Senate Shelves CLARITY, Kospi Cracks 10%, Bitcoin Takes the Hint and Nosedives 2% 📉

Bitcoin fell roughly 2.7% to about $63,200 after the U.S. market close Monday, extending losses across major cryptocurrencies as South Korea's Kospi index plunged 10% to its lowest level since mid-April, one of its worst single-day declines in years. BTC, last quoted at $63,566.12, declined from nearly $65,000, dragging down ether (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL) and other tokens. The slide ended a brief spell of resilience earlier in the session that had followed losses for NVDA on Wall Street.

The Kospi's drop, which now puts the benchmark 25% below its mid-June peak, featured steep losses in chipmaking heavyweights Samsung and SK Hynix. InvestingLive noted, "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." South Korea's index tripped a circuit breaker at the open and was down more than 8% at one point, according to separate reporting that put the decline at 11% intraday and cited over $670 million in crypto liquidations over 24 hours, $533 million of them longs. AI and layer-1 tokens including FET, NEAR and HYPE lost as much as 10% over 24 hours. Oil fell 2%, gold slid 1%, and Nasdaq 100 futures turned red, weighed by memory-stock weakness, with Dow futures up 0.7%.

On the regulatory front, the U.S. Senate shelved the CLARITY Act to prioritize a Russia sanctions bill and federal nominations, leaving just two weeks of floor time before the Aug. 8 recess and rendering the bill's fate this year genuinely uncertain. A key unresolved dispute over restrictions on government officials' crypto holdings remains on the table. Ether last traded at $1,880, down 0.56% on the day after failing to reclaim the $2,000 level on Monday.

Analysts at Bitfinex said in a note that bitcoin's link to equities is conditional rather than constant: "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." Derivatives positioning has turned cautious; taker long/short volume in futures flipped to 51.5% shorts, a turnaround from recent bullish bias, while XRP open interest rose nearly 6% to 2.35 billion tokens and SHIB, AVAX, LINK and DOGE futures saw declines in open interest.

Attention now turns to the Federal Reserve's interest-rate decision Wednesday, with Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference due July 29, followed by Core PCE and GDP data Thursday. Markets widely expect a rate hold at 3.50–3.75%, though the June episode in which rate-hike odds briefly hit 70% and 2-year Treasury yields jumped 16 basis points has left traders leaning toward deleveraging rather than holding through the event.