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South Korean police arrested three suspects behind a fake XRP staking scheme that defrauded 71 investors, with criminal proceeds reaching roughly $19 million.
The case shows why the country’s intense retail trading culture attracts increasingly sophisticated crypto fraud.
How the Fake XRP Staking Scheme Worked
Staking involves locking cryptocurrency to secure a network in exchange for rewards. The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced Thursday that its cyber unit dismantled an operation exploiting that concept.
Officers charged them with aggravated fraud and violating the Similar Reception Act. Two were taken into custody. The scheme began in October last year. The suspects launched a site branded around FXRP networks, promising monthly returns of 1.5% to 1.8% for staking XRP.
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🇰🇷👮‍♂️ La police de Séoul a démantelé une plateforme frauduleuse de staking XRP ayant détourné près de 19 millions de dollars.Selon les autorités sud-coréennes, trois personnes ont été arrêtées après avoir escroqué 71 victimes, en leur dérobant environ 3,4 millions de XRP, soit… pic.twitter.com/Xceb19aBnk
— Goku 🗞 (@Crypto__Goku) July 30, 2026
Those numbers far exceeded what genuine staking services pay. Investigators believe the figures targeted yield-hungry retail investors. The fraud drew power from its timing. Flare Network is a genuine blockchain, and FXRP is a real XRP-linked asset issued by it.
The suspects hijacked those names as the real token launched. Their fake platform mimicked a legitimate service, then vanished within a month. Victims transferred roughly 3.4 million XRP, worth about $8.6 million. Police later determined that the total proceeds neared $19 million.
How Did Police Track the Stolen XRP
Promotion spanned many platforms. The group used Naver blogs, forums, Tistory, articles, Wikipedia entries, and YouTube channels.
According to the authorities, Wikipedia carried a damaging falsehood. Entries claimed FXRP staking could only be accessed through Binance, steering victims toward the fraudulent process. YouTube channels impersonated industry figures. Accounts posing as Upbit developers and Ripple insiders used paid actors to explain remittance methods.
That routing served a purpose. Victims moved XRP via domestic exchanges and overseas platforms before it reached the suspects’ wallets. The detour circumvented South Korea’s Travel Rule, which requires exchanges to verify sender and recipient details on larger transfers.
Fake XRP Staking Scheme Stole $19 Million From 71 Investors in South Korea. Source: mk.co.kr
Police opened their investigation last October after overseas exchanges flagged complaints. Blockchain tracing followed the money across platforms. Speed proved critical. Within three days, authorities froze roughly $12.1 million abroad.
An Interpol red notice targets the main suspect, who remains abroad. Investigators also pursue accomplices who promoted the site.
Why South Korea Attracts These Schemes
South Korea has long been a global stronghold for XRP. Unlike Western markets dominated by Bitcoin, Korean retail traders consistently push XRP atop volume rankings.
Analyst Xaif Crypto reports XRP trading at nearly 4x Bitcoin’s volume across leading Korean platforms. On Upbit, turnover recently reached around $86 million.
South Korea is trading XRP at nearly 4x the volume of Bitcoin right now. 🇰🇷Korean retail is out here proving XRP conviction runs different. 👀 https://t.co/80KEu7MPtf pic.twitter.com/SLU0LOLGn9
— Xaif Crypto (@Xaif_Crypto) July 29, 2026
That figure reflects how actively the asset changes hands, not how many hold it. Intense participation and deep liquidity create the conditions fraudsters exploit. Local appetite survived turbulence elsewhere. The Kobeissi Letter reported that Korean equities tumbled 44% over 40 days, erasing nearly $2 trillion in market value.
Officials urge caution as similar schemes multiply. Verify staking claims independently, distrust guaranteed monthly returns, and report suspicious platforms immediately.
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Anthropic disclosed 3 incidents in which its Claude models gained unauthorized access to the real systems of 3 different organizations during cybersecurity evaluations that were misconfigured with live internet access.
The AI firm identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs, a check it launched after OpenAI revealed its models had escaped an isolated test environment and reached Hugging Face.
How Claude Reached Real Systems in Capture-the-Flag Tests
The evaluations tasked Claude with capture-the-flag challenges. These exercises ask a model to break into a machine and retrieve hidden information.
Anthropic told the models they had no internet access. However, a misconfiguration left the test machines connected to the open web. Thus, Claude treated the real systems it found as part of the exercise.
In the most serious incident, Claude Opus 4.7 exploited vulnerabilities in a real company’s infrastructure. The model extracted application and infrastructure credentials and accessed several hundred rows of production data.
“In all four of the runs, the model eventually recognized (as can be observed in its verbalized reasoning) that the system was real—in two cases, the model rationalized that the real company must be part of the exercise. However, none stopped the attack on that basis,” Anthropic said.
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Claude Mythos 5 Uploaded Malware to PyPI
In another incident, Claude Mythos 5 published a booby-trapped Python package to PyPI, the public software registry. The package stayed live for roughly 1 hour and ran on 15 real systems.
One was a security company’s scanner, which executed the hidden code. Claude then exfiltrated that company’s credentials and accessed further infrastructure. The model’s own reasoning flagged the risk early on before it convinced itself that the environment was simulated.
“Claude went to extensive lengths to carry out this attack—lengths that would likely have indicated to a human participant that this was no longer just an evaluation, and that they were in fact uploading a real PyPI package,” the team added.
A third incident involved an internal research model that scanned roughly 9,000 targets and compromised one company’s application via SQL injection. That model stopped its attack once it concluded the target was real.
Anthropic notified the affected organizations on July 27 and said it is in talks with evaluator METR for a third-party review. The firm argues the episodes reflect an operational failure rather than a model alignment failure, noting its standard consumer safeguards would have blocked the behavior.
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CXMT Corp (688825) jumped 8.95% on Friday to close at 57.60 yuan (about $8.51), extending its rally through a fifth trading day on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
The Chinese memory chipmaker has grown continuously in the few days since its record initial public offering (IPO) last week, pushing its market capitalization to roughly 3.54 trillion yuan, or about $523 billion.
Why CXMT Keeps Climbing
CXMT, short for ChangXin Memory Technologies, listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on July 27. Shares surged as much as 466% on opening day. The move briefly pushed CXMT past Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to become mainland China’s most valuable listed company.
In its few days since IPO, CXMT has seen upward growth. Image Source: Trading View
The IPO raised 57.92 billion yuan, or about $8.6 billion. CXMT plans to use the funds to expand production and close the technology gap with foreign rivals.
Two forces are driving investor demand. Beijing wants chip self-sufficiency as Washington restricts China’s access to advanced semiconductor equipment.
At the same time, a global shortage of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the chips that let devices and AI models store and process data, has manufacturers redirecting supply toward AI data centers.
What CXMT Actually Makes
CXMT was founded in 2016 and is based in Hefei. The company holds roughly 7.7% of the global DRAM market, making it the world’s fourth-largest producer. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology control the other 90% between them.
