U.S. CPI: +2.9% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +2.9%); U.S. CORE CPI: +3.2% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +3.3%)

E-commerce working capital RWA platform Dow Protocol announced the completion of a $9 million seed round, with participation from MH Ventures, OKX Ventures, Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, Essentia Partners, and Quartet Group. Dow Protocol serves merchants of leading global e-commerce platforms, providing working capital advances based on their sales receivables and real operational data. Its underlying asset service system is embedded in mainstream e-commerce platforms, enabling direct access to merchants' raw operational data for credit assessment and risk control. Meanwhile, via partnerships with these platforms, repayments are deducted directly from the platform side, bypassing merchant accounts, which fundamentally mitigates repayment risks and establishes an industry-leading collection mechanism. On the capital side, Dow Protocol leverages the instant settlement capabilities of stablecoins, cutting the lengthy disbursement process of traditional lending to as fast as same-day arrival. For the cash-flow-sensitive working capital market, disbursement speed is a value in itself, so market participants are willing to pay a premium for this efficiency. Additionally, Dow Protocol advances new on-chain native logic for working capital advances, enabling high-granularity, programmable execution of advance terms, and reengineering the underlying operational logic of supply chain finance. Dow Protocol positions itself as a general-purpose pan-e-commerce PayFi RWA advance protocol, with a framework scalable to supply chain finance advance needs across multiple sectors including e-commerce, catering, payments, gaming, and AI computing power.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), Nasdaq 100 index futures fell 1%, while Dow Jones futures rose 0.1%. Most large-cap U.S. tech stocks traded lower in pre-market trading: Microsoft gained 0.7%, Meta rose 0.2%, Apple added 0.1%, Amazon was unchanged, Google Class A fell 0.3%, Tesla and Nvidia each dropped 1%, SpaceX declined 2%, and SK Hynix fell 4%.

Per its official announcement, Huobi HTX launched the CXMT/USDT (Changxin Technology) perpetual contract on July 28, supporting long and short trading with leverage ranging from 1x to 10x.

According to Bitget market data, Hong Kong-listed large language model stocks saw broad declines after the Hong Kong stock market closed. Zhipu (02513.HK) fell more than 18%, while MINIMAX-W (00100.HK) dropped over 14%.

According to Hyperinsight monitoring, among current SKHY holding addresses, the whale starting with 0xdb0 ranks first with an unrealized loss of approximately $993,000, a loss scale nearly 10 times that of the second-ranked address. This address currently holds a long position of about 47,500 SKHY contracts with 5x isolated margin leverage, with a position value of around $6.547 million, an average entry price of $158.87, and a return of -65.8%. Its liquidation price is $124.78, only about 9.6% away from the current price. The whale has been trading SKHY since its listing, and realized a profit of about $553,000 in its first round of trading. On July 15, it re-entered long positions near $184, an entry price 23.5% higher than the issuance price. As SKHY continued to decline afterward, it kept adding positions, gradually lowering its overall average holding price to $158.87. After SKHY broke below the issuance price for the first time, the address today created an additional 100 layered buy orders, extending its bottom-buy averaging range from $136 down to $52.3, planning to add about 113,600 SKHY, with a total order value of approximately $10 million and a weighted average order price of $88.05. The lowest-tier buy order is set at $52.3, 62.1% lower than the current price and 64.9% lower than the issuance price, equivalent to 35.1% of the issuance price. If all orders are filled without triggering liquidation and with sufficient margin, its SKHY long position will increase to about 161,000 contracts, expanding to 3.4 times its current size, and the overall average holding price will drop to around $108.92. When the final-tier order is filled at $52.3, the position’s unrealized loss is expected to expand to approximately $9.121 million...

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost released data showing that Bitcoin spot trading volume continued its long-term contraction trend in July this year. Spot trading volumes on major exchanges have overall dropped by more than 75% from their end-of-2024 peak. Binance alone recorded over $35 billion in monthly volume, but this is still a sharp decline compared to the $246 billion in November 2024. Trading volumes across all platforms contracted simultaneously during the same period. The last time such low trading volume levels were seen dates back to the end of the 2023 bear market. The analyst attributes the weak demand for risk assets to multiple macroeconomic pressures: the ongoing escalation of the U.S.-Iran conflict has suppressed risk appetite, while high inflation has left persistent concerns about elevated interest rates—an environment extremely unfavorable for speculative assets. Meanwhile, the stock market has continued to absorb most available liquidity, with the tech sector’s strong performance driving this liquidity siphon effect, though this narrative began to be questioned in July. For Bitcoin to return to an uptrend, a shift in the macro environment is needed, and more importantly, a recovery in demand, which is the only true driver of a rebound in trading volume.