overs

ChainCatcher crypto trader Bonk Guy posted on the X platform in response to the recent controversy surrounding his purchase of EMBER and explained his investment logic. Bonk Guy stated that he first noticed the project when EMBER's market cap was about 3 million dollars but did not buy in. After observing for a day due to the rapid growth of platform data, he re-evaluated and bought in from a market cap of about 7 million dollars all the way up to a 20 million dollar market cap.Bonk Guy mentioned that EMBER is the main Launchpad based on Meteora, supporting the use of SOL, USDC, and over 150 tokenized stocks as paired assets for issuing tokens, and employs Meteora Dynamic Bonding Curve technology, while also providing features such as token tax distribution, Daily Jackpots, and DAO governance.According to his disclosure, Ember recorded about 51.7 million dollars in trading volume and 561,000 dollars in fees within 3 days of launch, with a total of 2,041 tokens issued, over 41,800 unique wallet addresses, and 149,000 Solana transactions. Bonk Guy compared his purchase of Ember to his previous trade in PONS, stating that he first saw PONS when its market cap was below 1 million dollars, similarly ignoring it for a whole day, and then began buying in at around a 4 million dollar market cap. Rather than whether a popular token has already emerged, it is more important to observe the real usage data underlying the Launchpad.Additionally, Bonk Guy stated that both Robinhood Chain and BNB Chain have multiple successful Launchpads, and that Solana's meme trading ecosystem has developed over a longer period, so there is no reason to believe that Solana can ultimately only accommodate one successful Launchpad. He also mentioned that his trading decisions are not based on market consensus. Some of his past most successful trades often came from identifying opportunities before the market formed a consensus; by the time everyone recognizes it, the asymmetric upside potential is usually significantly reduced.Regarding the recent controversy, Bonk Guy stated that the claim "EMBER has over 50% of Bubblemaps address clusters" has been clarified by Bubblemaps; his previous statement that Ember "was launched by Meteora" is also inaccurate, with a more accurate description being that Ember is based on Meteora's related infrastructure, which is now included in the Meteora ecosystem page. Bonk Guy emphasized that he has no relationship with the Ember team, and EMBER is a personal trade for him.

The Compound Foundation announced the launch of the Institutional Market, a lending market exclusively for whitelisted institutions, supporting borrowing of ETH, wstETH, WBTC, and cbBTC with USDC, with a maximum loan-to-value ratio of 87%. On its first day of launch, the market was oversubscribed, with participation from institutions such as DeFi Saver, K3/Nexo, KPK, and Yearn. The entry threshold is a deposit of 100,000 USDC, and Compound has reserved 200,000 USDC as supplier incentives, which will be proportionally distributed to whitelisted participants within three months, with a supply cap of 20 million USD.This market is the first product to be launched from the 52 million USD plan approved by the Compound DAO in August, described by the foundation as the Institutional Comet built on v3.5, independent of the DAO-funded V4 roadmap. Compound stated that v3 has been running for four years without any incidents. Currently, Compound's total locked value is 1.53 billion USD, with 1.42 billion USD on the Ethereum chain, ranking sixth among lending protocols on DefiLlama, with a 23% growth over the past 30 days.The Compound Foundation was relaunched on August 17 with a budget of 52 million USD, with a team from Coinbase, Anchorage, NEAR, and Maple.

According to Cryptopolitan, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) won first place in the Saxony-Anhalt elections with a vote share of 43.8%, securing 39 out of 83 seats, while the CDU's vote share significantly dropped to 17.2%. Although this victory does not directly affect federal tax law, it will further strengthen AfD's voice in the discussions on cryptocurrency tax reform in Berlin.AfD has consistently advocated for the retention of the 12-month tax exemption policy for Bitcoin holdings and opposes including private mining and Lightning Network node operations under commercial taxation. In contrast, the German Ministry of Finance plans to abolish this tax exemption period, aiming to increase annual revenue by at least 1 billion euros.

