Real World Assets (RWA) platform Dow Protocol, which provides e-commerce working capital financing, has closed a $9 million seed round, with participation from OKX Ventures, MH Ventures, and Animoca Brands.

South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Upbit has designated STORJ as a trading warning project and suspended deposits for the token. According to HTX market data, STORJ’s price has seen a continuous gradual decline following its bankruptcy announcement. Its parent company, Storj Labs, announced it has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization under U.S. bankruptcy code to resolve historical debts and continue operations.

Citrini analyst Jukan, citing TrendForce’s latest industry survey, noted that the three leading MLCC (multi-layer ceramic capacitor) manufacturers in South Korea and Japan posted their highest monthly shipments in five years in June: Murata hit 140 billion units, Samsung Electro-Mechanics 98 billion units, and Taiyo Yuden 40 billion units. The growth was mainly driven by strong AI demand, a trend that has continued into July. Cloud service providers’ procurement momentum for self-developed ASICs (such as Google TPU and AWS Trainium) remains robust, boosting demand for high-capacitance, low-voltage, small-sized MLCCs. However, AI-grade production capacity is diverting supply from consumer applications: South Korean and Japanese manufacturers are rapidly shifting their consumer-grade X5R MLCC production capacity to higher-spec X6S/X7R products for AI use, putting pressure on medium-to-high capacitance consumer MLCC (1μF to 22μF) capacity, with inventories of key products generally falling to 30 days or less. Jukan pointed out that supply tightness has triggered a knock-on effect, leading to a surge in distributors’ emergency orders. Order spillover has benefited Taiwanese and Chinese mainland suppliers, driving channel prices sharply higher: Distributors that stocked up in advance raised prices by an average of 20% to 25%, while spot market prices rose to two to three times their original levels. The market shows a structural divergence of “weak end demand but firm channel prices”: On one hand, consumer electronics remain sluggish due to factors like renewed inflation concerns from US-Iran geopolitical tensions and Apple’s recent price hikes for MacBook and iPad; on the other hand, AI bottlenecks are spreading from GPUs and memory to the smallest on-board components, with production capacity reallocation and channel scarcity being the main drivers of current price strength.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US pre-market optical communication concept stocks extended their losing streak, with declines as follows: Marvell Technology (MRVL) fell 2.85%; Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) dropped 3.11%; Lumentum Holdings (LITE) decreased 2.24%; Coherent Corp (COHR) fell 3.31%; and Ciena Corporation (CIEN) dropped 2.7%.

Hyperliquid officially responded to the price pinning incident in its SK Hynix (SKHYNIX) perpetual contract market, explaining how the HIP-3 market operates. Hyperliquid is a permissionless blockchain, where different teams can deploy and run markets on it as an infrastructure layer. The SKHYNIX perpetual contract was deployed and operated by the Trade.xyz team, which is currently investigating the incident and will share updates once a conclusion is reached. Secondly, HIP-3 deployers push their market’s mark price, oracle price, and external perpetual price inputs. Based on today’s posts and support tickets, it may be necessary to walk through this mechanism. Deployers can choose to adopt a mark price method similar to that used for perpetual contracts operated by validators (such as BTC). In this case, the protocol contributes one of three median components: the median of on-chain data (latest trade price, best bid, best ask). The other two components are pushed by the deployer and influence the final mark price. For a simplified example: if the median of on-chain data (latest trade price, best bid, best ask) is 100, but the deployer pushes (150, 151), the mark price will be 150. Note: As of press time, Hyperliquid officials have not provided further clarification. For more related reports, see "The Truth Behind Hyperliquid’s Pinning Incident: $868 Leveraged $500M Hynix Contract Market".

E-commerce working capital RWA platform Dow Protocol announced the completion of a $9 million seed round, with participation from MH Ventures, OKX Ventures, Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, Essentia Partners, and Quartet Group. Dow Protocol serves merchants of leading global e-commerce platforms, providing working capital advances based on their sales receivables and real operational data. Its underlying asset service system is embedded in mainstream e-commerce platforms, enabling direct access to merchants' raw operational data for credit assessment and risk control. Meanwhile, via partnerships with these platforms, repayments are deducted directly from the platform side, bypassing merchant accounts, which fundamentally mitigates repayment risks and establishes an industry-leading collection mechanism. On the capital side, Dow Protocol leverages the instant settlement capabilities of stablecoins, cutting the lengthy disbursement process of traditional lending to as fast as same-day arrival. For the cash-flow-sensitive working capital market, disbursement speed is a value in itself, so market participants are willing to pay a premium for this efficiency. Additionally, Dow Protocol advances new on-chain native logic for working capital advances, enabling high-granularity, programmable execution of advance terms, and reengineering the underlying operational logic of supply chain finance. Dow Protocol positions itself as a general-purpose pan-e-commerce PayFi RWA advance protocol, with a framework scalable to supply chain finance advance needs across multiple sectors including e-commerce, catering, payments, gaming, and AI computing power.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), Nasdaq 100 index futures fell 1%, while Dow Jones futures rose 0.1%. Most large-cap U.S. tech stocks traded lower in pre-market trading: Microsoft gained 0.7%, Meta rose 0.2%, Apple added 0.1%, Amazon was unchanged, Google Class A fell 0.3%, Tesla and Nvidia each dropped 1%, SpaceX declined 2%, and SK Hynix fell 4%.