coverage endedAug 4, 2026, 9:15 PM
Japan may have spent as much as $36.6 billion buying yen in the first joint US-Japan action to support the currency since 1998. Bitget Wallet’s Alvin Kan says it can slow a disorderly slide without reversing the broader trend.
Bitcoin stuck in tight rangeAMD falls 9% despite earnings beat as CapEx costs soar
Chipmaker AMD (AMD) easily topped Street consensus forecasts on both the top and bottom lines, but reported CapEx spending of $808 million against estimates for just shy of $300 million.
Shares are lower by 9.15% in after-hours trading.
Among those down in concert are Intel (INTC), off 1.5%, and Marvel (MRVL), off 1.2%.
Elon Musk's SpaceX tops earnings estimates
SpaceX (SPCX) reported second-quarter loss per share of $0.09, beating estimates for a loss of $0.24.
Revenue of $7.8 billion was ahead of forecasts for $6.9 billion.
The company continues to hold 18,712 bitcoin.
Read more: SpaceX tops Wall Street revenue forecast, posts $540 million loss on bitcoin holdings
Shares are little changed after-hours, but rose 9.4% during the regular session on Tuesday to $125.33.
Helping the shares today was a general market melt-up, with the Nasdaq rising 2.6%. More specifically to SpaceX, the company announced a partnership with Nvidia to design the Starmind space data center.
Nasdaq soars nearly 3% as AI trade comes roaring back
Roughly two hours before the close of trade on Tuesday, stocks are at session highs, led by the Nasdaq’s 2.7% gain. The S&P 500 and DJIA are up just shy of 2%.
Setting off today’s move was a major decline in oil prices, driven by optimism about yet another deal to end the war in the Middle East.
Really, though, the gains are a continuation of the furious rally from what’s looking like an epic bottom hit last week. That denouement of the price collapse of the AI infrastructure trade was enough to blow up Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund and allow Ken Griffin’s Citadel to swoop in and purchase Situational’s positions at a discount.
The V-shaped recovery since has been epic. To pick a few names, CoreWeave (CRWV) — up 9% today — is now higher by 50% from last week’s bottom; SanDisk — up 11% today — is higher by roughly 40%; Micron Technology (MU) — up 8% today — is ahead about 22%.
The remarkable risk rally, though, is not spreading to crypto, where prices remain stuck in a very tight range. Bitcoin (BTC) is about flat over the past 24 hours and the past week at $64,000. Ether (ETH) is also flat over the past 24 hours, and down 1.8% over the past week at $1,873.
Blockstream expands simplicity on liquid with post-quantum transactions and new developer tools
Blockstream has unveiled a series of updates to Simplicity, its smart contract language for the Liquid Network, including the deployment of the first post-quantum-signed transactions on Liquid's mainnet.
Simplicity, which launched on Liquid in October, was designed to bring more expressive smart contracts to Bitcoin's UTXO model while emphasizing security through formal verification.
The latest milestone saw Blockstream Research implement the SHRINCS post-quantum signature scheme as a Simplicity contract. According to the company, the deployment did not require a network-wide consensus upgrade, demonstrating how new cryptographic features can be introduced on Liquid without waiting for a protocol fork.
Blockstream also said it has finalized the contract architecture for its Lending v2 application, providing a template for developers building lending and credit products on Liquid.
The company said it plans to release additional developer tools, including a fuzz testing framework for smart contracts, a standardized wallet interface and human-readable transaction signing designed to make contract interactions easier to verify and understand.
Bernstein eyes AI growth, crypto fees ahead of Galaxy Digital earnings
Galaxy Digital's second-quarter earnings Wednesday may matter more for what management says than what it reports, said Bernstein in a note Tuesday. One key question is whether the company is close to signing a second AI data center customer, reducing its reliance on CoreWeave. Investors also want updates on the new McGregor campus and how future projects will be financed.
On the crypto side, attention is shifting toward recurring fee businesses like Galaxy Curator, prediction markets and tokenization. These businesses could provide steadier revenue that is less tied to bitcoin's price, making Galaxy's earnings more resilient over time if adoption continues to grow.
Bitcoin toxic maximalism has failed, says Trezor co-founder
“Invest your energy in building something, not merely in opposing something,” wrote Pavol Rusnak, co-founder of popular bitcoin wallet Trezor.
Trezor, which through the years has enabled support for cryptos other than bitcoin, was not immune to attacks by the makers of Coldcard and other Bitcoin maxis.
“This … is not about settling personal grievances or revisiting old conflicts,” said Rusnak.
