Korea's Kospi Takes a 10% Beating While Bitcoin Mostly Shrugs

Bitcoin traded near $64,100 on Thursday, virtually unchanged on the day at roughly $64,531.93, while ether held around $1,905 and XRP stayed at $1.07 as a brutal selloff in Asian semiconductor stocks showed its first signs of easing after two of the steepest trading sessions in years. South Korea's Kospi index swung between a 6% gain and a 2% loss before settling, after a stretch that took the benchmark down more than 40% from its June peak and triggered circuit breakers earlier in the week.

The turbulence in equities began Monday after the U.S. close, when bitcoin slipped 2.7% to roughly $63,200 from near $65,000, dragging ether (ETH), XRP, solana (SOL) and other majors lower; over $670 million in crypto positions were liquidated in 24 hours during the initial rout, including $533 million from longs, as oil fell 2% and gold slid 1%. SK Hynix led the decline with a 17% drop on Wednesday after reporting a 557% surge in quarterly profit that still missed estimates, while Samsung slid 12% the same day before its Thursday update, in which it said chip profit rose more than 250-fold on AI memory shortages and saw its shares move only 2%. "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.

U.S. earnings split overnight, with Microsoft gaining nearly 9% in extended trading on its fastest cloud growth in four years and Meta falling 8% on a weak revenue forecast, as Nasdaq 100 futures rose 1% after the index entered a technical correction on Wednesday. The Federal Reserve held rates steady on Wednesday at 3.50–3.75% in a decision that drew three dissents in favor of an increase, prompting Rabobank to note that rate-hike speculation will resurge in the coming weeks; about $286 million in positions were liquidated in 24 hours, with longs accounting for $186 million and shorts $100 million.

Hours after the FOMC decision, Iran launched multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. troops that were intercepted, prompting President Donald Trump to vow to hit Iran "hard," and oil surged 8% overnight, erasing Monday's declines and sending the Dow down 2.2% to a three-month low. On the regulatory front, the U.S. Senate shelved the Crypto Clarity Act to prioritize a Russia sanctions bill and federal nominations, leaving only two weeks of floor time before the Aug. 8 recess and casting uncertainty over a closely watched dispute over restrictions on government officials' crypto holdings. "BTC trades with equities when the stress is macro and [interest] rates-driven, and decouples when the stress is idiosyncratic to the equity market," analysts at Bitfinex said in a note.

Derivatives positioning turned defensive, with taker long/short volume in futures flipping to 51.5% shorts, the first bearish skew in at least three weeks, while open interest held steady at roughly 750,000 BTC and XRP futures open interest rose nearly 6% to 2.35 billion tokens. Weekly performance across majors shows the damage was modest, with HYPE down 8%, XRP off 6%, solana 5%, dogecoin 4% to $0.07 and bitcoin 3%, while BNB eked out a small gain, volumes of about $28 billion in bitcoin and $10 billion in ether underscoring the thin liquidity that defined the session.