According to Bitcoin.com, the Swedish Tax Agency has issued tax reassessments and fines totaling approximately $56.5 million (around 540 million Swedish Krona) to six cryptocurrency mining companies in Boden, accusing them of disguising their mining operations through complex corporate structures and illegally obtaining tax benefits for data centers.This enforcement action stems from a comprehensive industry audit covering 2024 to 2026, with a total of nine mining companies nationwide being pursued for over $50 million in taxes, with the six companies in Boden accounting for the vast majority. Among them, Bikupan Datacenter, a subsidiary of Hive Digital, has initiated financial restructuring due to its inability to pay taxes and has appealed the tax ruling to the Supreme Administrative Court. A previous investigation by the public broadcaster SVT Norrbotten revealed that cryptocurrency mining companies have caused the Swedish government to lose approximately $100 million in tax revenue.

A British man named Chris has recovered 61 bitcoins, currently worth about 4.4 million dollars, after a 12-year legal dispute following the closure of the UK cryptocurrency exchange Intersango in 2014. Chris purchased the bitcoins in 2011 and subsequently left the assets in the exchange's custody, without transferring them to a self-custody wallet.Intersango, formerly known as Britcoin, was one of the first exchanges in the UK to offer bitcoin trading in pounds. Ryan Sweetnam, the financial litigation director at CEL Solicitors, assisted in recovering the assets. The law firm took 4 months to submit the necessary documents to a US court, ultimately completing the return through negotiation. Chris stated that he now opens the wallet where the bitcoins are stored about 20 times a day.

According to Digital Asset, the National Tax Service of South Korea has issued regulations stating that even if overseas virtual asset (digital asset) exchanges go bankrupt, individuals with accounts at those exchanges must declare those accounts as overseas financial accounts. The National Tax Service stated on the 28th of last month: "Residents who open accounts with overseas virtual asset operators for the purpose of trading digital assets must declare those accounts as overseas financial accounts, even if the operators go bankrupt."In addition, it is expected that the scale of digital assets included in the overseas financial account declaration will reach 105 trillion Korean won by 2026, a decrease of 5.4% compared to 2025.

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki stated that he hopes to avoid a race towards "unmonitorability" of models due to misleading reports. He mentioned that current cutting-edge models, including Astra, have a computational graph depth that differs from GPT-4 by no more than a factor of two. Since the launch of the first inference models, OpenAI has been committed to preserving and utilizing chain-of-thought monitoring, believing that this technology helps observe how the model's alignment capabilities generalize from the training distribution.Pachocki also pointed out that chain-of-thought monitoring is relatively fragile, and the trend is not optimistic, but it can still be strengthened through research and has become a core objective of OpenAI's current research agenda. Previously, The Information reported that Astra uses recurrent depth, allowing the same set of Transformer layers to compute repeatedly. As a result, some inferences can occur internally within the model, without needing to be entirely expressed as a chain of thought, raising concerns about whether the model will become increasingly difficult to monitor.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC) has proposed allowing intermediaries to provide certain digital asset derivatives traded overseas to retail investors. According to the proposal, eligible products must be similar to crypto derivatives traded domestically in Thailand, including aspects such as underlying assets, duration, leverage, and settlement methods. At the same time, these products must be traded on exchanges that adopt central counterparty clearing and are supervised by regulatory bodies belonging to specific international regulatory or exchange organizations.Crypto derivatives that do not meet the above conditions will only be available to institutional investors. The Thai SEC stated that institutional investors are better equipped to assess and manage complex and high-risk products. Current rules only allow intermediaries to provide relevant investment services to retail and high-net-worth clients when overseas derivatives are similar to domestic trading products, while overseas crypto derivatives, due to their varying structures and risk levels, require targeted regulations.This consultation is the latest initiative by Thailand to incorporate crypto-related products into the regulated capital market. The Thai SEC officially designated cryptocurrencies and digital tokens as permissible derivative underlying assets in a notice issued on March 5 and is discussing potential contract specifications with the Thailand Futures Exchange. The consultation will continue until September 30, and the Thai SEC has not yet announced the proposed implementation date for the revisions.

