DeFi News Hub

OpenRouter's compound-model API stacks budget AI models—and beat GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 outright in benchmark testing.

Activity on the Bitcoin network is surging, CryptoQuant said, but it's not correlating with price movement for its native asset.

Global financial institution Charles Schwab is the latest firm hoping to steal a piece of the growing prediction market pie.

Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of Ether, dismissed a warning from a former Ethereum Foundation contributor that the network's core development faces a funding crisis, saying there is "zero chance" of a shortfall. "In my opinion, zero chance of this... Read the full story at The Defiant

The bill is meant to curb potential insider trading, blocking lawmakers and family members from policy-related prediction market bets.

Sonic Labs said its three founding board members — Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson — are resigning from the board, and named Matt Visser as chief executive officer and Kosta Kourkoumelis as chief operating officer, in a leadership overhaul at the blockchain network whose token and... Read the full story at The Defiant

Many AI users are convinced that OpenAI is quietly running GPT-5.6 inside ChatGPT. OpenAI isn't confirming anything.

Institutions are gobbling up Solana for their balance sheets. These are the top publicly traded treasuries.

Amazon Web Services on Monday turned on AI traffic monetization inside AWS WAF, letting any site behind Amazon CloudFront charge AI agents per request in stablecoins through Coinbase's x402 protocol. It is the first time a hyperscale cloud has wired onchain settlement directly into its... Read the full story at The Defiant

The disastrous day for Bitcoin firms' preferred equity offerings may have been due to unwinding of leveraged positions in STRC and SATA.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423, eligible for a floor vote at any time leadership chooses to schedule one. House Agriculture digital-assets subcommittee chair Dusty Johnson said Thursday the House will move fast on a companion if the... Read the full story at The Defiant

CME Group plans to sue the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the agency's approval of crypto perpetual futures, the world's largest derivatives exchange operator announced Wednesday evening on CNBC. Outgoing Chief Executive Terrence Duffy said the case would be filed as soon as Thursday and... Read the full story at The Defiant

Amazon is pulling out of "Artificial," a film about Sam Altman's brief ouster from OpenAI, not long after investing $50 billion in the firm.

Researchers found malicious Wallpaper Engine downloads on Steam Workshop distributing infostealers, backdoors, and account-hijacking malware.

Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned as co-executive director and board member of the Ethereum Foundation on Thursday, the second co-ED exit at the Switzerland-based nonprofit in four months. Her departure deepens a leadership turnover that has been running through the organization since the spring. Wang... Read the full story at The Defiant

Isiah and Raymond Garcia held a Minnesota family at gunpoint for eight hours and forced the father to transfer over $8 million in crypto.

The asset manager's two proposed "Bitcoin DRIP" funds would hold U.S. stocks and reinvest dividends into Bitcoin, a novel ETF structure.

Z.ai's GLM-5.2 sits within 1% of Claude Opus 4.8 on long-horizon coding benchmarks, runs entirely on Huawei silicon, and undercuts Western frontier models by up to 82% per token.

Crypto investors and builders say the censorship of Anthropic's Fable 5 proves their long-running argument: that AI should run on decentralized networks no company or government can switch off. The model shipped with guardrails so broad that many users complained, by Anthropic's own account, and... Read the full story at The Defiant

Image generation company Midjourney is developing a full-body imaging system that combines ultrasound tech with AI smarts.

The settlement ensures that convicted Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky is unable to trade in CFTC markets or register with the regulator.

Quantum computing threatens the blockchain ecosystem, from Bitcoin to Ethereum and beyond, and Algorand has a plan to be prepared.

Another key figure at the Ethereum Foundation is stepping away from her post, continuing a recent leadership exodus.

Ondo Finance added 173 tokenized stocks and ETFs to Ondo Global Markets on Tuesday, pushing its catalog past 430 assets available across Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain. Ondo Finance's official X account announced the expansion on June 17. The batch spans some of the most capital-intensive corners... Read the full story at The Defiant

Brain is a self-improving memory layer that tracks what Computer did, what worked, and what failed—then uses it overnight to make the next task faster and cheaper.

As the MiCA grace period closes, only a fraction of registered firms hold full licenses, setting up the prospect of a wave of consolidation.

