Japanese and South Korean stock markets opened higher and closed higher, with SK Hynix surging over 13%.

South Korea’s stock market closed nearly 6% higher on Thursday, rebounding from a sharp decline in the previous session, as chip stocks surged on the back of shareholder return measures and falling U.S. Treasury yields. Chipmaker SK Hynix rose 12.73% after announcing it would repurchase and cancel its treasury shares; peer Samsung Electronics gained 9.49%. Earlier media reports said Samsung Electronics will also unveil a new shareholder return policy by the end of this month. A total of 905 stocks changed hands on the day, with 521 advancing and 338 declining. Foreign investors net bought 1.7 trillion won (about $12.2 billion) worth of South Korean stocks. (Jinshi)

On-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa) tracked that the trader codenamed "Set 10 Big Goals" resumed live trading on Binance on July 27, after a one-month break. As of now, his total short positions in BTC and ETH contracts are valued at around $222 million, with an accumulated unrealized profit of roughly $401,000. For BTC, he holds 4x-leveraged short positions totaling 2,236.384 BTC, with a position value of approximately $156 million, an entry price of $69,826.87, and current unrealized profit of about $369,000. For ETH, he holds 6x-leveraged short positions totaling 29,316.677 ETH, with a position value of around $66.1 million, an entry price of $2,254.74, and current unrealized profit of roughly $32,000.

NeoSoul announces completion of $11 million Pre-A round financing. Participating institutions in this round include MH Ventures, Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, 0G Foundation, Kirin Capital, CatcherVC, and New Oak International. The capital will be used to further advance NeoSoul’s development of AI agent trading products and AI economic infrastructure. This financing round comes shortly after the launch of NeoTrade, NeoSoul’s AI agent trading workbench, which allows traders to configure their own AI trading agents, enabling these agents to make independent decisions and execute trades autonomously. AI is evolving from auxiliary analysis to independent execution; for trading, the industry’s focus is shifting to how to maintain agent autonomy while ensuring controlled fund security. This round brings together multiple investment institutions from digital assets, Web3 infrastructure, decentralized AI, Asian capital, and North American markets. Notably, Kirin Capital, a key investor in this round, has long been rooted in the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian capital markets, and its investment will further support NeoSoul’s expansion into Vietnam and Southeast Asia. NeoSoul co-founder Kaelan stated: “AI is moving from information production to autonomous economic activities, and trading is one of the earliest scenarios that can form a complete economic closed loop. NeoTrade serves as the entry point; following this financing round, NeoSoul will continue building infrastructure that supports large-scale participation of AI agents in economic activities.” NeoSoul plans to allocate the capital from this round to further develop NeoTrade, strengthen its trading infrastructure, and expand its global ecosystem. The company will continue advancing product development around the connection between autonomous AI decision-making and controlled fund execution.

According to Deribit data, crypto options with a total notional value of $1.82 billion are set to expire and settle tomorrow. Breakdown: BTC options have a notional value of $1.57 billion, with a put/call ratio of 0.65 and a max pain point of $66,000; ETH options carry a notional value of $250 million, a put/call ratio of 0.77, and a max pain point of $1,950.

According to monitoring by TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), address 0x6666...23f5 currently holds 450,000 HYPE long positions on Hyperliquid, with a position value of approximately $32.49 million. Its average entry price is $39.8114, and the current unrealized profit is around $14.58 million. On-chain fund flow data shows that the address’s initial funds entered HyperCore primarily via Circle CCTP-related HyperEVM CoreDepositWallet. The first deposit was made on March 18, 2026, followed by cumulative receipts of about 3.8 million USDC between March 18 and 27, all from the HyperEVM CoreDepositWallet. Subsequently, starting at 02:31 HK time on March 18, 2026, the address built a 10x leveraged HYPE long position from scratch, completed its last position addition on April 7, and has since been inactive (making it impossible to calculate its historical trade win rate). As of press time, the address has paid $950,000 in funding fees for its long positions, ranking third among all HYPE contract long addresses on Hyperliquid by position size.

According to HTX market data, Bitcoin has broken through $70,000, posting an 8.6% gain over the past 24 hours.