MediaTek announced on the 31st that it has completed the pricing of $3.9 billion (nearly NT$125 billion) in overseas convertible bonds, bringing in funds from two AI giants, Nvidia and Google's parent company Alphabet. Nvidia accounted for $3.5 billion (about NT$110 billion), approximately 90% of the total amount, and announced that the two companies will deepen their cooperation in the future. This is the largest overseas convertible bond issuance in the history of Taiwan's capital market and also Nvidia's first investment in a Taiwanese company.According to a joint statement from Nvidia and MediaTek, Nvidia will purchase MediaTek's overseas convertible bonds. This investment expands the cooperation between the two parties, and MediaTek will use Nvidia's NVLink Fusion and Nvidia's recently released NVHBM technology to facilitate smoother communication of components in data centers. Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang stated that the cooperation with MediaTek has "expanded significantly," making it one of the top partnerships; MediaTek's processors will become the foundation for the next generation of Windows PCs. MediaTek stated that this overseas fundraising attracted enthusiastic participation and subscriptions from long-term important partners such as Nvidia and Alphabet, as well as renowned international investors.

In 2014, British man Chris lost access to his digital wallet when the trading platform Intersango collapsed. At that time, the wallet contained approximately £4,000 worth of Bitcoin. The platform had over 5,000 accounts.It is reported that there may still be hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Bitcoin in the account of one of the company's co-founders, which former users may be able to reclaim if they can provide sufficient proof of ownership.After multiple failed attempts to contact the company over the years, Chris once gave up, stating that watching the price of Bitcoin continuously rise "felt like being punched in the stomach." However, earlier this year, he tried again and hired a lawyer to assist in proving his ownership of several dozen "lost" Bitcoins. Months later, these Bitcoins were returned to him—currently worth about £3.3 million.

Chainalysis' latest report shows that the potential taxable on-chain cryptocurrency activity globally will reach at least $457 billion by 2025, while the OECD's Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) covers only about 14% of the on-chain taxable activities. The report estimates that the United States contributes approximately $112.6 billion, with North America leading at $134.6 billion, followed closely by the European Union at $125.1 billion.This estimate includes income generated from realized gains, mining, staking, and lending, as well as payments denominated in crypto assets, but does not include trading activities within centralized exchanges. The CARF will start data collection on January 1, 2026, across 48 jurisdictions, including the UK and EU, requiring eligible crypto platforms to collect customer and tax resident information and report transaction data to domestic tax authorities for cross-border sharing.The report points out that the CARF's design, centered around crypto intermediaries, is the main reason for the coverage gap. Colby Mangels, a former OECD advisor involved in the development of the CARF, stated that the framework is designed around intermediaries that conduct crypto transactions as their business, which leaves a significant amount of decentralized finance activities outside the reporting scope due to the lack of centralized operators or custodial relationships. Mangels noted that tax authorities are focusing on the progress of anti-money laundering regulations, including when DeFi platforms or their operators should be considered regulated crypto service providers.

Fairlead Strategies Managing Partner Katie Stockton stated that Bitcoin is no longer in an oversold state, but it has not yet reached an overbought state. She pointed out that Bitcoin broke through the 200-day moving average in May, and a potential breakout may be imminent. Last week, Bitcoin began to rise due to news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the scale of liquidity support repurchase operations, with a 7-day increase of over 22%, and the latest trading price is around $78,915, having previously surpassed $81,000 on Monday.For most of June and July, Bitcoin traded below $65,000 and experienced the lowest volatility in 17 years. Analysts believe that the so-called "devaluation trade" may heat up again, where investors buy assets when they believe fiat currencies are devaluing. The dollar declined after the Treasury's announcement, while gold and Bitcoin rose accordingly. U.S. investors re-entered Bitcoin ETFs last week, with inflows nearing $2 billion.Additionally, President Trump met with crypto executives at the White House last week, stating that pushing the Clarity Act through would keep the U.S. ahead. The bill was originally scheduled for a vote in August but has now been postponed to September, and it will establish a framework for distinguishing between securities, commodities, and payment stablecoins in digital assets.

On August 24, according to Caixin, the National Development and Reform Commission released the "Measures for the Administration of Foreign Investment (Revised Draft for Public Comment)" and is publicly soliciting opinions from society, from August 21 to September 20, 2026. The "Draft for Comments" expands the definition of investors from enterprises to domestic enterprises, other organizations, and individual residents, and clarifies that reinvestment by investors abroad also falls under foreign investment.In the section on foreign investment regulation, regarding the classification and regulatory division of foreign investment, the procedures for approval and filing, and other matters, investors must obtain foreign investment approval documents or filing notices before implementing foreign investments. For individual residents newly included as investors, the approval authority is the National Development and Reform Commission, and the filing authority is the provincial development and reform department of their registered residence or habitual residence.

