「Insider Whale」 transferred 89 million USDC to Binance, possibly setting up a $500 million Bitcoin short position on the platform.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), Reddit’s stock price rose more than 13% to trade at $179.4. Earlier reports noted that S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Reddit (ticker: RDDT) will be officially added to the S&P 500 index ahead of the August 18 trading open, replacing the acquired AvalonBay Communities (ticker: AVB).

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), storage and optical communication stocks strengthened at the opening of the US stock market. Most optical communication concept stocks rose: Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) gained 9.07%, Lumentum (LITE) climbed 4.57%, Corning (GLW) advanced 2.86%, and Coherent (COHR) increased 1.60%. The entire storage sector saw broad gains: SanDisk (SNDK) rose 6.15%, Seagate Technology (STX) gained 4.71%, Western Digital (WDC) climbed 4.57%, SK Hynix advanced 3.06%, and Micron Technology increased 2.30%.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S. stocks opened with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 0.1%, the S&P 500 up 0.1%, and the Nasdaq gaining 0.16%. SanDisk (SNDK) rose 7% as the company forecasts mid-to-high double-digit revenue growth for fiscal years 2028 through 2030. Western Digital (WDC) and Micron Technology (MU) each climbed roughly 4%. Applied Materials (AMAT) fell 5% after the company released its prior earnings results.

According to Bloomberg, EdgeConneX, a data center operator backed by EQT, is seeking a credit line of up to $2.5 billion from banks to cover power-related costs for its data center projects. People familiar with the matter said the company is in talks with lenders including Natixis and BBVA, and the financing could be finalized as early as this month. The arrangement aims to help EdgeConneX lock in power supply for its data center projects. Data center developers typically need to pay large deposits to utility firms to build grid connection infrastructure such as transmission lines and substations, and letters of credit can reduce the cash tied up by developers while waiting for power access. Since EQT Infrastructure invested in EdgeConneX in 2020, the company’s completed data center capacity has more than tripled. As power supply emerges as a major bottleneck for data center expansion, an increasing number of developers are adopting similar financing tools. Switch recently secured $3.5 billion in bank commitments, while Blackstone-backed QTS is also in talks for at least $2 billion in related financing. Separately, EdgeConneX is also discussing up to $4 billion in debt financing for a data center project in Texas.

Citrini analyst Zephyr published a report questioning that the performance comparison between HBF and HBM presented by SanDisk at its Investor Day had parameter setting biases, arguing the company "deliberately underestimated HBM's performance" in the demonstration. He noted that SanDisk set the total bandwidth of both HBM and HBF at 12.8TB/s in the comparison, equivalent to 1.6TB/s per stack, while running the Qwen3-480B-A35B model with bfloat16 precision. Zephyr stated that current model inference mostly uses FP4 or FP8, so the required capacity for this model across different quantization methods ranges from approximately 240GB to 480GB. Zephyr added that SanDisk fixed HBM's per-GPU capacity at 192GB, but a 16-layer HBM4E configured with 8 stacks can reach 512GB capacity and deliver around 32TB/s bandwidth, roughly three times the parameter values SanDisk used in its demonstration. He argued that these parameter choices make SanDisk's demonstration result — claiming "HBF only requires 1 to 4 GPUs, while HBM needs 8 GPUs" — fail to fully represent the actual performance of higher-spec HBM configurations.

Grayscale Research Head Zach Pandl published a post stating that the Ethereum and Solana communities are discussing adjustments to their token economic models, with related code changes potentially lowering the annual inflation rates of ETH and SOL, thereby reducing future token supplies. Ceteris paribus, slower supply growth could provide support for token prices. Grayscale estimates that if the relevant adjustments are implemented, by the end of 2031, ETH’s annual supply inflation rate will drop to around 0.4% (close to that of BTC), while SOL’s will stand at approximately 1.1%. By comparison, gold’s annual supply growth rate is roughly 1.8%, and the U.S. CPI inflation rate is about 3.3%. Currently, the relevant proposals are still under discussion within their respective communities. Pandl noted that the Solana-related proposal appears to have broader consensus, making it more likely to be implemented. If the proposals pass, since staking rewards are primarily derived from new token issuance, the number of tokens earned by ETH and SOL stakers will decrease. Pandl pointed out that reduced supply could boost scarcity and exert upward pressure on prices, benefiting holders of unstaked ETH and SOL; whether stakers will benefit depends on the net impact between the reduction in staking rewards and the potential rise in token prices.