South Korea’s Kospi index triggered a market-wide circuit breaker for the second consecutive time today, tumbling to an intraday low of 5,532.33 after opening more than 1% higher. Bitcoin (BTC), by contrast, climbed 1% above $64,000 even as Korea’s chip-stock selloff deepened.
Key Takeaways
Kospi and Kosdaq triggered circuit breakers on Wednesday, Korea’s first-ever back-to-back halt.SK Hynix fell sharply despite reporting a 557% jump in quarterly profit that still missed forecasts.Bitcoin rose about 1% toward $64,000, decoupling from Korea’s selloff for a second week straight.Local reporting attributed Wednesday’s extension of the selloff to continued weakness in large semiconductor stocks, heavy foreign selling, and lingering concern over supply-and-demand pressure from single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that had ballooned in size earlier this year.
A Profit Beat That Still Wasn’t EnoughThe selloff deepened even as SK Hynix reported blowout earnings. The chipmaker’s shares fell sharply Wednesday despite posting a 557% jump in quarterly profit, a result that still missed the elevated expectations Wall Street and Seoul investors had built into the stock after months of AI-driven memory-chip demand.
The mismatch once again brought to light just how far semiconductor valuations across Asia had run ahead of fundamentals, leaving little room for anything short of a blowout to satisfy the market.
In the meantime, Senate Majority Leader John Thune signaled the CLARITY Act would not clear the chamber before its August recess, before recovering alongside the broader crypto market.
Wednesday marked the second time in seven days that crypto held its ground through a sharp unwind in AI-linked equities, a pattern that suggests bitcoin’s tight correlation with semiconductor and AI stocks may be loosening. Analysts have generally described the relationship between Kospi swings and bitcoin moves as correlated through a shared investor base rather than causally linked, a framing that Wednesday’s divergence complicates without fully resolving.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix remain the two most heavily weighted stocks on the index, meaning one more leg down in chip shares could easily trigger another circuit breaker before Korean markets get a chance to stabilize.
