Live updates: Japan's collapsing yen is pushing companies into bitcoin and XRP

Hedge funds have turned the most bearish on the yen since 2007, boosting bets on further losses to nearly 138,000 contracts as of June 30.

OpenAI said Wednesday it will publicly launch its GPT-5.6 model family this Thursday, expanding access globally after weeks of restricted preview.

The three models are named Sol, Terra and Luna - drawn from the Latin names for the sun, earth and moon, meant to mark capability tiers rather than model generations.

Thursday's public release ends that gated period and puts one of the most capable model families to date into general access, feeding the same AI-infrastructure race that has driven this month's market swings from chip stocks to crypto.

GPT-5.6 spent the past two weeks in a limited preview restricted to about 20 government-approved partners, a rollout OpenAI said was coordinated with the U.S. government over the models' cybersecurity capabilities.

Meanwhile, the naming choice draws amused reactions in crypto circles on social media.

Terra and Luna were the twin tokens at the center of a $40 billion implosion in May 2022, when the TerraUSD stablecoin lost its dollar peg and dragged its sister token LUNA to near zero, wiping out retail holders and triggering a cascade that took down Three Arrows Capital, Celsius and eventually FTX.

The names remain shorthand in crypto for catastrophic failure.

Cryptocurrency exchanges' trading volume of perpetual futures contracts on real-world assets (RWAs) reached $347 billion for the month of May, up from $230 million at the start of 2025, according to CoinGecko .

Exchanges have processed more than $1.32 trillion in perpetual futures contracts for traditional finance instruments this year, compared with $104 billion last year, the firm's data shows.

Real-world asset perpetual futures overtook spot lst November, with $26.4 billion in monthly volume versus $17.7 billion for spot RWAs. In 2026, TradFi perps generated more than 8 times the volume of spot RWAs.

Binance led the category with almost $500 billion in volume across the 17-month period, while MEXC handled $324 billion and Hyperliquid $272 billion. Binance’s monthly share rose to 36% from 25%, extending its lead in crypto derivatives trading .

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $21.44 million on Monday, a third consecutive day of net inflows after $265.69 million on July 6 and $221.72 million on July 2, per SoSoValue data. It is the first three-day inflow run since the record June outflows began, though Monday's figure was the smallest of the three.

BlackRock's IBIT drove the day with $54.80 million, offsetting outflows from Fidelity's FBTC and ARKB. Total bitcoin ETF assets sit at $77.26 billion, up from a June 30 low of $70.95 billion.

The three-day run is modest in size but marks a shift in direction after eight straight weeks of net weekly outflows. Whether it holds is the signal that matters. The bid faded twice before in similar spots this year, and the real test comes with the Fed's late-July meeting and the mid-July inflation print.

Bitcoin traded near $63,800 as the data landed, up on the week, per CoinDesk data.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the fragile ceasefire recently reached with Iran is over after the two nations exchanged airstrikes, injecting renewed geopolitical uncertainty in financial markets.

The memorandum of understanding and the ceasefire with Iran "is over, as far as I'm concerned," he said while speaking alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the NATO summit in Ankara.

WTI crude oil futures jumped by 5% to over $74 a barrel while bitcoin (BTC) slipped to $62,000, down 2% since midnight UTC. Futures tied to Nasdaq traded 1.2% lower at 29,000 points.

Robinhood Chain, the trading platform's layer-2 blockchain built on Arbitrum (ARB), has topped $100 million in total value locked (TVL) just a week after its debut, according to DeFiLlama data .

The lion’s share of funds, about $89.8 million, are held on lending platform Morpho, which the company is leveraging to power its newly launched Robinhood Earn product.

Decentralized exchange Uniswap is the next biggest, with $13 million in total value locked, followed by prediction market Meridian.

South Korea's Kospi has fallen about 20% from last month's peak — a figure considered to be a technical bear market in financial circles — as the AI-demand doubts that have whipsawed the index this month deepened.

The index dropped as much as 5.7% Wednesday, with SK Hynix falling 5% and Samsung losing 6.9%. Bitcoin traded near $62,650, down 0.6% on the day but still up 6.1% on the week, CoinDesk data show.

Korea's chip-heavy stock market, the best performer in the world earlier this year, has started to crack on concerns that hyperscalers' massive spending on AI isn't producing the returns to justify it, with worries over a possible glut of computing capacity.

The Kospi crashed 10% on June 22, slid again July 2, and has now given back most of a 116% year-to-date gain, trimmed to about 73%.

Samsung reported a 19-fold jump in quarterly profit this week on AI memory demand, and the stock fell anyway. Traders are demanding more proof to justify the money pouring into the AI supply chain, and Korea's concentration in two chipmakers plus leveraged ETFs that amplify moves has turned that doubt into outsized swings.

Bitcoin's relative calm fits the read that has held through the month. Crypto is caught in the same AI-driven risk complex, but its deeper, more liquid market has absorbed the macro pressure without the forced-deleveraging cascades hitting Korean equities.

U.S. consumers are growing increasingly concerned about the rising cost of living, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey released Tuesday.

Consumers now expect inflation to rise to 3.7% over the next year, up from 3.5% in May and the highest reading since September 2023. Their three-year inflation expectations climbed to 3.3%, the highest level since June 2022. Five-year inflation expectations remained unchanged at 3%.

These rising inflation expectations are particularly relevant for perceived store of value assets like gold and bitcoin. When consumers anticipate high inflation, they often park a portion of their savings in store-of-value assets.

The yen is trading near its weakest level in four decades, and Japanese companies are moving crypto onto their balance sheets to escape it.

SBI VC Trade on Tuesday said corporate demand for bitcoin and XRP is climbing as the currency's slide pushes firms to diversify reserves beyond cash, with the exchange's registered accounts passing 2 million, roughly double its 2025 count.

Hedge funds have turned the most bearish on the yen since 2007, boosting bets on further losses to nearly 138,000 contracts as of June 30, per CFTC data. The dollar buys around 162 yen as of Asian morning hours Wednesday.

The driver is the interest-rate gap between a hawkish U.S. Fed and a Bank of Japan still far behind it, the same gap that makes holding yen cash a losing position and sends firms looking for harder assets.

SBI, the crypto arm of Tokyo-based SBI Holdings, noted demand for its corporate service has grown alongside companies that hand out bitcoin or XRP through shareholder-perk programs.

The move fits a pattern the market has watched all month. A weak yen has fed the carry trade, where investors borrow cheaply in yen to buy higher-returning assets elsewhere, and some of that flow is now reaching crypto through regulated Japanese channels rather than offshore ones.

Bitcoin traded near $62,650 on Tuesday, up 6.1% on the week, per CoinDesk data.

Stablecoin market cap fell to $312B in June, its largest monthly drop since TerraUSD, while tokenized equity volumes surged 145% to a record $3.86B.

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