Iran nears agreement with Oman on strait management.

SK Hynix is exploring options including bringing in external investors or selling partial stakes for its Chongqing plant in China, with the facility valued at around $3 billion. The plant serves as a key semiconductor back-end production base for SK Hynix in China, and relevant discussions remain in the early stages, meaning the transaction may not ultimately materialize. This asset adjustment has drawn attention primarily because SK Hynix is simultaneously pushing forward large-scale expansion plans in South Korea. The company previously announced it would invest massive sums in its Yongin semiconductor cluster and Cheongju production base to build production capacity for next-generation DRAM memory and high-bandwidth memory, among other products. Against the backdrop of surging demand for storage chips driven by the development of artificial intelligence, if the equity transaction for the Chongqing plant goes through, it is expected to help boost asset operational efficiency and strengthen the capital support for its domestic investments.

According to Yonhap News Agency, former SK Hynix China local subsidiary employee Kim (South Korean national) was sentenced to 1 year and 6 months in prison in the second instance for leaking the company’s business secrets to a Chinese firm. In 2022, Kim intended to switch jobs to Chinese enterprises including Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon. He violated the company’s security rules by printing or photographing a large volume of cutting-edge technology and business secret documents related to CIS (CMOS image sensors) from the internal document management system, and directly quoted parts of the content in his resume submitted to the Chinese company, completing the leak. Prosecutors indicted Kim on charges including violations of the Industrial Technology Protection Act, the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, and breach of trust. The first-instance court found Kim guilty of leaking business secrets, sentencing him to 1 year and 6 months in prison, but acquitted him of charges related to Hybrid Bonding technology, stating that the technology had not been included in the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy’s list of advanced technologies at the time. Criminal Division 10-1 of the Seoul High Court recently issued the second-instance ruling, fully upholding the original sentence. The court noted that Kim leaked a large amount of business secrets and submitted them to the Chinese company via his resume, constituting a serious offense. The documents were the result of years of R&D investment by the victim company; a lenient sentence in such cases would weaken enterprises’ motivation for technological development and make it easy for overseas competitors to steal South Korean technology through talent recruitment. The court also considered that Kim had fully confessed and most of the documents had been recovered, so it did not impose a heavier penalty.

Solana ecosystem meme coin TOAD launched at 10 PM last night. Mike Dudas, founder of 6th Man Ventures, received tokens gifted by the TOAD community, then continuously promoted the coin on social media and made small purchases. Dudas stated he will not sell these tokens, instead he will follow Ansem’s approach to use them to encourage narrative dissemination. Driven by the news, per GMGN data, TOAD’s market cap quickly surged past $20 million after launch before pulling back, currently standing at $12 million with trading volume exceeding $52.1 million. BlockBeats reminds users that related token prices are highly volatile, so investors should exercise caution.

A mysterious whale is opening a 20x long on 500K $SOL($22.78M). A newly created wallet deposited 8.43M $USDC and placed a TWAP order to long 500K $SOL ($22.78M). So far, 199,838 $SOL ($15.2M) has been filled.

A mysterious whale (possibly a miner) has deposited 6,494 $BTC($420.5M) to #Binance over the past 3 weeks.

An #Ethereum ICO participant "0x6A53" just deposited 0.1 $ETH to #Coinbase after 11 years of dormancy. He invested only $620 in the ICO and received 2,000 $ETH — now worth $3.83M, a 6,184x return!