Bitcoin Holds Steady as Kospi Hits a Record

South Korean chip stocks and the Kospi surged, but crypto mostly sat still. BNB was the only major standout, while Bitcoin and Ether barely changed.

Key Takeaways

• Bitcoin hovered around $64,300 on Friday, even as Asian stocks ripped higher and the Kospi set a record.
• Ether, XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin were mostly flat, while BNB stood out with a 3% daily gain.
• A Coldcard wallet security incident did not visibly move the price, even after about 594 Bitcoin were siphoned off.

Bitcoin was still trading near $64,300 (€56,000) on Friday, even with one of the year’s biggest stock rallies playing out in Asia. South Korea’s Kospi climbed as much as 17%, chip funds bounced sharply, and yet crypto barely flinched. Most major coins were stuck in place, with BNB the clear outlier after rising 3% on the day.

The Crypto Market Stays Quiet

Ether was changing hands around $1,907 (€1,660), XRP at $1.08 (€0.94), Solana at $74 (€64), and Dogecoin at $0.07 (€0,061). In Bitcoin, trading volume came to about $27 billion (€23.5 billion), while Ether saw roughly $7 billion (€6.1 billion). Bitcoin briefly pushed up to $65,300 (€56,900) in early Asian trading, but the move faded within an hour.

The weekly picture is still soft. HYPE is down 5% over the past seven sessions, Solana and XRP are each lower by 3%, and Bitcoin has slipped 2%. Ether and Dogecoin are up 1%, but that has done little to change the broader tone, which is still one of hesitation.

Stocks Are Leading the Way

The stock market move was much more dramatic. Samsung and SK Hynix both climbed more than 23%, while Taiwan Semiconductor added 10%. Those gains helped drive a broad rebound across Asian markets after an earlier sell-off had dragged the Kospi more than 40% below its June high.

Tech also turned higher in the U.S. The Nasdaq 100 ended a six-day losing streak, Amazon surged nearly 10% after strong cloud results, and Apple dropped 6% on supply worries. Bitcoin had often tracked chip stocks in July, but this time it mostly shrugged off both the earlier slump and this week’s rebound.

Why This Matters

For European crypto readers, the takeaway is simple: Bitcoin does not always move in lockstep with stock market risk appetite. Right now, traders seem to be reacting more to specific flows and sector rotations than to a broad macro narrative. That matters for how the market keeps pricing the link between crypto, U.S. tech, and Asian equities.

A security incident involving Coldcard wallets also failed to shake the market. About 594 Bitcoin, worth roughly $38 million (€33.1 million), were siphoned off on Thursday from around 500 wallets because of a flaw in the hardware wallet’s key generation. Coldcard says it uses two secure elements from different vendors to store the master secret of a BIP39 wallet, and its firmware is open source and reproducible, but none of that showed up in the price action.