CXMT mainly builds mainstream memory chips for phones, laptops, and servers. It still trails rivals in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the advanced chip type that feeds AI data centers directly. Counterpoint Research director MS Hwang said CXMT aims to start supplying HBM within China by 2027.
Dell, HP, and Apple have reportedly started testing CXMT’s chips as they look to diversify away from Korean and American suppliers. Price is the main draw. But the deal carries risk.
The Pentagon has added CXMT to a list of firms it links to the Chinese military, a designation the company denies. Apple is separately lobbying Washington for clearance to use Chinese-made memory.
CXMT’s rise lands amid what industry watchers call “RAMageddon,” a consumer device memory squeeze that has already boosted Apple’s smartphone pricing power and rattled chip stocks from Seoul to Wall Street.
Analysts remain split on how much relief CXMT can deliver. That means any pricing benefit for everyday devices probably won’t arrive soon, even as the AI chip race keeps accelerating.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup generated $20 billion in prediction market volume, with the US and China contributing the largest country-level flows, according to new Chainalysis research published Thursday.
More than 400,000 wallets placed on-chain bets on the tournament. World Cup markets accounted for roughly 63% of all prediction market activity during the event.
World Cup Betting Volumes Peaked at the Final
Chainalysis tracked World Cup betting from January 2026. Markets were already producing nearly $50 million in daily volume months before kickoff. Daily activity jumped to around $250 million once the tournament opened on June 11.
The final, in which Spain defeated Argentina, drove over $300 million in wagers. Novelty markets also attracted heavy flows. A single market asked whether Cristiano Ronaldo would cry after his last campaign, generating $49 million.
Bettors fared unusually well. Chainalysis found 55% of participants ended the tournament in profit, and 79% of those winners were experienced prediction market users.
The report mapped tournament betting flows by country between June 11 and July 19. The heatmap shows that the US and China generated the highest attributable volumes worldwide.
Canada, Thailand, and the UK also ranked among the top contributors. Australia, Brazil, Russia, and India also saw heavy activity, while much of Africa showed little or no attributable volume.
Prediction Market Volume by Country. Source: Chainalysis
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Sanctioned Exchange Funds Reached Betting Wallets
Not all the money was “clean.” Chainalysis identified roughly 3,700 wallets, under 1% of bettors, with illicit transaction histories.
The largest single source was Huobi/HTX, which sent at least $5.4 million into World Cup betting wallets. The UK sanctioned the exchange in May over alleged Russian sanctions evasion, and the EU followed in July. Scam-linked wallets added around $2 million.
Meanwhile, FIFA’s own on-chain experiment stayed largely clean. Chainalysis identified a key FIFA Collect wallet on Avalanche that received $24 million from NFT collectors between May 2025 and the tournament’s end.
The firm said that strict identity checks may explain the negligible level of illicit exposure. On-chain flows indicate FIFA collected at least $6 million from secondary sales.
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The ETH/BTC ratio briefly topped 0.030 this week, its highest level in three months. However, Bitcoin (BTC) dominance climbed at the same time instead of falling.
That combination points to capital concentrating in the market’s two biggest assets, not spreading into the wider altcoin field.
Two Winners, Not a Broad Rally
Bitcoin’s dominance sits near 58.7%, and it gained ground over the past day, but in general, it has been relatively steady. At the same time, Ethereum’s (ETH) share climbed to 10.5%. The category tracking everything else, thousands of smaller tokens outside the top two, has been on a slide and dropped to 30.8%.
Bitcoin’s dominance is still strong and improving slowly, with Ethereum gaining ground but other altcoins slipping. Image Source: CoinMarketCap The Rest of the Market Keeps Shrinking
This squeeze isn’t new. Altcoin sell pressure outside Bitcoin and Ethereum ran for 15 straight months through mid-June. BitMine chairman Tom Lee still calls the ETH/BTC move a bullish signal for crypto overall:
“We view the rising ETH/BTC ratio, despite the falling odds of passage of the Clarity Act in 2026, as a sign crypto prices are strengthening.” — Lee
That read centers on ETH specifically. It says little about the median token, and the Ethereum whale accumulation driving the rally has focused on ETH, not smaller altcoins.
Not Just a Bounce
The ETH/BTC ratio sits at 0.02963, up 10.52% over the past month; however, the pair is still down 4.85% over six months and 12.60% year to date. This indicates how low Ethereum was relative to Bitcoin and how far it has to climb.
While still down substantially over the past 5 years, there are signs of ETH increasing in value against BTC. Image Source: Trading View
Institutional buying backs the move up. BitMine and Arthur Hayes have kept adding ETH through a month when spot ETH ETFs pulled in fresh inflows while Bitcoin funds saw redemptions. Treasuries and funds don’t typically chase a single green candle. Their buying suggests they expect the move to last.
Whether the ratio holds here or slides back toward its lows will show whether this is a genuine reversal or just a bounce inside Bitcoin’s grip on the market.

On-chain analytics platform Lookonchain tracked a whale that turned a multi-million-dollar loss into a $6.44 million profit in the days leading up to and following the Korean chipmaker’s earnings.
SK Hynix’s stock had been facing a prolonged and substantial downturn as appetite cooled for AI infrastructure companies. However, an impressive earnings result turned things around quickly.
A Rocky Three-Day Trade
Wallet 0xC8b5 opened a 3x leveraged long on 37,229 units of SKHX on July 29. SKHX is a Hyperliquid perpetual contract that tracks SK Hynix’s share price rather than the stock itself. The $37.3 million position briefly showed a $778,000 gain, per Lookonchain.
Thanks to the strong rebound in $SKHX, whale 0xC8b5 has turned a loss into a profit.The whale's 37,229 $SKHX ($43M) position is now up more than $6.44M, fully recovering all previous losses.https://t.co/oyXYWnWKNm pic.twitter.com/NSupYkSeGH
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 31, 2026
That gain evaporated fast. A day later, the position’s value fell to $34.28 million. The wallet then faced a $2.26 million unrealized loss, according to a follow-up post. Lookonchain noted the trader had lost more than $1 million on each of the previous three trades. That pattern pointed to another costly bet.
Despite the impressive spike, SK Hynix is still down by nearly 15% over the past 5 days. Image Source: Trading View
The reversal came just as fast. The position’s value climbed to roughly $43 million. The whale now sits on a $6.44 million profit, fully recovering its earlier losses.
Why the Swing Was So Violent
SK Hynix posted record Q2 operating profit on July 29. Surging demand for its HBM4 memory chips drove the results. Yet the stock initially whipsawed lower. Investors weighed South Korea’s broader market selloff and lingering doubts about AI infrastructure spending.
That reversed on July 31. SK Hynix shares surged as much as 28.59% to ₩1,700,000 on the Korea Exchange. It marked their sharpest single-day move in years.
