Japan's stock market closed down nearly 1%, while South Korea's two major stock indices were mixed.

InPoint Finance, a venture led by Standard Chartered Hong Kong, is set to announce updates on its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin (HKDAP) within August. The firm has earlier secured a stablecoin issuer license approved by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), becoming one of the first institutions to obtain such authorization. Agnes Ng, Chief Executive of Standard Chartered Hong Kong, Greater China and North Asia, noted that InPoint will operate on a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model, not directly targeting end users, but delivering services to enterprises, institutions and individual users via authorized distributors. Its application scenarios cover cross-border settlements, tokenized assets and other use cases. She added that the stablecoin’s launch is aimed at supporting the real economy and resolving the efficiency and cost challenges enterprises face in cross-border settlements.

According to monitoring by TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), since the close of trading last Friday through the weekend, the million-dollar-level positions of Micron Technology (MU) and SanDisk (SNDK) involve a total of 7 addresses. As of pre-market trading in US stocks, all these addresses hold long positions, with no million-dollar-level short orders recorded. The total value of these long positions is approximately $29.297 million, with an overall unrealized loss of around $1.193 million; 5 out of the 7 addresses are currently in the red. Specific details: - Micron Technology: 4 addresses hold a combined 16,700 long positions, with a position value of about $13.904 million, a weighted average entry price of $871.6, and the current price is around $834.6, resulting in a total unrealized loss of roughly $617,000. - SanDisk: 5 addresses hold a combined 12,400 long positions, with a position value of approximately $15.393 million, a weighted average entry price of $1,286.1, and the current price is around $1,239.6, leading to a total unrealized loss of about $576,000. Notably, the address starting with 0x0ad holds long positions in both MU and SNDK, with a combined position value of around $14.392 million and an unrealized loss of approximately $600,000, making it the address with the largest position size and loss in this round of US storage stock bets over the weekend. Additionally, the address starting with 0xfe7 holds a 10x leveraged long position of about $3.174 million in SNDK, with an unrealized loss of roughly $312,000. These two addresses together contribute around $912,000 in losses, accounting for 76.5% of the total unrealized loss.

According to Bloomberg, South Korea's Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) has become the world's most volatile national stock index, even exceeding Bitcoin in volatility. The KOSPI's year-to-date return volatility has surged to 63%, ranking first among major national stock indices, surpassing Bitcoin's 48%.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahaei stated at a regular press conference that there are currently no talks between Iran and the United States. Iran is holding discussions with Oman at this stage, with topics centered on the Strait of Hormuz. Bahaei further pointed out that given the U.S.'s continued violations of the memorandum of understanding, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will not undergo significant changes.

Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) bought another 6M $ENA($525K) at an average price of $0.09.

Morgan Stanley released a report noting that June HDD/SSD data continues to reflect strong demand from data centers. TSR projects that the shipment capacity of enterprise-grade SSDs for data centers will reach 525 exabytes (EB) in 2026, a year-on-year surge of 100%; the shipment capacity of nearline HDDs for data centers will hit 1845 EB, up 30.4% year-on-year. The report shows that in June, data center enterprise-grade SSD shipment capacity stood at 46.33 EB, rising 124.5% year-on-year and 12.0% month-on-month. In the same period, enterprise-grade SSD shipments totaled 6.35 million units, up 41.1% year-on-year and 8.9% month-on-month. Morgan Stanley argues that as the share of high-capacity products rises, SSD shipment capacity growth will continue to outpace unit shipment growth. For HDDs, June nearline HDD production reached 7.03 million units, up 12.3% year-on-year and down slightly 0.6% month-on-month. TSR forecasts nearline HDD production will hit 8.439 million units in 2026, a year-on-year increase of 12.8%. However, the report warns that future production expansion of nearline HDDs may be constrained by read/write head and testing capacity. Overall, AI and data center capital expenditure remain key drivers of storage capacity demand, though supply chain bottlenecks are spreading from end devices to key components.