WTI and Brent crude oil have continued their downward trajectory, with Brent’s intraday decline widening to 3%.

According to Yujin Monitoring, F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun withdrew 9,937 ETH (valued at $15.5 million) and 147.5 WBTC ($8.7 million) from Binance over the past six hours, then deposited the assets into Spark. Since the start of the month, when BTC fell below $60,000 and ETH dropped below $1,700, he has accumulated approximately 65,700 ETH ($111 million) and 966 WBTC ($60.29 million) through dip-buying. Current prices stand at around $62,400 for BTC and $1,660 for ETH. All of the WBTC and roughly half of the ETH were deposited into Spark, while the remaining half of the ETH was allocated to Ethereum staking.

According to Hyperinsight’s monitoring, Abraxas Capital — a whale that has long profited from funding rate carry via hedging short positions on gold assets — is currently shorting GOLD with 5x leverage. Its initial margin for the position is roughly $3.51 million, and it has held the trade for 144 days while keeping the position size stable. Cumulative funding rate settlements during this period have yielded $359,000, accounting for around 10.2% of the principal; excluding minor position adjustments, its annualized return stands at approximately 25.9%. Overall, on-chain whales are net short (likely driven by arbitrage and hedging positions), with total short nominal size of about $39.3 million, 1.56 times the long position size ($25.2 million). For non-large holders, funding rates are mostly positive (reflecting a long-term bullish market), providing a steady income source from rates for hedging short positions.

Micron Technology Chief Commercial Officer Sumit Sadana hinted that "certain specific major clients" (Apple) used negotiating leverage during the last industry downturn to slash prices sharply, severely undermining the company’s ability to invest in production capacity and sowing the seeds for the current severe memory chip shortage. Additional data shows that Apple’s price-cutting practices led to massive losses for suppliers including Micron and SK Hynix in 2022 and 2023, with some posting gross margins as low as -90%. Meanwhile, Apple reaped over $16 billion in profits via its tiered pricing strategy for different iPhone storage capacities. Interestingly, three years later, Apple has reaped what it sowed. Yesterday, Apple was forced to raise prices for its hardware products amid a surge in storage chip costs, a move that subsequently triggered a sharp plunge in the company’s stock price.

Per Bitget market data, U.S. stocks are broadly lower in pre-market trading. Micron and other storage stocks that were relatively strong yesterday are seeing catch-down declines: Micron is down 5.19% pre-market, SanDisk (SNDK) is down 5.91%, and Seagate (STX) is down 4.26%. The CPO sector remains weak: AAOI is down 4.99% pre-market, Corning (GLW) is down 3.93%, Lumentum (LITE) is down 3.92%, and Marvell (MRVL) is down 3.86%. Notably, Strategy’s closely watched perpetual preferred stock STRC has fallen below $73 in pre-market hours, currently trading at $72.91, a 3.67% drop. MicroStrategy’s MSTR is down 0.28%.

Federal Reserve Chair Walsh plans to appoint two senior central bank economists as advisors. Daniel Covitz and Eric Engstrom, both longtime Federal Reserve staff members, will advise Walsh. (Wall Street Journal)

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a crypto whale has opened a combined short position valued at $73.76 million: 1002.5 BTC (40x leverage) and 89,695.7 SPCX (10x leverage). BTC’s liquidation price is $62,071.8, and SPCX’s liquidation price is $162.79.