Strong earnings from Amazon and Microsoft sparked a broader AI-stock rally. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won added momentum with a rare direct share purchase.
The episode follows a separate $57 million liquidation event on the same SKHX market days earlier. That event underscored how thin the margin for error has become. Leveraged bets that track SK Hynix’s earnings swings now carry real risk.

The Bank of Japan is set to hold its policy rate at 1% on Friday. Confirmed currency intervention sent the Japanese Yen (JPY) surging against the US Dollar (USD) before partly reversing.
A market source told Reuters that Japan carried out yen-buying, dollar-selling intervention overnight. The move pulled the currency off a 40-year low in its biggest single-day jump since January 2023.
A Yen Rally Already Fading
USD/JPY tumbled from above 163 to below 158 on Thursday. The pair then climbed back to 160.175 in early Friday trading as the intervention effect began to fade.
Still, the reversal shows how quickly currency moves can unwind without follow-through signals from the central bank itself.
The Yen suddenly strengthened against the USD, but that strength is quickly being erased.. Image Source: Trading View
Rodrigo Catril, senior FX strategist at National Australia Bank, said the timing suited Japan’s weaker dollar and calmer risk sentiment.
“If you want to kind of intervene, it’s probably quite a good time.”
Rodrigo Catril, National Australia Bank
The Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to 1% in June, the highest level in 31 years. Analysts expect Friday’s meeting to hold that rate while striking a hawkish tone. A Reuters poll points to another hike, to 1.25%, by year-end.
The Fed’s Hold Adds Pressure
The Federal Reserve also held rates steady Wednesday, its fifth straight pause. Traders questioned the central bank’s resolve on inflation, weakening the dollar broadly. That adds pressure on Kazuo Ueda, the Governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), to sound convincingly hawkish.
The US Dollar Index (DXY) fell 0.7% in the previous session, Reuters reported. The index was on pace for a 1.5% weekly drop.
That broader dollar weakness narrows the gap between the Fed’s benchmark rate and the BoJ’s 1% level. Traders use that spread to fund the yen carry trade, borrowing cheap yen to buy higher-yielding dollar assets.
The strategy only works if the rate gap holds and the yen doesn’t strengthen too quickly. A narrower gap or a stronger yen could unwind those trades fast, adding another reason to watch Ueda’s tone closely.

Bitcoin miner IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN), another company that has pivoted to AI infrastructure, jumped 30% on July 30, clawing back losses from a broader sell-off in AI infrastructure stocks.
Co-CEO Daniel Roberts told investors that customer demand for IREN’s computing capacity outstrips what the company can build right now.
CEO Points to Contracted Revenue, Not the Stock Price
Rather than address the recent volatility directly, Roberts used a post on X to redirect attention to the business itself. He said signed contracts already cover 85% of IREN’s $4 billion-plus 2026 annualized revenue run-rate target. Construction crews are actively working the company’s sites right now, he added.
“What we know today: demand for our capacity exceeds everything we can build, 85% of our $4bn+ 2026 target is signed, and there are thousands of people on our sites right now pouring concrete and racking GPUs. We’ve been through way worse than this. Back to it.”— Daniel Roberts, Co-CEO, IREN
8 years ago Will and I started accumulating powered land because we thought compute would eat the world. Some weeks the market agrees with us more than others.What we know today: demand for our capacity exceeds everything we can build, 85% of our $4bn+ 2026 target is signed,…
— Daniel Roberts (@danroberts0101) July 30, 2026
Prepayments Ease Funding Concerns
The rally builds on $2.8 billion in AI cloud contracts IREN signed earlier in July with Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, and Figure AI. Several of the newer multi-year deals include customer prepayments. These payments cover roughly 45% of the related GPU capital costs, easing investor worry over how IREN funds its buildout.
IREN’s stock had fallen more than 30% over the prior month, alongside peers like TeraWulf and Applied Digital. The drop reflected a wider correction across bitcoin miner stocks pivoting toward AI hosting.
Trading volume on the rebound hit nearly 73 million shares, well above IREN’s roughly 53 million average, consistent with a short-covering squeeze layered on top of the fundamental news.
Despite the massive single-day jump, IREN is still down over the past 5 days. Image Source: Trading View
Whether the rebound holds may depend on how IREN’s contracted revenue converts into cash flow as its 1.2 gigawatt 2027 capacity target approaches.

South Korea’s KOSPI index surged by double digits on Friday morning. The rebound follows back-to-back circuit breakers on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as sharp monthly losses.
Stronger-than-expected cloud results from Microsoft and Amazon revived confidence in AI spending, sparking a chip rally across Seoul and Tokyo.
KOSPI Rebound Triggers Buy-Side Sidecar in Seoul
According to Google Finance, KOSPI stood at 6,440.14, up 15.13% at press time. The index gained 846.58 points from Thursday’s close of 5,593.56 by 10:30 a.m. local time.
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KOSPI Index Performance. Source: Google Finance
A buy-side sidecar was triggered at 9:06 a.m., suspending program trading for five minutes. The KOSDAQ saw a similar curb after touching an intraday high of 693.81. At press time, it was up by 8.91%.
The rally was carried by index heavyweights. SK Hynix jumped 27.69% to 1,688,000 won, while Samsung Electronics climbed 21.74% to 252,000 won.
The bounce comes after days of turmoil. Circuit breakers halted both markets on July 28 and 29, forcing an emergency government meeting after 864.5 trillion won evaporated in two sessions.
Before this session, July ranked as the market’s worst crash ever, with the KOSPI down over 33% for the month.
US Cloud Earnings Reignite the AI Trade
The catalyst came from Wall Street overnight. Microsoft rallied 16% Thursday after Azure growth beat forecasts, and Amazon jumped over 9% in extended trading on stronger-than-expected second-quarter revenue.
The Nasdaq climbed 2.78%, and the S&P 500 added 1.66%. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia semiconductor index soared 8.2%, and the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) gained more than 8%.
The rally spilled into Tokyo. Advantest surged 17.92%, and Tokyo Electron climbed 9.67%. SoftBank Group rose 15.12%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 5.35%, and the broader Topix gained 2.32%.
Whether the rebound holds is the next test. Even after Friday’s surge, the KOSPI trades roughly 31% below its June record of 9,385.59.
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Starbucks stock is climbing back toward triple digits, and Jim Cramer says it won’t stop there. The coffee chain beat Wall Street on nearly every line this week.
In a week of major earnings calls, Starbucks has not only performed, but also shown delivery on a promise of a turnaround in the coffee chain’s fortunes, promised by CEO Brian Niccol.
Starbucks Beats Across the Board
Starbucks earned an adjusted $0.85 per share in its fiscal third quarter. That’s up 70% year over year and well ahead of estimates. Revenue held at $9.3 billion. Global comparable-store sales grew 7.9%, the fourth straight quarter of gains.
