TACO Trading Heats Up Again: Model Predicts Trump May Shift Iran Policy by Late July

According to The Wall Street Journal, AMD (AMD.O) has signed a major chip and investment deal with Anthropic. AMD will invest $5 billion in Anthropic as part of the chip transaction, while Anthropic will start purchasing up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s (AMD.O) latest-generation chips in the first half of 2027.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said the crypto exchange has reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. Under the deal, the SEC will pay $150,000 and revise its record-keeping policy. The lawsuit stemmed from the SEC’s loss of nearly a year’s worth of communications between former Chair Gary Gensler and other senior officials during a peak period of crypto industry enforcement. Coinbase had previously requested the SEC to provide documents outlining how it applies securities laws to digital assets, a demand that was rejected. The exchange then filed the lawsuit and secured a court ruling in its favor. The SEC attributed the lost text messages to an automatic data deletion process. Grewal noted the SEC has previously fined financial institutions billions of dollars for similar record-keeping lapses. This February, Coinbase also reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) over another FOIA lawsuit. Coinbase said that case revealed the FDIC had ordered nearly 20 banks to halt crypto asset-related operations starting in 2022. The resulting documents later sparked congressional hearings and led a court to find the FDIC violated federal law. Grewal stated both lawsuits center on government transparency and due process, adding that the American public has a right to know whether regulators are restricting access to banking services for legitimate crypto firms through non-public means.

Independent research firm TS Lombard’s report indicates that South Korean storage chip stocks are valued near fair levels, though market expectations for storage companies’ future earnings may still be overly optimistic. Quarterly growth in traditional DRAM contract prices slowed from 93%–98% in the first quarter to 58%–63% in the second quarter; TrendForce projects it will further decelerate to 13%–18% in the third quarter. The spot market is stabilizing, with DRAM and HBM prices also starting to fall. The report points out that long-term supply agreements provide a floor for sales volumes and prices, but also limit suppliers’ ability to continue raising prices, and related protections will gradually weaken over the next year, making it difficult to support further large upward adjustments to earnings expectations. For HBM, 2026 annual contract price hikes lag behind traditional DRAM, and HBM’s first-quarter earnings were even lower than those of 64GB DDR5 RDIMMs. While larger chip sizes and wafer resource competition in 2027 theoretically should boost suppliers’ bargaining power, more players are entering the market: ChangXin Memory Technologies has begun sampling, global trackable DRAM capacity is projected to reach around 2.1 million units per month by the end of 2026, and TSMC has also entered the HBM4 base chip and packaging segments. Current consensus market expectations peg storage companies’ 2027 EPS growth at 36%–40%, but TrendForce forecasts unit supply growth of only 15%–20%. TS Lombard believes that current share prices of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix largely reflect a scenario where 2027 earnings are 40%–50% lower than the market consensus, with valuations near fair levels, though storage cycle risks have not fully dissipated.

According to market sources, OpenAI will launch a new enterprise-focused software called OpenAI Presence.

Zilliqa has disclosed a critical random number generation vulnerability in its Zilliqa Ledger application, which impacts Schnorr signatures for native non-EVM Zilliqa transactions. Attackers can recover signers’ private keys from biased ephemeral random numbers using only public on-chain data. Any account that has signed and broadcasted approximately 5 or more native transactions via the Zilliqa Ledger app should be considered compromised. As affected signatures are permanently recorded on-chain, updating the application later will not resolve the risk—compromised private keys must be deactivated. EVM transactions and development tools including zilliqa-js, gozilliqa-sdk, and pyzil are not affected. The vulnerability stems from the app selecting the wrong 32-byte segment when copying random numbers, retaining 8 bytes of zero padding while losing 8 bytes of entropy, leading up to 64 bits of each random number being fixed to zero. Attackers can leverage 5 or more affected signatures to recover private keys in seconds using standard hardware. Zilliqa observed suspected active exploitation on July 19 and confirmed the root cause on July 21. To prevent further fund losses, Zilliqa has suspended native transactions and is collaborating with Ledger to develop a patched application. However, the patch cannot protect already exposed keys; affected users should not transfer assets on their own and must wait for official coordinated disposal plans.

Wintermute’s market analysis states that June’s U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell 0.4% month-over-month, marking the largest single-month decline since April 2020. The overall inflation rate dropped from 4.2% to 3.5%, below the market’s expected 3.8%. Markets have priced out the possibility of a July interest rate hike by the U.S. Federal Reserve, but renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran and the resumption of port blockades pushed Brent crude up 15.54% for the week. Risk assets showed clear divergence: Ethereum (ETH) rose 3.64%, Bitcoin (BTC) gained 1.46%, while the Nasdaq Composite index fell 4.16%. Following the U.S. CPI release, Bitcoin briefly surged from around $62,000 to $64,900, and ETH jumped as much as 7% to $1,884, triggering roughly $134 million in short-position liquidations within an hour. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw a combined net inflow of approximately $191 million on Tuesday and Wednesday, ending a 10-day streak of net outflows. However, compared to June’s record $4.5 billion net outflow, the current inflow scale remains insufficient to confirm a sustained trend. Bitcoin held onto its post-CPI gains amid a sell-off in chip stocks, indicating the crypto market structure is repairing but has not yet formed a definitive upward trend. Wintermute believes that if spot Bitcoin ETFs maintain net inflows for a consecutive week and Bitcoin trades above $66,000 for several sessions, the market’s relative strength signal will be confirmed. This assessment could be invalidated if Brent crude breaks above $90 or the Strait of Hormuz is officially closed.