Bitcoin Logs a 2.7% Tuesday Tantrum While Kospi's 10% Plunge Steals the Show 🇰🇷

Bitcoin fell about 2.7 percent to roughly $63,200 in the hours after the U.S. close on Monday, extending losses across major cryptocurrencies as Asian equities, led by South Korea's Kospi, sold off sharply. The decline dragged down ether ($ETH), XRP ($XRP), and solana ($SOL) and ended a brief period of resilience that had followed heavy losses for NVDA on Wall Street earlier in the session. As of the most recent reference price, BTC was changing hands at $63,566.12.

The U.S. Senate has delayed action on the CLARITY Act to focus on a Russia sanctions bill, effectively pushing any vote on the crypto regulatory package to next week, ahead of the Aug. 8 recess. The legislation, widely seen as a potential catalyst for institutional buying of digital assets, now has a narrower legislative window.

South Korea's Kospi index fell 10 percent to its lowest level since mid-April, bringing its drop from a mid-June peak to roughly 25 percent. Heavyweights Samsung and SK Hynix led the declines. "The market is falling out of love with chipmakers at the moment and that's been a big driver of the bull market in South Korea," InvestingLive wrote.

Analysts at Bitfinex argued that bitcoin's correlation with equities is more nuanced than commonly portrayed. "BTC trades with equities when the stress is macro and [interest] rates-driven, and decouples when the stress is idiosyncratic to the equity market. An earnings-and-capital-expenditure debate is precisely that, so on this data the correlation is overstated," the firm said in a note shared with CoinDesk.

Market participants are now focused on the Federal Reserve's interest-rate decision on Wednesday, followed by Core PCE and GDP data on Thursday, a combination expected to inject volatility across asset classes into the end of the week.