Operating margin expanded 430 basis points to 14.4%. North America’s margin grew for the first time since early fiscal 2024. That held even after stripping out the tariff refunds that boosted the headline numbers.
Shares jumped more than 3% Thursday to roughly $107. That puts Starbucks up about 26% year to date. The stock now sits near the 52-week closing high of $108.37, set on July 16. It has not closed above $110 since January 2025.
Starbucks has been on a steady climb YTD, and these earnings results could accelerate things. Image Source: Trading View Cramer Bets Bigger on the Turnaround
Cramer interviewed CEO Brian Niccol on CNBC Thursday and called the quarter the inflection point for the turnaround. He raised his Investing Club price target to $120 from $115 and said the results should help Starbucks
Niccol is leaning harder into store remodels, and Starbucks now targets 1,500 upgraded locations by fiscal year-end. He’s also simplifying the company’s footprint abroad. Roughly 90% of its nearly 23,000 international stores now run under licensing deals. That follows a China joint venture Starbucks finalized in April. The company plans to keep direct control only over the U.S. and Canada.
The upgrade follows a costly stretch of layoffs that investors cheered as Niccol cut costs. It also stands out against Cramer’s more cautious calls on other momentum stocks this week.
Whether Starbucks actually heads towards $120 may hinge on North America’s margin gains holding once the tariff refunds fade.

OpenAI cut prices on two GPT-5.6 models on July 30, slashing Luna by 80% and Terra by 20%, as businesses grow more cautious about ballooning AI bills.
The cuts land three weeks after GPT-5.6’s launch. They reflect mounting pressure from cost-conscious enterprises. Cheaper Chinese rivals, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, add to that pressure.
A Pricing Squeeze With High Stakes
Luna’s input price fell to 20 cents per million tokens from $1. Its output price dropped to $1.20 from $6. Terra’s rates fell to $2 and $12 per million tokens, down from $2.50 and $15. Sol, OpenAI’s flagship model, kept its price.
The discounts follow years of unrestrained corporate AI spending. Workers called the trend tokenmaxxing, using AI freely without tracking cost. Finance teams now want clearer returns before approving new AI budgets.
We are committed to pushing the model frontier across cost efficiency, capability, and speed.Starting today, we are reducing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20% , and offering a faster option for GPT-5.6 Sol in the API.Luna and Terra’s lower prices are… pic.twitter.com/rFhK7XKedp
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) July 30, 2026
Cutting Costs to Make Money?
OpenAI framed the move as an efficiency gain, not a defensive one. Open AI explained:
“Our strategy remains focused on advancing both capability and efficiency so each generation of intelligence can accomplish more work at a lower cost.”
The timing still matters. Chinese AI models gained ground on Anthropic and OpenAI this year. They undercut both labs on cost. Anthropic’s mid-tier Claude Sonnet 4.6 still costs more per token than the discounted Terra.
Analysts say cheaper pricing could lift usage of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s models. It could also thin the margins investors watch as both companies pursue anticipated initial public offerings. Winning cost-sensitive customers and proving profitability to future shareholders pull in opposite directions.
IPO Pressure Mounting
Cutting prices could cut both ways for OpenAI’s IPO ambitions. Wider adoption strengthens the growth story bankers will pitch to investors. Usage and revenue growth tend to matter more than near-term margins in a pre-IPO narrative, and locking in cost-sensitive enterprise customers now, before they defect to cheaper Chinese rivals, protects the market share on which any IPO valuation depends.
It also lets the company point to efficiency gains (lower cost per task) as evidence that their technology is maturing rather than just getting more expensive to run.
However, IPO investors will eventually want to see a credible path to profitability, and shrinking per-token revenue on already thin-margin inference businesses makes that path harder to show on a prospectus.
If Terra’s and Luna’s usage doesn’t grow enough to offset the lower prices, the cuts show up as reduced revenue rather than reduced cost, exactly the kind of number that gets picked apart in IPO due diligence.
Whether the discounts ease that tension or simply delay it stays unclear for now. OpenAI’s next earnings update, once usage data from Terra and Luna appears, should offer an early answer.

Elon Musk says 90% of Earth has a financial reason to move to Spain. He made the claim on Thursday, as thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta.
It is an argument he has made many times before. Until now, he aimed it at the United States.
What Happened in Ceuta
Ceuta is a small Spanish city on the coast of North Africa. About 85,000 people live there. It sits right on the border with Morocco.
Thousands crossed over on Thursday. Most swam around the Tarajal seawall. At least nine people died.
🇪🇸 Insane footage from the Moroccan border with Spain: thousands of migrants are gathering at the borderThis is exactly what Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez was aiming for. pic.twitter.com/Fb1pEKU0jj
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 30, 2026
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Rachid Sbihi runs the union for Ceuta’s border police. He described “absolute chaos” and said the border had “totally collapsed,” according to the Associated Press.
Local leader Juan Jesús Vivas asked Madrid to declare a national emergency and send the army. The Interior Ministry said no. It sent troops and extra police anyway. Spain and Morocco then agreed to speed up returns.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain was mobilizing all necessary resources. In January, his government gave legal status to about half a million undocumented workers.
“The Government of Spain is fully committed to providing an immediate response to the situation in Ceuta…working with Moroccan and international authorities, and preparing the necessary measures to restore normalcy as soon as possible… This is the moment to build solutions, with responsibility and cooperation,” wrote Sanchez.
Musk attacked that plan at the time. Sánchez told him “Mars can wait.” The clash fits a pattern in Musk’s European political commentary.
Where the ‘90% of Earth’ Line Comes From
The idea is simple. Musk says a country becomes a magnet when its benefits beat what most of the world lives on. That magnet then grows big enough to break the budget.
He made the same point in April about America. Free taxpayer money can beat the living standards of 90% of Earth, he wrote. That gives 90% of Earth a reason to move there.
A 2024 version used smaller numbers. America holds 4% of the world’s people. A shift of just 1% would crush essential services, he said. For Spain, he put the number at 7 billion.
Spain’s entire budget will be destroyed by illegal migrants. It’s basic math: if Spain offers free stuff to migrants that is above 90% of the living standard of Earth, they create a forcing function for 90% of Earth to move to Spain, which is around 7 billion people!” Musk explained.
Researchers see it differently. They find that jobs, distance, language, and family already living abroad matter more than benefits. That gap is why the line spreads fast, and why it gets attacked just as fast.

Coinbase posted a $359.5 million net loss on second quarter revenue of $1.22 billion, below Wall Street’s $1.29 billion consensus. COIN shares fell 5.44% after hours to $154.68.
The selloff erased a 2.18% regular session gain that had left the stock at $163.58. Investors looked past a record trading market share and fixed on the shrinking top line.
Coinbase (COIN) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance Coinbase Revenue Miss Extends a Losing Streak
This was the third straight quarter in the red. Losses have narrowed each time.
