White House: No Current US-Iran Negotiations Scheduled, Strait of Hormuz Remains Open

According to market data from BIT (Bit.com), U.S. crypto-themed stocks have extended their gains. The performance breakdown is as follows: MSTR rose 2.98%; COIN gained 3.69%, CRCL climbed 3.72%; SBET increased 2.36%; BMNR jumped 4.87%; HOOD advanced 6.20%; and HYPE's crypto treasury firm PURR rose 8.79%.

While Nvidia’s upcoming earnings report and remarks from Federal Reserve Chair Walsh at the Jackson Hole Symposium are the main events capturing investor focus this week, stock derivatives market traders have already begun preparing for potential volatility spikes around the November U.S. midterm elections. Volatility traders closely monitoring futures markets linked to the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) point to signs that demand for hedging S&P 500 index fluctuations is rising ahead of and around the election. The September-expiring VIX futures are currently trading at around 17.4, while October contracts have climbed to 19, and November contracts have risen further to 19.7. Matthew Thompson, co-portfolio manager at Little Harbor Advisors, said: "The U.S. general election is approaching, and we have entered a time window where elections will impact the VIX. You can already see this 'steepening' in the VIX futures term structure." A study by analysts at CBOE Global Markets shows that since 1945, 80% of midterm election years have recorded higher realized volatility than the prior year, with an average increase of 3.5 volatility points. In years when the same party controls both the White House and Congress, realized volatility rises by an average of 6 volatility points.

News Brief from Dong察 Beating AI: OpenAI has released the latest test results of its self-developed AI inference chip Jalape?o. The chip outperformed NVIDIA’s GB200 and GB300 superchips in the InferenceX benchmark test. On models including GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1, and Kimi K2.5 1T, Jalape?o delivers 1.5 to 1.9 times the AI workload per watt of competing products, with end-to-end latency reduced by 1.7 to 3.6 times. OpenAI noted that Jalape?o uses an ASIC architecture developed in partnership with Broadcom, purpose-built for AI inference to boost throughput and lower latency. The company plans to roll out small-scale deployments of the chip by the end of this year, expand production in 2027, and continue developing its second and third-generation chips. However, OpenAI stressed that it will not fully replace chips from partners such as NVIDIA.

Beating AI Express: OpenCode co-founder Dax Raad shared a screenshot of Stripe’s backend, revealing that over the past few days, Stripe has blocked roughly $323 million in fraudulent payment attempts on behalf of OpenCode. Dax noted this amount is far higher than OpenCode’s own revenue, adding that if these transactions had been processed, they could have directly driven the company to collapse. OpenCode has been waging a battle against this group of fraudsters: some register thousands of Go accounts at once, use rotating proxies, then resell the account balances via tokens. On August 11, Dax announced he had just purged 7,013 fraudulent accounts, a move expected to save the firm $400,000 monthly. The cancellation of the first-month $5 discount is now viewed as part of the same anti-abuse offensive and defensive efforts.

According to a New York Times report, the U.S. State Department is preparing to gradually allow some diplomatic personnel evacuated earlier amid the U.S.-Iran conflict to return to its embassies and consulates in the Middle East, with the earliest possible return to posts starting as soon as this week. U.S. diplomatic missions in Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, Iraq, and Kuwait will all boost staffing, while some embassies plan to restore their full authorized strength. Analysts believe this move indicates the Trump administration may judge the conflict is drawing to a close, but the continued restriction on diplomatic personnel’s family members from returning also signals that local security risks remain higher than pre-war levels. Meanwhile, Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Qatar and Pakistan are still pushing for the resumption of U.S.-Iran negotiations, with officials from both countries communicating with relevant parties almost daily, and calling diplomatic negotiations the "only way out" to resolve the crisis. Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff recently visited Tehran and held talks with senior Iranian officials, focusing on preventing conflict escalation, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and ending the war. Qatar also called on Iran to restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, and added that it will not reach a separate energy transport security agreement with Iran.

U.S. President Trump posted a statement saying: "I have just been notified by the U.S. Navy that all mines in the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz have been cleared and/or detonated. The U.S. has informed Iran that any vessel or warship laying new mines will be immediately and systematically destroyed. We are monitoring every inch of the strait via the U.S. Space Force, as well as tracking 'Pickaxe Mountain' and three other nuclear facilities that have already been destroyed. We have a zero-tolerance policy for mine-laying, and this policy is now fully in effect."