On August 24, according to the Shanghai Securities Journal, Alibaba announced the completion of the pricing for a new share placement of HKD 80 billion (approximately USD 10.2 billion), with 100% of the net proceeds from the placement to be used for investing in full-stack AI capabilities and strengthening AI infrastructure construction.According to sources close to the transaction, this placement was nearly 3 times oversubscribed, exceeding HKD 200 billion. Sovereign and long-term funds ultimately accounted for over 40% of the subscription, with high order quality. Major sovereign funds from regions such as the Middle East, Europe, and Asia actively participated in this subscription.

Real Vision founder Raoul Pal stated that the charts he closely monitors show that Bitcoin has entered an oversold zone of more than two standard deviations relative to the Nasdaq and is currently rising rapidly. He mentioned that he will continue to observe but believes that in the long term, crypto assets should outperform the Nasdaq.Raoul Pal pointed out that such long-term structural trends are of significant reference value for asset allocation. This view is based on the relative strength performance of Bitcoin against the Nasdaq.

According to CoinDesk, a governance proposal from the Optimism community has been approved, reallocating 546.9 million OP tokens originally planned for user airdrops to the "Strategic Ecosystem Fund" managed by the Optimism Foundation, sparking discussions in the community about governance transparency and user rights. The OP tokens involved account for approximately 12.7% of the total supply, valued at about $49.7 million at current prices.The Optimism Foundation stated that as the ecological strategy shifts towards institutional adoption and corporate partnerships, large-scale user airdrops are no longer fully aligned with the current development direction. Unused tokens can be utilized for ecosystem incentives, partnership building, and enterprise-level project expansion. The final vote resulted in 17.974 million OP in support and 10.931 million OP against the proposal.A key turning point occurred 16 minutes and 52 seconds before the voting ended, when the Optimism core development team Test in Prod (delegate.testinprod-io.eth) cast 8.486 million OP in support, raising the approval rate from 45.77% to 61.84%, ultimately pushing the proposal through.If the vote from Test in Prod were excluded, the support rate for the proposal would only be 46.47%, which would not have passed, and the related tokens might have remained in the user allocation pool. The Optimism Foundation previously committed to disclosing the cumulative usage of the fund and related results through an annual budget report. This vote has also reignited discussions about the influence of "large delegated voting rights" in DAO governance and the balance of rights for token holders.

According to Digital Asset, the South Korean government stated that digital assets held by residents through personal wallets or overseas exchanges, as long as they generate income from transfers or lending, are generally subject to taxation.The digital asset tax will be implemented starting January 1, 2027, taxed as other income, with a deduction of 2.5 million won and a tax rate of 20%, including local taxes up to a maximum of 22%.

According to a report by the Korean News Agency, global virtual asset infrastructure company BitGo announced that its Korean entity BitGo Korea has received acceptance of its VASP (Virtual Asset Service Provider) registration application from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of Korea on August 18, becoming the first foreign cryptocurrency corporate entity to complete VASP registration directly in Korea.BitGo Korea was established in 2024, and this time chose to directly meet regulatory requirements to enter the market, rather than adopting the industry norm of acquiring existing VASP companies. Subsequently, it will use this as a foundation to officially launch virtual asset custody and transfer services in Korea, focusing on expanding business towards financial institutions and corporate clients.

Kaito AI founder Yu Hu responded to the community's privacy concerns regarding the Pulse browser extension. Yu Hu stated that Pulse's verification feature is based on zkTLS technology and generates encrypted proofs only when users actively initiate verification. Kaito only receives the final proof and not the complete account data or browsing history. The interactive data collection of Pulse on the X platform (such as content exposure, duration of stay, interactions) has been clearly authorized at the time of user installation and will not send browsing activities from other web pages to Kaito.Regarding the Chrome prompt "can read and write all website data," Yu Hu acknowledged that its displayed scope is broader than actual use and will be corrected in the next version to "can read and write X website data," which critics like Ultra have recognized. Kaito Pulse will be open-sourced this week for community review. Yu Hu stated that Pulse's device fingerprinting feature is only used to prevent abuse behaviors such as click fraud and witch attacks, and is not used for analysis or other purposes. This statement serves as Kaito's official response to recent community concerns, with the specific features of Pulse to be confirmed by the open-source code.