Coinbase lost $666.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 and $394.1 million in the first. Diluted loss per share came in at $1.36, while transaction revenue reached $599.2 million.
Adjusted EBITDA stayed positive at $207.8 million, a 14th consecutive quarter above zero. That figure fell from $303.3 million three months earlier.
Restructuring costs added $52.4 million. The line had read zero for 10 straight quarters before Coinbase began cutting 700 jobs earlier this year. Citi had already cut its price target by 41% days before the report.
Record Market Share Lands in a Shrinking Market
Crypto trading volume market share climbed to 10.3% from 9.1% in the first quarter, a third consecutive record. Derivatives share also hit an all-time high for the third quarter running.
Meanwhile, the wider crypto derivatives market contracted by double digits over the same stretch.
Prediction markets did the heaviest lifting. Contracts and revenue both more than doubled, growing 106% quarter over quarter. The business crossed $100 million in annualized revenue.
Those gains landed against a weak backdrop. Bitcoin spot trading volumes fell toward multi-year lows in July. Rival Robinhood saw crypto revenue drop 38% year over year.
Stablecoins Now Carry More of the Load
Subscription and services revenue reached $555.1 million, or 48% of net revenue. That share stood at 29% in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Coinbase said 88% of net revenue came from sources other than Bitcoin spot trading. Average USDC held in Coinbase products hit a record $20 billion. That is more than 30% of the dollar-pegged stablecoin in circulation at quarter end.
Stablecoin transaction volume on Base, the company’s own layer-2 network, rose sevenfold year over year.
“Coinbase is no longer a bet just on the price of Bitcoin. All of financial services are getting updated by crypto, whether that’s trading or payments or lending, and Coinbase is the best-positioned company in the world to power this,” Brian Armstrong, Coinbase co-founder and chief executive, in the earnings release.
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What Comes Next
Coinbase reduced and narrowed its 2026 adjusted expense guidance. The company now implies GAAP technology, administrative and marketing costs of $4.34 billion to $4.6 billion this year.
“Despite market headwinds, our fundamentals remain strong as we consolidate trading share and continue to build through the cycle,” Alesia Haas, Coinbase chief financial officer, in the same release.
One question now hangs over the second half. Can a bigger slice of a smaller market lift revenue once trading volumes recover?

Apple reported its strongest June quarter on record, topping Wall Street forecasts on both revenue and earnings. Shares still fell in extended trading on Thursday as investors picked apart the composition of the beat.
Services revenue and Greater China sales landed below analyst forecasts. A one-time tariff refund also flattered profitability, leaving traders to judge how much of the quarter reflects durable demand.
Apple Q3 Earnings Rest on iPhone and Mac Strength
Revenue reached $109.42 billion for the quarter ended June 27, up 16% year over year. Diluted earnings per share rose 29% to $2.02, ahead of the $1.89 consensus.
Mac produced the quarter’s biggest upside surprise. The segment generated $10.35 billion, roughly 29% above last year and well clear of forecasts near $8.7 billion.
iPhone revenue climbed 22% to $54.25 billion. Every geographic segment grew by double digits, and the installed base of active devices set a record.
“Today, Apple is proud to report our strongest June quarter ever, with double-digit revenue growth across iPhone, Mac and Services, and in every geographic segment,” Tim Cook, Apple CEO, in the company’s earnings release.
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Tariff Refunds Cloud the Quality of the Beat
Gross margin reached 50.1%, but tariff refunds contributed about 2 percentage points of that figure and $0.11 of earnings per share. Strip those out and the beat narrows considerably.
Those refunds trace back to the Supreme Court tariff ruling in February, which struck down the White House’s global tariff regime. The benefit is unlikely to repeat at the same scale.
Services grew 12% to $30.74 billion, short of estimates near $31.2 billion. Apple pointed to foreign exchange headwinds as one factor. Greater China revenue rose 22% to $18.82 billion, though analysts had set a higher bar after recent share gains.
How Stock Traders Are Framing the Setup
Shares closed at $333.43 on Thursday, down 0.56%, then eased to roughly $317.66 after hours. Market value sits near $4.97 trillion, just under the $5 trillion market cap the stock touched earlier this week.
Apple (APPL) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
That run created the problem. Apple gained about 15% in July and closed a week of megacap earnings that had already lifted expectations beyond a routine beat.
Some analysts had already flagged the valuation risk heading into the print, including warnings on Apple’s valuation from investor Dan Niles. The soft Services line gives that argument fresh support.
The report also marks Cook’s last as chief executive. John Ternus takes the role on September 1, adding a leadership variable to a September quarter that already carries memory supply constraints and recent hardware price increases.
Guidance from the earnings call now matters more than the headline numbers. Traders will watch whether management signals that Services growth reaccelerates, or whether this quarter marks the peak of the current cycle.

MicroStrategy earnings for the second quarter carried an $8.22 billion net loss and a new metric, BTC Hurdle ARR, that Strategy’s own bitcoin yield is currently running below.
The company set that hurdle at 10.8% and reported a 4.5% bitcoin yield for the year. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Kang called the figure its effective cost of credit.
What the New Metric Is Meant to Show
Strategy published BTC Hurdle ARR and Net Bitcoin Per Share on its website this week, timed to results. Together they are meant to show whether bitcoin accretion outruns what the company pays creditors and preferred holders.
Kang set out the test himself.
“Our BTC Hurdle ARR of 10.8% represents our current effective cost of credit. If BTC ARR is above this rate, Net BTC Per Share captures a positive spread and appreciates faster than bitcoin on a go-forward basis,” Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer, Strategy said in the statement.
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The comparison is not perfectly clean. Strategy published no current BTC ARR figure, and BTC Yield tracks per-share accretion over a fixed window rather than an annual rate.
The Distance Between 4.5% and 10.8%
The direction is still checkable. A 4.5% yield banked between January 1 and July 26 works out near 8% annualized, leaving a shortfall of roughly three percentage points.
Strategy announces Q2 2026 results:– Increased $BTC Holdings by 11%– Reduced Convertible Debt by 18%– Increased USD Reserve by 12%– Increased BPS by 5%https://t.co/nfBSJsFjMt
— Strategy (@Strategy) July 30, 2026
On the company’s own logic, a negative spread means Net Bitcoin Per Share fails to outpace bitcoin itself. Anyone holding MSTR for leveraged exposure is currently paying more for credit than the machine returns.
Scrutiny of that machinery is not new. The debate over new metrics has trailed Strategy through 2026, as has the collapse in MSTR’s premium to its holdings.
Why the Cost of Credit Keeps Climbing
The hurdle rises with whatever Strategy pays for money. STRC issuance brought in $7.53 billion this year, growth of 254%, and management pushed the payout rate on those preferred shares to 12%.
Preferred dividends alone consumed $400.7 million during the quarter, against $49.1 million a year earlier. Roughly $218.4 million of bitcoin was sold to help cover them.