“Everyone who tolerated, rewarded, or participated in this behavior should reflect on the role they played and try to do better next time … Overall, I believe things will improve.”
SpaceX shares rise ahead of first earnings report as a public company
SpaceX (SPCX) is set to report second-quarter results after Tuesday’s market close, its first earnings report as a public company following its record IPO in June.
Analysts expect revenue of $6.93 billion and a loss of $0.26 per share. SpaceX shares are up 4% on Tuesday but remain almost 50% below their June high.
The company also holds 18,712 BTC.
Rate hike odds pared back as oil tumbles 5%
Positive comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about an imminent deal with Iran have sent crude oil lower by 5%, with WTI minutes ago sliding below $76 per barrel for the first time in several weeks.
That price action is affecting bond yields, with the 10-year U.S. Treasury down 4.5 basis points to 4.64% and the 2-year yield off 6 basis points to 4.19%.
The Fed’s next meeting is in September and the odds of a 25-basis-point rate hike — riding at about 70% as recently as one day ago — have slid to just 57%, per CME FedWatch.
Roughly one hour into the trading day, U.S. stocks are near session highs, led by the Nasdaq’s 1.5% advance. Crypto continues to flatline, with bitcoin trading just under $63,700.
S&P 500 reclaims record high as Nasdaq rallies 2%
The S&P 500 hit a record high of 7,644 on Tuesday, rising 0.58% and reclaiming its previous June peak after a 5% correction.
The Nasdaq gained 2% and is now less than 5% below its June all-time high.
Polymarket reportedly aiming for $20 billion valuation in latest funding round
Prediction markets giant Polymarket is in early talks on a roughly $1 billion funding round at a valuation topping $20 billion, according to Bloomberg.
That would be up from $15 billion at its most recent round closed in April, and more than double the $9 billion valuation at an October 2025 round.
Peer Kalshi in May said it closed a funding round valuing the company at $22 billion.
Bitdeer surges 14% on $4.7 billion data center deal with Nvidia-backed Volta
Bitdeer’s (BTDR) Tydal, Norway AI Data Center is expected to be among that country’s largest and most efficient AI data centers upon completion, said the company in a Tuesday press release.
The initial 16-year lease agreement with a subsidiary of Volta is worth $4.7 billion in contracted revenue. An 8-year extension could boost the value to $8 billion.
Nvidia is among the backers of Volta Infra Holdings, an AI infrastructure platform.
BTDR is higher by 14% pre-market.
'Retirement attack': Coldcard may have predicted its own fate five years ago
“Coldcard makes retirement attacks impossible,” said the maker of the ill-fated bitcoin wallet in a tweet in October 2021.
“What’s a retirement attack,” asked a responder.
“It’s when the project makers could have a ‘bug’ in the entropy generation for later retrieval,” responded Coldcard.
As they like to say on social media, “OOF SIZE: Large.”
May have deal to open Strait of Hormuz, says Scott Bessent
Stock futures are adding to gains, oil is sliding, and crypto is just kind of sitting there after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — appearing on CNBC — said a deal could be in place tomorrow to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Nasdaq 100 futures are now higher by 1.1%, and WTI crude oil has slumped 3% to $78 per barrel.
Crypto has picked its head up from overnight lows, but bitcoin for the moment remains in a tight range below $64,000.
ADA futures open interest hits record high
Futures tied to Cardano’s ADA are more popular than ever.
As of this writing, open interest in ADA futures stood at record high of 2.79 billion tokens, according to data source Coinglass. Open interest refers to the number of active or open contracts at a given time.
The token’s spot price rose to 19 cents early Tuesday, the highest since July 4, according to CoinDesk data.
Cipher Digital shares fall 8% as losses overshadow black pearl progress
Cipher Digital (CIFR) shares fell 8% after second-quarter revenue dropped 43% year on year to $24.8 million. The company recorded a $267.5 million net loss, driven partly by a $150.5 million warrant liability revaluation, $66.7 million in interest expense and a $23.5 million realized bitcoin loss. Cipher delivered its first Black Pearl capacity ahead of schedule, secured a 900 MW site option and fully funded its Stingray development through project-level financing.
The yen intervention shows bitcoin now trades as a macro asset
A stronger yen raises the odds of more carry-trade unwinds, and that can shake risk assets including bitcoin, said Eric Swartz, founding general partner at Panther Hollow Ventures told CoinDesk today after Friday's rare US-Japan intervention to prop up the currency.
Bitcoin moving on a central-bank currency operation is a sign it now sits inside the global macro portfolio, priced alongside equities, rates and currencies rather than on its own. Institutional investors increasingly treat it that way, Swartz said, and events like this confirm it.
