Japan’s Nikkei 225 barely budged Tuesday despite a historic joint US-Japan intervention to prop up the yen. But Kioxia Holdings’ earnings miss suggests the real pain has not landed yet.
Tokyo and Washington intervened to halt months of yen weakness, and Kioxia posted disappointing guidance days later. Markets have absorbed both events calmly so far, but the underlying risks, a possible BOJ rate hike and a currency still primed to strengthen, remain unresolved.
The Nikkei 225 slipped slightly, 0.6% to around 63,300 on Tuesday. That extended Monday’s 1.4% drop.
Both moves look mild next to the selloff traders feared. Tokyo and Washington had just confirmed their first coordinated yen-buying operation in decades.
Kioxia Holdings actually rose slightly on Tuesday. But others in Japan, like SoftBank Group and Advantest, declined as chip stocks led the pullback.
The move follows Kioxia’s 65% plunge from June highs. That slide had already fueled speculation over shareholder payouts before Friday’s earnings.
The yen has settled near 155 to 157 per dollar. It gained as much as 3.8% over two sessions last week, when Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the joint action.
Kioxia’s fiscal first-half operating income guidance missed analyst estimates on July 31. The company announced a three-for-one stock split and a share buyback the same day, but neither measure addressed the earnings shortfall itself.
A stronger yen deepens that problem. Kioxia is an export-heavy memory chipmaker, so it loses value on overseas sales whenever the currency strengthens. That adds currency drag to an outlook it already cut.
The timing makes things worse. Global memory chip prices are still swinging, and the wider AI chip trade has wobbled all through July. Korean rivals SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics posted their own sharp moves during that stretch.
The bigger risk sits with the Bank of Japan. The central bank held rates at 1% last week but left the door open to a hike. Bessent has repeatedly pushed Governor Kazuo Ueda toward tightening further.
The BOJ’s next policy meeting in September is the trigger point traders are watching. A hike would widen room for further yen strength. Officials have also signaled they will intervene again if the currency slides back toward its recent lows.
That combination puts Kioxia in a tough spot. It already missed its own guidance, and the currency it depends on looks primed to keep rising.
Whether Kioxia’s slide deepens may depend less on its own numbers. It may hinge more on what the BOJ decides in six weeks.
The post Japan Stocks Shrug Off Yen Shock, But Kioxia Signals More Pain Ahead appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Today in crypto, Boltz paused its Bitcoin swap service after a wave of AI-assisted hacking attempts and Hashdex said it will liquidate its spot Bitcoin ETF after failing to attract enough investor assets. Meanwhile, Bernstein warned that delays to the CLARITY Act could pressure crypto valuations.Boltz pauses service after wave of AI-assisted hacking attemptsBoltz, a non-custodial Bitcoin swap service, says it is disabling its service until further notice after a rise in AI-assisted hacking attempts over the last few months.In a post to X on Monday, Boltz said the decision came after seeing a steady increase in “automated AI-assisted probing” of its infrastructure this year. “After reviewing the results of our own recent security scans, we cannot responsibly re-enable Boltz swaps, especially as we are being actively targeted by what appear to be multiple resourceful groups while we race to deploy fixes.” Boltz’s operational pause highlights the difficulty that smaller development teams are facing, as attackers discover vulnerabilities and adapt exploits faster than they can respond.“In the past few days alone we saw a drastic acceleration [of attacks] and we do not believe this asymmetry will reverse,” said Boltz. Hashdex to liquidate its spot Bitcoin ETFHashdex is shutting down its spot Bitcoin ETF after failing to attract enough investor assets, marking the first major closure among the wave of US spot BTC funds.The asset manager said it will liquidate the fund this month after reviewing its trading activity, operating costs and investor demand. Remaining shareholders will receive cash distributions once the fund sells its approximately 225 Bitcoin holdings. The ETF, which trades under the DEFI ticker on NYSE Arca, currently manages about $14.3 million in assets.The fund entered the US spot Bitcoin ETF market in March 2024, months after rival products had already launched. Despite initial optimism that it could gain traction, the ETF never grew beyond roughly $18 million in assets. It originally debuted in 2022 as a Bitcoin futures ETF before converting to a spot fund. Among US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs, it ranks as the smallest by assets, highlighting the growing divide between dominant issuers and smaller competitors.CLARITY Act failure could send crypto valuations lower: BernsteinThe odds of the CLARITY Act passage are dwindling as the US Senate is scheduled to begin summer recess at the end of this week, threatening another leg down for cryptocurrency valuations, according to wealth manager Bernstein.Bernstein said that the Senate’s failure to pass the legislation could trigger an immediate negative “industry knee-jerk reaction,” which may result in another leg down for Bitcoin and the broader crypto market.“From a tactical standpoint, we expect the crypto market to bottom and start showing momentum towards late Q3 and early Q4 prior to the mid-terms,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a Monday report shared with Cointelegraph.At the same time, however, the analysts said that Senate failure to pass the legislation may bring more proactive policy support from regulators, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which may accelerate rulemaking initiatives under Project Crypto.Project Crypto is a regulatory initiative first announced by SEC Chairman Paul Atkins in July 2025, which was later expanded into a joint staff initiative between the SEC and CFTC in September 2025. The initiative aims to create a workable regulatory framework for digital assets using existing agency authority while Congress finalizes crypto market legislation under the CLARITY Act.
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