The quarter was punishing. An $8.32 billion writedown produced a net loss of $8.22 billion, or $24.45 per diluted share. With Bitcoin trading near $64,713, the 843,775 coin position sits about $8.9 billion beneath its $63.69 billion cost.
Bitcoin Price Performance, Source: BeInCrypto
Founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor reads the period as a transition rather than a strain.
“In the midst of this phase of muted bitcoin sentiment and market skepticism, we continue to evolve our business model and establish Digital Credit as a new asset class,” said Saylor.
Parts of the release support that reading. Convertible notes fell from $8.21 billion to $6.71 billion after a May buyback struck at an 8% discount to par, and software revenue grew 6.9% to $122.4 million.
A $3.75 billion reserve covers dividends and interest for 2.1 years, so nothing breaks imminently, though STRC’s durability remains contested. The sharper question is whether the spread flips positive before that cushion thins.

Amazon beat Wall Street on every headline metric in the second quarter, and Amazon Web Services grew 37% year over year, its fastest pace in 18 quarters.
Shares closed the regular session at $235.50, up 3.90%. The stock then climbed to $256.33 in after-hours trading, a further 8.85% gain, once the numbers landed Thursday.
Why the Amazon Q2 Earnings Beat Matters
Net sales reached $200.6 billion, up 20% from $167.7 billion a year earlier. Analysts had modeled roughly $197 billion.
Operating income rose 43% to $27.5 billion. That lifted the operating margin to 13.7% from 11.4%, against a consensus near 12%.
Diluted earnings landed at $5.75 per share versus estimates around $1.82. However, that comparison flatters the quarter.
Amazon booked $53.4 billion of non-operating pre-tax other income, primarily from its stake in Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude models. Strip out that revaluation and the operating result still clears the bar.
AMAZON $AMZN JUST REPORTED Q2 EARNINGS• Revenue: $200.6B, beating expectations of $196.47B 🟢• EPS: $5.75, beating expectations of $1.82 🟢• AWS revenue: $42.2BQ3 guidance:• Revenue: $197B-$202B, below expectations of $204.07B 🔴• Operating income: $22.5B-$26.5B vs… pic.twitter.com/aa9kiCoszk
— WOLF (@WOLF_Financial) July 30, 2026
Context matters here. Microsoft’s Azure business grew 43% a day earlier, while Meta watched AI spending squeeze margins to 31% from 43%. Investors wanted to know which camp Amazon fell into.
AWS Acceleration Validates the $200 Billion AI Bet
AWS sales hit $42.2 billion, a $169 billion annualized run rate. Growth of 36.7% was the segment’s strongest since 2021.
Profitability moved with it. AWS operating income jumped 64% to $16.6 billion, and the segment margin widened to 39.4% from 32.9%. Amazon therefore bought that acceleration without cutting prices.
“AWS is booming, growing 36.7% year-over-year in Q2 … and our AI and Chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion,” Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, in the earnings release.
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Both businesses grew at triple-digit rates. Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-gigawatt compute commitments to Trainium, Amazon’s in-house AI training chip.
Free Cash Flow Turns Negative as Capex Climbs
The bill is plain to see. Amazon spent $54.2 billion on property and equipment during the quarter alone.
Trailing twelve-month purchases reached $169 billion, a 64% increase. Free cash flow swung to an outflow of $7.6 billion over that period, from an $18.2 billion inflow a year earlier.
Operating cash flow still grew 33% to $161.4 billion, so the draining free cash flow reflects construction rather than weakness in the underlying business.
Guidance handed skeptics something, though. Amazon expects third-quarter sales between $197 billion and $202 billion, short of the roughly $204 billion analysts wanted. Prime Day timing explains nearly 400 basis points of the shortfall, the company said.
Investors who question AI capex returns now face a harder argument. The open question is whether AWS can defend 37% growth once the comparison base rises next year.

FTX begins its fifth creditor distribution on Friday, moving roughly $900 million to holders of allowed claims. The round is the smallest of the five the estate has paid since repayments began.
The shrinking size points to a bankruptcy in its closing phase. The harder problem now is not raising cash but reaching creditors who have never collected.
FTX Fifth Distribution Is the Smallest of Five Rounds
FTX moved more than $5 billion in its second distribution in May 2025, then about $1.6 billion that September. The fourth creditor distribution round came to roughly $2.2 billion in March 2026.
Friday’s payment is under half that. Allowed Class 5A Dotcom customer claims pick up another 9%, reaching 105% cumulatively, while Class 5B U.S. customer claims add 5% to reach the same level. General unsecured and digital asset loan claims each gain 3%, taking both to 103%.
FTX DistributionDistribution = 31st JulyRecord date = 16th JuneIf passed all requirements incl. KYC by 16th June will receive distribution Few creditors in the Bahamas are stuck on KYC for yrs despite submitting formsIdentity Verification: Verification in Progress pic.twitter.com/KL21v5mxc6
— Sunil (FTX Creditor Champion) (@sunil_trades) July 27, 2026
Convenience class holders sit at a 120% cumulative recovery, though FTX cautioned that final percentages may shift slightly on rounding. Those figures count dollars, not coins, and the real value of repayments has trailed what the same assets would fetch today.
A separate $18 million payment goes to preferred equity holders on the same date, lifting that trust’s running total to $95 million.
Some Creditors Still Cannot Be Paid
Claims that are not yet allowed stay marked as disputed. FTX lists three common reasons, including:
Proofs of claim still under reconciliation
Jurisdictions still under review, and
Customers who took partial payments through the Australian proceedings.
The Bahamas track runs on its own terms. Joint official liquidators of FTX Digital Markets set the same June 16 record date and July 31 start, but the distribution rate is still to be confirmed.
Creditors living in jurisdictions the liquidators flag as potentially restricted stay excluded while the legality of paying them is reviewed.
For everyone else, Friday starts a countdown. Holders of allowed claims who have not onboarded with BitGo, Kraken or Payoneer within six months may forfeit the right to be paid at all.
Tax forms carry a separate deadline under the plan with the same consequence. FTX said the class-by-class totals will reach the court docket shortly after July 31.

Robinhood (HOOD) stock closed at $89.84 on July 29, down 3.15%, slipping under $90 even after the company posted its best quarter ever.
Robinhood Stock Price: Yahoo Finance
The drop was not really about the numbers. HOOD has fallen about 14% in five days and roughly 20% this year, so the weakness runs deeper than one earnings report.
HOOD Earnings Beat, but the Market Sold the News
Robinhood reported record revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% from a year earlier.
JUST IN: $HOOD posts its best quarter ever with record revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% year-over-year, as prediction market event contracts surge 10x to $156 million and Robinhood Chain expands.
— HIT.com (@HIT) July 29, 2026
Adjusted earnings came in at $0.62 per share, far above the roughly $0.42 that analysts expected.
