According to BlockBeats, on July 17, Crypto.com announced that it has received a $400 million strategic investment from global market maker Citadel Securities, valuing the company at $20 billion post-investment. This is the first time the company has received institutional funding in its ten-year history.

Jim Esposito, president of Citadel Securities, said the convergence of traditional financial markets and digital asset infrastructure is an exciting evolution that will improve market efficiency, and Crypto.com has laid the foundation for supporting the continued institutionalization of the digital asset market.

Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, stated that crypto is increasingly becoming a track record for financial infrastructure, with an astonishing scale of opportunity at hand. After a decade of building compliance and technological infrastructure, the company is fully prepared to capture the growth wave across all asset classes.

This funding round comes at a crucial juncture for the institutionalization of the crypto industry. The funds are expected to propel Crypto.com's expansion across all asset classes, including tokenized securities and derivatives, bridging the gap between digital assets and traditional markets and building a more efficient 24/7 financial ecosystem. Citadel Securities, renowned for its technology-driven next-generation market-making capabilities, represents a deep integration between the core infrastructure of traditional finance and a crypto-native platform.

According to BlockBeats, on July 17th, data from BIT (bit.com) showed that TSMC's strong second-quarter results, released before the US stock market opened yesterday, failed to boost the chip sector. Instead, higher capital expenditure guidance triggered a re-evaluation of the timeline for AI investment returns, revealing an anomaly in the core logic of tech stocks: the stronger the fundamentals, the heavier the selling pressure. TSMC recorded a gross margin of 67.7% and raised its capital expenditure guidance to $60-64 billion, which should have been strong evidence for the AI capital expenditure narrative, but the market interpreted it as "expenditure inflation."

Most U.S. tech stocks closed lower this morning, including Tesla down 0.86%, Amazon down 1.99%, Nvidia down 2.40%, Meta down 2.46%, and Google A down 4.44%.

According to BlockBeats, on July 17th, based on BIT (bit.com) market data, all three major U.S. stock indexes closed lower: the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.2%, the Nasdaq Composite fell 1.47%, and the S&P 500 fell 0.51%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 4.3% in a single day, and the semiconductor sector as a whole has fallen 22% from its mid-June high, officially entering a technical bear market.

Semiconductor and memory stocks plummeted: SK Hynix ADR fell more than 13%, SanDisk fell more than 12%, Micron fell more than 5%, Western Digital fell more than 9%, and Seagate Technology fell 10%.