Crypto Exchanges
By James Thorp
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Why Markets Are Missing This. Analysts have been quick to celebrate easing energy costs — and fair enough, the Strait of Hormuz…
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Corporate Costs and the CPI Gap. Here's where it gets a bit complicated. DRAM's direct contribution to the Consumer Price Index is…
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What This Means for Bitcoin. Bitcoin was trading near $65,700 on Monday, down 17% over the past month.
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Memory chips are getting expensive. Really expensive. Binance Research put out a report flagging what it calls "chipflation" — a supply-driven inflation force that's been pretty…
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The headline number is hard to ignore: DRAM memory prices have surged sixfold over the past year. The culprit isn't some sudden manufacturing crisis or a natural disaster. It's AI.
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Analysts have been quick to celebrate easing energy costs — and fair enough, the Strait of Hormuz reopening knocked oil prices down roughly 4% — but Binance Research thinks…
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The numbers on the supply side are pretty grim. Even with a projected 30% capacity expansion, PC memory supply could still fall short by around 15% and smartphone memory by about…
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The market structure makes it worse. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron together control roughly 90% of DRAM production and essentially all HBM output. That's a tight oligopoly.
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Here's where it gets a bit complicated. DRAM's direct contribution to the Consumer Price Index is actually pretty small — Binance Research puts it at around 0.10 percentage points.
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More context: Coinbase Panel Warns Bitcoin Faces Real Quantum Risk but Splits on Satoshis Coins
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The broader inflationary pressure is real even if the CPI line item looks modest. And it's hitting simultaneously with supply constraints in energy and food — which means the…
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Bitcoin was trading near $65,700 on Monday, down 17% over the past month. The short-term read from Binance Research isn't particularly bullish.
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But the longer-term framing is different. Binance Research says that in an environment of persistent, supply-side inflation — the kind that central banks can't easily fix by…
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"Chipflation" as a concept gained traction as a market concern in 2025, and it's clearly not going away.
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See also: Coinbase Flags Millions of Bitcoin at Risk from Address Reuse Flaw
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