ROBINHOOD $HOOD JUST REPORTED EARNINGSEPS of $0.62 beating expectations of $0.41🟢Revenue of $1.31B beating expectations of $1.21B🟢 pic.twitter.com/5euq8vGrVS
— Evan (@StockMKTNewz) July 29, 2026
The mix told the real story. Prediction markets generated $156 million, overtaking both equities at $129 million and crypto at $100 million for the first time.
Robinhood $HOOD brought in more revenue during Q2 from prediction market transactions than both stock and crypto transactionsRevenue by segment:$342M – Options $156M – Prediction markets$129M – Equity$100M – Crypto$49M – Other pic.twitter.com/tjkMnxGOa8
— Evan (@StockMKTNewz) July 29, 2026
That shift matters because crypto revenue fell 38% year over year, after an even sharper crypto revenue slide in the prior quarter, yet total revenue still hit a record. However, the year-to-date stock price weakness persisted.
Robinhood Stock Price YTD: Yahoo Finance
Robinhood now runs 13 businesses above $100 million in annual revenue, far from its meme-broker image. One markets account said Robinhood “proved it’s more than a crypto stock.” And that outlook is now visible in the analysts’ calls.
$HOOD just proved it's more than a crypto stock.The biggest takeaway from Q2 wasn't the beat.It was the shift in where growth is coming from. As crypto cooled, equities, options, and prediction markets drove momentum.Robinhood is building a more diversified business and… https://t.co/xRpEVWMbYa pic.twitter.com/GmKnYnmR0U
— Eldora (@eldoraglobal) July 30, 2026
In the days before the report, the latest analyst calls stayed split but constructive. Barclays and Truist both reiterated buy ratings, with a Barclays Robinhood price target of $122, while JP. Morgan and Morgan Stanley kept hold ratings at $99 and $124.
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Each target still sat near or above the price, so Wall Street was not braced for a collapse. The company also kept buying back stock under a buyback plan it authorized earlier this year.
Robinhood Stock Analyst Calls: TipRanks
Part of the profit came from a one-time gain, which invites some caution on earnings quality. Even so, a double beat could not lift the shares.
Options Traders Are Still Hedging for Downside
Robinhood’s options market shows lingering caution. The put-call ratio, which weighs bearish put bets against bullish calls, sits near 0.66 in open interest, a high reading that favors puts.
The volume ratio has climbed toward 0.60 as well. That rise suggests desks kept adding downside hedges around the earnings date rather than betting on a pop.
HOOD Put-Call Ratio: Barchart
Hedging shows fear, however, and not always where cash is truly flowing.
Money Flow Improves as Selling Pressure Fades
Deeper data hints the selling may be cooling. Chaikin Money Flow (CMF), a gauge of whether institutional money is buying or selling, reads -0.09 and tried to cross above zero around July 24.
It failed, so institutions are likely still net sellers. Yet, CMF rose between July 27 and July 28 while the price fell, a small bullish divergence. This shows that the big institutional money is bleeding less as compared to the price. However, the CMF needs to move above zero for the HOOD stock to show price-specific positivity.
HOOD Money Flow and Volume: TradingView
Volume backs that up. Selling volume has thinned since early July even as the stock dropped, which suggests that even retail sellers are losing steam.
None of this confirms a bottom, though, so the HOOD price chart has to settle the argument.
Robinhood Stock Price Levels That Decide the Next Move
The chart still looks weak. Since June 9, Robinhood has traced a head and shoulders pattern, a topping shape where a high sits between two lower peaks, and it broke down on July 24, days before earnings. The breakdown structure still remains intact, which now explains why the options traders lean bearish.
The breakdown has stalled at $89.87, which also marks the 0.786 Fibonacci retracement. If that floor holds, the roughly 21% target near $76.53 may not fill, especially after a near 10% drop.
HOOD Price Analysis: TradingView
A hold above $89.87 and a reclaim of $93.84 would open room back toward the analyst targets. Real strength, however, only returns above $108.45, the right shoulder, which looks distant for now.
For now, $89.87 separates a possible rebound from a deeper slide toward $76.53.

Situational Awareness made 439% in six months. Then margin calls took its entire stock book in one trade. Ken Griffin’s Citadel bought it.
A quarter of that fund’s last reported stock holdings were Bitcoin miners. That was not an accident, and it is why crypto investors are reading this story closely.
Who Is Leopold Aschenbrenner?
OpenAI hired him for its Superalignment team in 2023 and let him go in April 2024. He has said he was pushed out for raising safety concerns.
Apparently this episode made Dwarkesh’s editor quit because the AI discussion stressed him out too much.Enjoy! https://t.co/lmBtXecUXq
— Leopold Aschenbrenner (@leopoldasch) June 4, 2024
In June 2024 he published an essay series called Situational Awareness. Its central claim was blunt.
“AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible,” Leopold Aschenbrenner, in his essay series Situational Awareness, June 2024.
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AGI means software that matches humans at most tasks. But the essay did more than predict it. One chapter argued the real bottleneck would be physical. Power contracts, transformers and electricity supply, not chips.
He then built a hedge fund on that idea. Its first stock disclosure, covering December 2024, listed six holdings worth $254.8 million.
Every one was a power or chip company. Not one was crypto. That changed quickly.
What Happened to Situational Awareness This Week
July went badly. The fund owned memory chip makers like SK Hynix, which fell hard in the AI memory stock selloff.
It had also bet against software firms such as Adobe. That trade pays off when a stock drops. Those shares rose instead. The wider market went the same way. The Nasdaq-100 fell 10% from its early June peak.
LEOPOLD’S SITUATIONAL AWARENESS FUND BLOWUP TIMELINEJULY 1: LEOPOLD’S HEDGE FUND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS REACHES $45 BILLION UP 450% YTDJULY 10: SK HYNIX US IPO MARKS TOP OF THE AI SECTORJULY 10-20: MAJOR SELLOFF ACROSS ALL AI STOCKS, MOST DOWN 30%+ IN 2 WEEKSJULY 10-20:…
— GURGAVIN (@gurgavin) July 30, 2026
Borrowed money turned a bad month into a forced one. The fund had used loans to hold more stock than its own cash could cover.
When prices fell, its lenders wanted more money behind those loans. That demand is a margin call.
CNBC named Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as the brokers involved. It also reported the fund had grown to $45 billion by the start of July.
Then it unwound every public stock position, CNBC said. Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund agreed to buy them. Millennium Management and Jane Street looked and passed, Bloomberg reported.
Citadel, the same fund that predicted a Fed rate hike at the July FOMC, purchased every one of Situational Awareness' disclosed holdings in a single transaction.How about them apples? https://t.co/E2MLKDksCh pic.twitter.com/ei3SpriTUj
— Sam Badawi (@Sam_Badawi) July 30, 2026
Where Do Bitcoin Miners Come In?
