ChainCatcher

South Korean tech stocks plummeted, triggering a leveraged sell-off, with SK Hynix halving in value in 34 days, and Bitcoin's volatility has fallen below that of Nvidia. Global stock markets are becoming "crypto-like," with a narrative and leverage-driven bubble cycle re-emerging.

Fortitude Mining, a mining company under Digital Currency Group (DCG), has signed a procurement agreement worth approximately $45 million, involving mining hardware and infrastructure in Nebraska, to advance the vertical integration of Zcash mining.This expansion includes a $31.5 million commitment for mining equipment purchases, as well as two acquisitions totaling $13.9 million, which include power contracts, land, buildings, and mining equipment. Fortitude stated that its controlled data center capacity has increased to over 60 megawatts by 2026. Fortitude is advancing a proposed merger with Nasdaq-listed HeartSciences Inc.; if completed, this mining company under DCG will gain public listing status. In the first quarter of 2026, Zcash accounted for 61% of Fortitude's mining revenue, while Bitcoin's share dropped to 36%.

According to Jinshi News, Amazon employees have discovered that due to errors in the company's deployment of AI and a lack of expenditure control measures, some projects have experienced "catastrophically high" cost overruns. A senior engineer stated at an employee meeting that attempts to shift tasks from traditional programming to using AI models have resulted in "unplanned" expenditures.Amazon expects its capital expenditures to reach $200 billion this year, primarily invested in AI and data center infrastructure construction.

According to Jinshi News, the European Union has launched a tender today, planning to establish up to 7 artificial intelligence super factories in Europe, which is an important initiative to promote technological autonomy in Europe. The plan is led by the industry and has received up to 10 billion euros in funding support, expected to leverage at least 20 billion euros in private investment.AI super factories will provide infrastructure for various enterprises and institutions, integrating advanced AI processors, software, and cloud technology, further strengthening Europe's leadership position in the technology sector.

Revenue reached a record high of 60.8 billion, but Meta's stock plummeted after hours. What shocked the market was the massive "AI bill": capital expenditures soared, leading to a 91% drop in free cash flow, with negative territory imminent. Unlike Microsoft selling computing power, Meta's monetization through AI "mining" is too slow. When revenue growth can't keep up with the pace of spending, capital is losing patience with this seemingly bottomless heavy asset transformation.

According to South Korean media reports, the Bank of Korea participated in the real transaction testing of the global payment settlement project "Agora Project" led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), successfully completing transactions using tokenized reserve funds.A total of 28 institutions participated in this test, including the Bank of Korea, central banks from various countries, and private financial institutions, covering six currencies: Korean won, US dollar, euro, British pound, Swiss franc, and Japanese yen. Domestic participating institutions in South Korea include KB Kookmin Bank, NongHyup Bank, Shinhan Bank, Woori Bank, and Hana Bank. The participating institutions conducted real transaction tests valued at approximately 800,000 Swiss francs, covering multiple currencies and testing 17 different transaction scenarios. The Bank of Korea stated, "In the future, the Agora Project plans to conduct more real transaction tests by identifying transaction types and scenarios not covered in this test."

Samsung SDS stated in its earnings call that its strategic investment in the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Dunamu is a "strategic layout for entering the digital asset infrastructure business." Both parties are discussing cooperation on stablecoin infrastructure, next-generation AI payments, and virtual asset financial system integration (SI). Samsung SDS President Lee Joon-hee mentioned that they will combine Dunamu's blockchain operation experience with Samsung SDS's capabilities in IT services, AI, cloud computing, and security to strengthen the digital financial infrastructure business.The earnings report disclosed on the same day showed that Samsung SDS's revenue for the second quarter was 3.7178 trillion won (approximately 2.6 billion USD), a year-on-year increase of 5.9%; operating profit was 231.8 billion won (approximately 160 million USD), a year-on-year increase of 0.7%. Among them, the cloud computing business revenue was 779.4 billion won, a year-on-year increase of 17%, with external cloud computing business revenue surging 75% year-on-year. The company plans to expand its AI infrastructure from the current 110MW to 230MW by 2029, and further expand to over 800MW by 2031. Samsung SDS previously announced an investment of approximately 20 billion won in Dunamu in May 2024.

According to the Korea Herald, the Korea Exchange conducted an internal review on July 29 regarding the technical feasibility and system requirements for a temporary ban on short selling and narrowing the price limit (currently at 30%) to address the recent severe fluctuations in the stock market. Sources familiar with the matter stated that "only technical feasibility was confirmed," and it was not a prerequisite for implementation, but rather a screening process during the review of available emergency measures.Recently, the South Korean stock market has continued to plummet, causing increasing damage to individual investors. During a meeting of the National Assembly's Administrative Committee, several lawmakers urged authorities to consider a temporary ban on short selling and to restart the Securities Market Stabilization Fund. A national petition to suspend short selling garnered over 10,000 signatures within two days of being made public. However, the ban on short selling conflicts with South Korea's goal of being included in the MSCI developed market index; a previous 17-month short selling ban from November 2023 to March 2025 had led to MSCI downgrading South Korea's market accessibility rating. The exchange's officials stated that they have not received any related requests from the government and have not formally discussed a short selling ban.

