South Korea's KOSPI triggered only its ninth Level 1 circuit breaker on June 27, halting trading for 20 minutes after a Broadcom guidance miss hit semiconductor stocks and pushed Bitcoin to a fresh 2026 low.
At 9:03 a.m. KST, the benchmark dropped 683 points, 8.4% to 7,477, crossing the automatic halt threshold. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each fell approximately 10% intraday; the chipmakers together account for more than half of the index by market cap, after crossing 50% in May.
The immediate trigger was Broadcom's AI chip sales guidance, which missed analyst expectations and sent the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down 10.26%, its sharpest single-session drop since March 2020. The selloff hit a market already under pressure: the Bureau of Economic Analysis released May PCE data on June 25 showing inflation at 4.1% year over year, a three-year high that had revived Federal Reserve rate-hike expectations heading into the session.
The halt was rare. The previous KOSPI circuit breaker came during the COVID crash in March 2020; Friday's was only the ninth in the index's history.
Bitcoin fell to an intraday low of $58,188 as Asian risk-off sentiment spread into crypto markets, below the prior 2026 low of $59,100 reached in early June.
CoinDesk data showed more than $1 billion in total crypto positions liquidated in the 24-hour session. Long positions accounted for $842 million, while Bitcoin-specific liquidations reached $489 million and ether liquidations reached $295 million.
That total was smaller than the $1.26 billion cleared in the prior session's May PCE-driven wave, but the two sessions together marked the heaviest back-to-back liquidation pressure of 2026.
South Korea is one of the world's largest retail crypto markets. The kimchi premium, the spread between Korean and offshore crypto prices, is a standing measure of local demand intensity, making sharp equity moves in Seoul more relevant for Asian crypto trading than a routine regional selloff.