链捕手ChainCatcher

Author: Zhang Yaqi, Wall Street News

A series of defaulting actions by the United States after the signing of the memorandum of understanding completely dashed the window for diplomatic détente between Iran and the US, and directly prompted Iran’s hardliners to prioritize preparations for war over negotiations.
According to China Central Television (CCTV) news, after U.S. President Donald Trump on the 14th said he would “soon announce the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory,” Iran on the 15th announced that it had reached an agreement with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz shipping route coming into operation. However, regarding control of the strait, both sides of the Iran-U.S. relationship are still talking past each other. On the same day, Ismail Bagiyei, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, publicly claimed this week that because the United States violated the memorandum of understanding, the subsequent negotiations were never initiated, and that the 60-day negotiation deadline set in the memorandum “has completely lost its meaning.”

ChainCatcher report, citing CoinDesk: decentralized lending protocol Compound Finance has completed a leadership reshuffle and approved a record-breaking budget of $52 million. The protocol’s total value locked has fallen from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to $1.2 billion, and it is seeking to regain growth.
Compound Finance is shifting to serve institutional clients, developing real-world asset products, partner integration solutions, and credit infrastructure to meet the compliance and technical standards of traditional finance.
Industry executives say Compound Finance’s new leadership team and large budget are consistent with the industry-wide shift toward serving financial institutions in the decentralized finance space. Total assets in the sector had previously declined due to weak markets and security vulnerability incidents.

According to a ChainCatcher report, Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft said that Bitcoin’s (BTC) current low-volatility environment does not necessarily imply an investment opportunity; the market may be forming a “low-volatility value trap” (vol value trap). Schultze-Kraft noted that BTC’s implied volatility is currently within the lowest 2% range of its historical distribution, but the volatility level priced by the options market is still about 1.5 times the volatility actually shown by the market.
He said that Glassnode’s “vol value trap score” currently stands at 91/100, the highest level in more than 3.5 years. Schultze-Kraft believes that although the market appears to be in an extremely low-volatility state, option prices have not fully reflected actual price action, and the volatility premium investors are paying may be relatively high. This metric indicates that the market is going through a rare period of volatility compression. Historically, similar extreme low-vol environments may set the stage for a subsequent volatility expansion, but the specific direction still depends on capital flows, the macro environment, and market catalysts.

ChainCatcher message: The encryption analyst cryptopainter said in a post that Kaito-related addresses with base: 0x98d0baa52b2d063e780de12f615f963fe8537553 will unlock 18.53 million tokens on August 20. Then, from September 16 to 17, another 6.58 million tokens will be unlocked in batches. He believes that the recent behavior of issuing a positive catalyst and pumping the price to distribute/sell off tokens constitutes price manipulation. He also explained that although he once supported Kaito, his stance has now turned to criticism.
The analyst said that his observation logic for Kaito has been simplified to checking whether the new product ecosystem can truly take root and generate social buzz and scale approaching the levels of 2025. Even if it recovers to 50%, it would still prove that it remains a leading InfoFi player. At that time, reconnecting the relevant positions would be done with greater confidence. If product delivery falls short of expectations or ecosystem participation is mediocre, he will not consider redepositing/re-staking for now.

According to a ChainCatcher report, on-chain analytics platform Santiment said that Bitcoin exchange balances have risen to the highest level since June 15. The supply tightness that had been repeatedly mentioned in connection with the ETF inflow narrative has essentially eased. Data shows that exchange BTC balances fell from about 1.337 million BTC on June 12 to about 1.304 million BTC on July 28, with around 33,000 BTC leaving the exchanges, a decrease of roughly 2.5%.
Soon after, the trend reversed. After the balance bottomed out on July 28, it rebounded to around 1.332 million BTC as of August 16, with about 28,000 BTC returning—equivalent to 84% of the prior outflow. In recent days, the replenishment of supply has become more stable; the balance has hovered around 1.332 million BTC, still about 5,200 BTC lower than the June peak.

ChainCatcher message: According to Lookonchain monitoring, an ETH trader recently bought back 1,674 ETH at a relatively high price again, worth about $3.19 million, with a purchase price of around $1,906.
Lookonchain stated that this trader has long had an operational pattern of “selling at a low price and buying at a high price.” Two months ago, the address still held 1,891 ETH, but it now has only 1,674 ETH. Through frequent range trading, it has cumulatively reduced its holdings by 217 ETH, resulting in losses of about $414,000 based on the current price.
Lookonchain noted that for this type of trader, frequent trading not only fails to improve returns, but instead causes assets to shrink due to market volatility, and said: “Sometimes, simply holding may be better than blindly trading.”

ChainCatcher message: The official GitHub status page shows that the platform is currently experiencing service issues, and multiple core functions have seen reduced availability.
According to the latest announcement, the error rate for GitHub’s web interface and API requests once reached about 20%, and the error rate for downloading archived repository files and the original repository content (raw repository content) was about 50%. In addition, SAML and OIDC identity authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync features are also affected.
Currently affected services include: Pull Requests performance degradation; Issues tracking performance degradation; Actions (automated workflows) performance degradation; Webhooks performance degradation; API requests encountering exceptions; and a decline in availability of GitHub Copilot.

According to a ChainCatcher report, Tom Lee, the chairman of BitMine, reposted an analysis of Ethereum’s price. The data shows that Ethereum is approaching an important technical breakout, and it is currently only about 3.5% away from the Daily Cloud (i.e., the Ichimoku Cloud on the daily timeframe). The analysis suggests that this indicator has not been effectively broken through since October 9, 2025. If ETH manages to stand above the Daily Cloud, it may indicate an improvement in the long-term trend structure and release further upside signals.
Tom Lee commented: “It would be good to see this scene.” The “Daily Cloud” in candlestick analysis usually refers to the Ichimoku Cloud (Ichimoku Kumo) in technical indicators. Here, “Daily” means it is calculated using the daily (day K-line) timeframe.