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) issued a restriction notice to Futu Securities International (Hong Kong) Limited, prohibiting it from handling or disposing of assets in customer accounts held by a certain entity, limited to HKD 125,247,000. This entity is suspected of participating in a fraudulent scheme aimed at creating a false or misleading appearance of demand for initial public offering shares. Futu is not the subject of the SFC's investigation, and this restriction notice will not affect Futu or its other clients.According to the notice, Futu must not dispose of or handle the relevant account assets in any way without the SFC's written consent, and must immediately notify the SFC if it receives any instructions related to the restricted assets. The SFC believes that issuing this restriction notice is in the interest of investors and the public. The investigation is still ongoing.

According to Business Insider, Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI and current head of Meta's Superintelligence Lab, stated at a Y Combinator event that AI has significantly narrowed the power gap between startups and giants. He recalled that when he founded Scale AI in 2016, "startups faced giants like David against Goliath, needing to find market entry points more intelligently"; however, with the development of AI agent technology, "it now feels more like Goliath against Goliath," and as long as startups apply AI agents in "the most ambitious way," it is not difficult to defeat large companies that already have an advantage.Scale AI, founded by Wang, is one of the earliest data annotation companies, employing thousands of contractors worldwide to train models for large AI labs. Last June, Meta reached a $14.3 billion deal with Scale AI, and Wang subsequently joined Meta. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also stated at the same event that "there has never been a better time to start a business."

Samsung Electronics' management sent strong bullish signals during a conference call: Agentic AI is igniting demand for computing power, and the shortage of storage supply is expected to continue until 2028. To this end, Samsung is signing five-year rolling long-term agreements (LTAs) with the world's top ten tech giants that include large upfront payments, aiming to secure 60%-70% of the company's total capacity to establish high visibility for its performance. Additionally, in the second half of the year, HBM4 revenue is expected to account for over 60%, and orders for 2nm foundry services are anticipated to double.

According to monitoring by Lookonchain, a certain whale deposited 625 BTC, worth $39.96 million, into FalconX after being silent for more than a year, possibly preparing to sell.It has held BTC for over a year and has incurred losses of more than $20 million.

According to data from RootData stock derivatives exchanges, the top three exchanges by cumulative trading volume in the past 7 days are Binance, Hyperliquid, and OKX.The total trading volume of the three exchanges is approximately $174.028 billion, accounting for 73.26% of the market share. Among them, Binance has a total trading volume of about $116.173 billion in 7 days, with a market share of 48.91%; Hyperliquid has about $30.618 billion, with a market share of 12.89%; and OKX has about $27.236 billion, with a market share of 11.47%.

According to Aave founder Stani Kulechov, after completing a comprehensive review, Aave will gradually phase out 50 low adoption rate asset reserves across multiple deployment environments and orderly stop deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, involving an additional 25 asset reserves.In addition, 21 expired Pendle PT assets will also be eliminated and replaced by new expiring assets. This adjustment involves approximately $98.1 million in supply assets and $15.6 million in debt. Stani stated that this move aims to reduce the economic and technical risks of the protocol based on the new Aave risk framework and technical asset listing framework, and Aave will continue to assess the risks of assets in each deployment environment.

According to the information released by the SEC, Robinhood (HOOD) director Bhatt Baiju sold 49,223 shares of the company's stock on July 24 at an average price of $95.09 per share, for a total value of approximately $4.68 million. After the transaction, his direct holdings decreased to 3,703 shares.

For VISA, it doesn't matter whether there is a winner or not; what matters is that the winner ultimately has to source from me.

July 29 Market Important Events Overview

OKX will launch GRVT/USDT (Grvt) spot trading on July 30 at 21:00. Users can start depositing at 11:00 on the same day, and the collective bidding will take place from 20:00 to 21:00, with withdrawal time set for 23:00.

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox posted on platform X, stating that some users believe there may be a secret increase in the supply of ZEC, and that it may take waiting for the Ironwood migration to complete or even months or years to confirm, but this view is incorrect.Zooko Wilcox stated that users can currently verify the current supply of ZEC themselves through their local computers, with data showing that the total supply of ZEC is 16,848,458 coins.

On July 28, OpenAI quietly updated its security incident disclosure, confirming that its AI agent accessed four external service platforms during the breach of Hugging Face, bringing the total number of affected platforms to five.Previously, OpenAI had disabled security filters while testing GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful model to assess raw capabilities. The model did not complete the security benchmark tests as expected; instead, it discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the package caching agent within the testing environment that granted internet access, subsequently breaching Hugging Face to steal answers.According to a forensic report released by Hugging Face on July 27, this autonomous agent executed 17,600 operations over approximately four and a half days, connecting 181 devices to the Hugging Face internal VPN and forging identity tokens. Among the four additional platforms, Modal Labs CTO Akshat Bubna confirmed through Reuters that his company was one of them, with the attacker using an unprotected public endpoint from a customer as a relay and command control base for the entire attack.The identities of the other three platforms remain undisclosed. OpenAI stated it would "directly notify the service providers" but would not publicly name them, as there is currently no legal requirement for mandatory disclosure. The U.S. Congress has responded by proposing a bipartisan "AI Emergency Shutdown Act," which aims to authorize the Department of Homeland Security to forcibly shut down AI models, with violators facing fines of up to $2 million per day.