The near-term read is caution, since a squeezed carry trade can force leveraged positions to cover and drag correlated assets with them. The longer-term read cuts the other way, that integration into the financial system is what a maturing asset looks like, even if it means bitcoin now catches the same macro cross-currents as everything else.
For anyone trading it, Swartz's view is that central-bank policy and capital flows matter as much as anything crypto-native.
Hut 8 revenue jumps 81% as AI data center pipeline expands
Hut 8 (HUT) reported second-quarter revenue of $74.9 million, up 81% year on year, while adjusted EBITDA increased to $10.4 million from $4.2 million. The company posted a net loss of $177.1 million, largely driven by $138.6 million in unrealized digital asset losses.
Its AI infrastructure business now has 949 MW of contracted capacity, representing $26.6 billion in expected base-term contract value and more than $1.75 billion in expected average annual net operating income.
Cathie Wood bought the Coinbase dip a week after trimming other crypto stocks
ARK Invest bought 54,776 Coinbase shares worth about $8 million across three of its ETFs on Monday, adding to the position after the stock slumped more than 14% on last week's earnings.
It also picked up roughly $1.4 million of Circle and sold a small amount of Solmate.
The buy leans against what ARK did a week ago, when the firm added to SpaceX while trimming Robinhood, Block and Bullish (the parent company of CoinDesk), a rotation out of crypto-linked equities. This one runs back into them, at least on the two names that just got cheaper.
Some of it is mechanical. ARK caps any single holding near 10% of a fund and rebalances as prices move, so a sharp drop in Coinbase pulls its weighting down and prompts buying to top it back up. Coinbase is the sixth-largest holding in ARKK at 4.2%, worth about $238 million, behind Tesla, SpaceX, Tempus AI, CRISPR and Shopify.
Bitcoin's average holder is sitting right at breakeven
Under 55% of bitcoin supply is sitting in profit, meaning barely more than half of all coins are worth more than what their holders paid, per Bitfinex. That puts the average holder near breakeven, a reading that shows up at turning points rather than at tops or bottoms.
Recent buyers are the ones underwater. Short-term holder SOPR, which reads above 1 when wallets that bought within the past few months sell at a profit and below 1 when they sell at a loss, sits at 0.9971.
Bitfinex calls this as a pivot, with supply rotating from weaker hands to stronger ones. What the numbers actually establish is narrower, that a market pinned at breakeven has not yet chosen a direction and that the selling so far is orderly.
STH-SOPR is the thing to watch. It has to climb back above 1 and hold there for the rotation Bitfinex describes to be real, and until it does, the case rests on the absence of capitulation rather than on evidence of accumulation.
Bitcoin at $63,600 as rare US-Japan yen action tests carry-trade fears
Bitcoin was little-changed the past 24 hours after Washington and Tokyo intervened together to support the yen, a rare move that revived concerns about the cheap Japanese funding behind leveraged bets across global markets.
Japan and the United States confirmed they bought yen on Friday after the currency weakened to 163.73 per dollar. Bank of Japan data suggest Tokyo may have spent as much as $36.6 billion, while the size of the U.S. contribution has not yet been disclosed.
The yen rebounded to 157.57 on Friday and held near 157 on Monday.
Crypto traders watch the yen because of the carry trade. Investors borrow in Japan, where the policy rate is 1%, and move the money into assets offering higher returns.
A sudden rise in the yen can force those traders to close positions and sell other assets to repay the loans.
That risk did not reach bitcoin immediately. BTC traded near $63,600 on Monday, up about 1.8% over 24 hours and little changed over seven days.
Alvin Kan, chief operating officer at Bitget Wallet, said the intervention is better viewed as a check on disorderly trading than the start of a lasting yen recovery.
The interest-rate gap still favours the dollar, with the Federal Reserve’s benchmark range at 3.50% to 3.75% against the Bank of Japan’s 1%. Without a smaller gap or investors unwinding yen-funded trades on their own, repeated intervention may only slow the currency’s decline.
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The Evolution of the Crypto CEX Landscape: A Case Study on Binance
The Evolution of the Crypto CEX Landscape: A Case Study on Binance
Binance remains crypto’s leading exchange, expanding from spot and derivatives into RWAs, payments, savings, yield, and broader financial services.
Jun 29, 2026
Binance remains crypto’s leading exchange, expanding from spot and derivatives into RWAs, payments, savings, yield, and broader financial services.
Why it matters:
Binance remains crypto’s leading exchange, expanding from spot and derivatives into RWAs, payments, savings, yield, and broader financial services.
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