Japan and South Korea stock markets closed higher, with Samsung Electronics rising 6.7%.

According to Yonhap News Agency, South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) approved relevant rule amendments on August 12, which will take effect on August 19 to further strengthen price deviation rate management for ETFs and ETNs, and expand simulation trading requirements to single-stock leveraged products (including inverse products) listed domestically and overseas. The new rules tighten the price deviation rate standards for securities firms on all ETFs and ETNs: from 3% for domestic products and 6% for overseas products to 2% and 5% respectively. For liquidity providers that intentionally, due to gross negligence, or repeatedly violate management obligations, the Korea Exchange plans to restrict their new liquidity provision business. Starting August 19, individual retail investors making their first investment in single-stock leveraged products listed in South Korea or overseas must complete free simulation trading first. Investors need to finish at least 5 trading days of simulation sessions, each lasting over 1 hour, totaling no less than 5 hours, to experience the negative compound interest effect of leveraged products and the actual trading environment. The FSC noted that it had already raised the basic margin for single-stock leveraged products to 30 million won in cash on July 31, and trading volume of these products dropped to less than one-fifteenth of the previous day’s level that same day. The regulatory authorities added that while recent stock market volatility has eased, unstable factors remain, and they will continue monitoring the market and rolling out follow-up measures.

According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa), a newly created wallet purchased approximately $7.31 million worth of ETH over the past hour. The address 0x856…3cD9F withdrew stablecoins from Binance an hour ago, then used CowSwap to acquire 3,877.67 ETH in batches at an average price of $1,886.55. The address has since transferred all of its ETH to 0xC32…D64f9.

Binance bStocks shared a post stating "Almost time." The accompanying image in the post displays the date August 13, 2026, teasing that an important announcement could be released tomorrow.

According to CNBC, Norway’s $2.34 trillion sovereign wealth fund generated over $182 billion in profits in the first half of the year, marking a new historical high for the same period, with an investment return rate of 9.4%. Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the fund, said the strong performance was mainly driven by robust stock market results, particularly gains in Asian tech stocks. In its latest half-year report, the fund disclosed its stake in SpaceX for the first time: it holds approximately 0.05% of SpaceX, worth just over $1.2 billion as of June 30. By contrast, the fund holds around 1.3% of Nvidia’s shares, valued at $61.8 billion, and roughly 1.2% of Apple’s stock, worth $52.7 billion. Established in the 1990s, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is primarily funded by the country’s oil and gas revenues. It currently invests in over 7,000 companies across more than 50 countries globally, holding about 1.5% of all global listed companies’ shares. Equities make up more than two-thirds of its overall portfolio, with U.S. stocks accounting for roughly 40% of the total.

Goldman Sachs TMT trading expert Peter Callahan noted that post this earnings season, the AI narrative within the software sector is shifting. Previously, the market was more concerned that generative AI would erode the moats of traditional software firms, but the data infrastructure and developer tools space has begun shifting from "AI headwinds" to "AI tailwinds", with companies like Cloudflare, Palantir, Datadog, Twilio, and Atlassian drawing increased attention. By contrast, whether traditional SaaS application companies can build an equally clear AI monetization logic remains to be seen. The underlying shift is that AI commercialization is expanding from model training to inference, AI agents, and automated applications. Cloudflare disclosed that non-human traffic has already surpassed human traffic, and projected that if the current trend continues, machine-generated network requests will grow rapidly. This means AI is not necessarily just a disruptor to software firms: for platforms that host data, APIs, network traffic, security, and developer tools, the growing number of AI agents and their call frequency could in itself become a new source of demand. As a result, a clear divide is emerging in the software industry: whether AI is a net positive increasingly depends on whether a company operates at the application layer or the infrastructure layer, and whether it can monetize directly from the growth in AI traffic. (Jin10)

Harmony issued a statement announcing that it has suspended its cross-chain bridge service due to today’s security incident, and ordered all validators to immediately upgrade to the latest patch. The patch can prevent further unauthorized token minting, the project said, with additional updates to follow to address the tokens that have already been minted. In addition, Harmony has requested all cryptocurrency exchanges to block and freeze funds linked to four relevant wallet addresses. Earlier reports confirmed that Harmony suffered another security breach today. On-chain analysis shows the project was likely hit by an empty block vulnerability attack, with the attacker minting around 4 billion ONE tokens without authorization—equaling roughly 26% of the current total supply. About 2.8 billion of these tokens were subsequently transferred to exchanges, triggering notable selling pressure on the market. As a result, ONE’s price was cut in half intraday.