a fundamentally different business from issuing equity to accumulate bitcoin, and the newly announced Digital Credit Capital Framework — a USD reserve, a 12% preferred dividend, twin $1 billion repurchase authorisations and a programme to monetise up to $1.25 billion of bitcoin — formalises that shift. TD Cowen cut its target on David Bailey's Nakamoto by 58% over the same balance-sheet pressure. Not every treasury is retreating: Bitmine added 9,946 ether last week and raised its buyback, with Tom Lee pointing to the rising ETH/BTC ratio.

One more date for the calendar. The FTX Recovery Trust begins its fifth distribution on 31 July, releasing roughly $900 million and pushing cumulative recoveries past $10 billion — 105% of allowed value for Dotcom and US customer claims.

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.