Crypto readers mostly missed this part. Situational Awareness became one of mining’s larger shareholders, and it happened fast.
Big US funds must list their stock holdings every three months on a form called a 13F. Five exist for this fund. Read in order, they show a bet being built.
Source: SEC 13F filings, BeInCrypto analysis
The latest filing lists 29 holdings worth $5.52 billion. Miners and their data center arms make up $1.38 billion of it.
Core Scientific was the largest at $418.7 million. IREN came next at $328.6 million, then Applied Digital at $278 million.
Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Hut 8, WhiteFiber, Bitdeer, CleanSpark and Bitfarms made up the rest.
The whole disclosed book grew nearly 22 times in a year. The mining share went from nothing to a quarter of it.
So the AGI fund became a mining fund by design. His essay said the bottleneck was power. Miners own power, land and cooling, which is why miners became AI powerhouses.
There is a catch for shareholders. Anyone holding these stocks in July shared the trade with a fund facing margin calls. No mining company knew, so none of them said so.
Did Citadel Engineer This?
One theory spread fast. It says Citadel scared the market about rate hikes, waited for Leopold to break, then bought his stocks cheap.
🚨🚨 Did Citadel just rug pull Leopold? July 28: Citadel "predicted" a surprise Fed rate hike, which historically tanks the marketJuly 29: Market sells off. Situational Awareness gets margin called. Fed left rates unchangedJuly 30: Citadel acquires Leopold's entire… pic.twitter.com/02iCRPSoCL
— Leopold Stock Tracker (@LeopoldTracker_) July 30, 2026
The first part is true. Frank Flight, who runs macro strategy at Citadel Securities, published a note on July 27. He wrote that he now expected a rate hike at the July meeting.
Bloomberg reported the call added to market nerves. Two days later, a Griffin firm bought the stock book.
Four things break the theory.
First, there are two Citadels.
Citadel Securities buys and sells stocks for other people. Citadel is the hedge fund. They are separate firms.
Second, Flight had company.
PGIM and Wrightson ICAP also called for a hike. Bond veteran Harley Bassman wanted one twice as big.
Third, the fear came first.
Bloomberg tied it to oil prices rising after the US and Iran clashed again, plus a strong job market.
Fourth, the Fed did not hike.
It held rates steady, and three of its 12 voting members wanted a quarter-point rise.
That last detail matters. It was the first time since September 2016 that three officials dissented in the same direction. The pressure to raise rates was real, and it sat inside the Fed.
What Nobody Can Answer Yet
Did Citadel get a bargain? Nobody outside the deal knows. Neither firm will say what it paid.
Some think the forced selling mattered anyway. On CNBC, Jim Cramer argued it looked like a clearing event that could mark a bottom for the AI trade.
The tape says something simpler. Microsoft reported strong results on Wednesday night and rose about 15%.
Microsoft (MSFT) Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
Chip stocks jumped the next day. One big chip index rose 6.7% and snapped a five-day losing streak.
One block trade does not move a whole chip index. An earnings report can.
Six days before all of it, Aschenbrenner had told his investors to add money.
“PS. At times we call out opportunities that seem like a particularly good time to add funds, if you have been waiting for one,” Leopold Aschenbrenner, in the July 24 investor letter as reported by the Financial Times.
He got the direction right. He just did not own the stocks anymore.
The fund is not dead. It still holds private stakes, including Anthropic, which filed confidential IPO paperwork on June 1.
Miners spent 10 years being called a curiosity. It took one AI fund’s margin call to make them matter.

Coinbase (COIN) stock heads into second-quarter earnings today after the close under a warning from one of its biggest backers.
Citigroup still rates the stock a buy. Even so, it cut its Coinbase price target from $400 to $235 on July 24, a 41% reduction that landed days before the report.
Citi Keeps Its Buy Rating but Slashes the COIN Stock Target
The gap between that rating and that target is the real story into earnings. Citi analyst Peter Christiansen kept the buy call, yet he still cut 41% off his goal for COIN stock.
His reasoning was blunt. Christiansen expects the quarter to mark a low point for trading, with spot trading volumes near a two-year trough.
Coinbase analyst ratings and price targets: TipRanks
That caution did not appear in a vacuum. Coinbase had missed revenue estimates last quarter, and Coinbase stock has fallen about 29% this year, so the market was already braced for a softer stretch.
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Other desks, meanwhile, moved the same way. Clear Street trimmed its target to $225, while Rosenblatt held the $240 call, similar to Citi’s slashed number.
What Wall Street Expects From Coinbase’s Q2
Analysts have set a low bar for Coinbase Q2 earnings. They expect revenue near $1.3 billion, down about 13% from a year earlier and below the $1.41 billion posted last quarter.
The weakness sits in trading.
Coinbase earnings tmrw. Expect a lot of pain. You’re going to get a good look at the anemic nature of crypto trading volumes plaguing the industry. Courtesy of the second largest exchange in the world.
— Andrew (@AP_Abacus) July 30, 2026
Forecasts put transaction revenue around $640 million, and Barclays estimates Coinbase handled about $152 billion in volume, well under the Street’s $178 billion view.
Coinbase stock quote and Q2 earnings date: Yahoo Finance
Still, the picture is not all bearish. Subscription and services income, including USDC interest, gives Coinbase a steadier base when trading slows. That explains why COIN stock has surged over 5% month-on-month. USDC is the dollar-pegged stablecoin it helps run.
Wall Street is bracing for a quieter quarter from Coinbase.As spot trading volumes decline, earnings expectations have been lowered. The spotlight now shifts to pending U.S. crypto legislation that could reshape the industry’s future. pic.twitter.com/3FZPcqDx7u
— Conor Kenny (@conorfkenny) July 29, 2026
Instead, many traders are looking past the quarter toward US crypto legislation. A market-structure bill called the CLARITY Act would give exchanges clear federal rules, which could pull more institutional money and new products onto platforms like Coinbase. COIN stock has already climbed on signals the bill is near the finish line.
How the Market Is Positioned Into the Print
Positioning, however, sends a mixed message. The put-call ratio, which weighs bearish put bets against bullish calls, points two ways at once.
In standing bets, or open interest, the ratio has eased to 0.74 from about 0.86 in early June. That shift means longer-term positions have turned slightly more bullish on Coinbase stock.
Fresh activity, by contrast, looks defensive. The volume ratio has climbed to 0.75 from about 0.44, which shows traders buying puts to hedge before the results.
COIN put-call ratio: Barchart
Big money, though, has held firm. Chaikin Money Flow, a gauge of whether institutions are buying or selling, sits at 0.03 and has stayed above zero even as COIN stock drifted lower since June.
COIN Money Flow and Price: TradingView
For now, tonight’s transaction revenue and any volume guidance will decide whether Citi’s caution or those steady inflows prove right. Beyond the quarter, traders are watching Washington, where crypto legislation could reset the story for Coinbase stock.