Backpack's tokenized SpaceX share token has crossed 10,000 onchain holders on Solana, six days after listing alongside the company's Nasdaq debut. The milestone widens the holder gap with rival xStocks' SpaceX product and lands as Backpack chief executive Armani Ferrante stakes out a structural... Read the full story at The Defiant

The crypto miner has signed a landmark three-year GPU contract with Bell Canada and Cohere—as Canada races to build AI systems it actually owns.

Strategy's STRC preferred stock extended its slide to a fresh record low on Thursday, deepening the discount on one of the main channels the largest corporate bitcoin holder uses to fund its purchases. The Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, known as STRC, traded near $85 on... Read the full story at The Defiant

Kentucky accused America’s top prediction market platforms of running illegal sports betting operations, joining a growing stack of states.

Strategy’s flagship preferred stock is facing pressure, but analysts say that's not yet an existential threat for the Bitcoin treasury giant.

Prediction market traders don't see Bitcoin or Ethereum making their next big moves to higher price targets.

Everyday investors that own Strategy’s STRC have been drawn to double-digit yields, but the preferred stock’s volatility has shaken some.

The proposed rulemaking establishes how U.S. crypto companies will have to screen stablecoin customers after the passage of the GENIUS Act.

Cap Labs has closed its public CAP token auction with 1,002 unique bids, $16.4 million in total commitments, and a 5.5x oversubscription rate, the EigenLayer-backed stablecoin protocol announced Wednesday night. The auction opened June 8 and drew a final clearing price of $0.011 across a total... Read the full story at The Defiant

Bitcoin slid to $64k as rate hike odds soared after Kevin Warsh's first FOMC presser. But was it Warsh or Saylor truly driving the selloff?

A new National Risk Assessment names crypto-asset misuse among Ireland's top threats, as a 30-point plan tightens checks on crypto funds.

Outgoing CME chief Terry Duffy says perpetual futures are actually swaps under Dodd-Frank, and that the exchange will file suit Thursday.

BTC slid to around $64,100 after Kevin Warsh's hawkish debut, but analysts argue a $60,000 floor and catalysts could spark a rebound.

French authorities said that government cybersecurity researchers will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption beginning in 2027.

A new APA survey found that more than a third of psychologists have patients using AI as an additional mental health professional, even as clinicians warn that the technology can reinforce delusions.

The judge said Polymarket is not likely to succeed on the merits of its case against Michigan state regulators.

Defunct crypto exchange FTX gained exposure to SpaceX in 2022, and the rocket-maker’s post-IPO rally has lifted hopes among creditors.

Privacy-tech firm Zama said Wednesday it is launching the first DeFi yield product for Confidential USDC, opening deposits June 23 through a vault built on Morpho and curated by Steakhouse Financial. The product extends fully homomorphic encryption from simple token transfers into a productive... Read the full story at The Defiant

The first US spot Litecoin ETF has been trading for nearly eight months, and the price of the underlying asset has barely moved. Litecoin sits near $45, down roughly 89% from its $400-plus peak, even as Canary Capital's LTCC fund and a parallel SEC/CFTC commodity classification cleared the last... Read the full story at The Defiant

Nvidia's ENPIRE hands an entire robot fleet to coding agents like Codex and Claude Code, letting them write training code, test it on real hardware, and improve without a human watching.

Stablecoin infrastructure firm Trace Finance said Wednesday that it raised a $32 million Series A round to help expand its reach.

Prime Minister Kristen Michal backed a proposal to issue AI agents a personal identification code separate from the people who own them.

Perps DEX Satori Finance is the latest in a string of crypto firms forced to shut their doors amid an extended market downturn.

Congressional negotiators have folded a statutory ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency into a bipartisan housing package, blocking any Fed-issued retail digital dollar until December 31, 2030. The text is the most durable legislative CBDC prohibition yet assembled in Washington.... Read the full story at The Defiant

The American Gaming Association is leading a coalition of tribal groups and hospitality unions urging the Senate to insert language into pending crypto market-structure legislation that would bar prediction markets from offering sports wagers. The push squarely targets Kalshi and Polymarket. The... Read the full story at The Defiant

Total value locked in the canonical bridge of World Chain, the Optimism Stack rollup operated by Worldcoin's Tools for Humanity, climbed 32.87% over seven days to about $602M, according to a DefiLlama snapshot earlier this morning. The token tracked the move, with WLD up over 50% in the same... Read the full story at The Defiant

After generating $5.5 billion in trading volume in two weeks, Kalshi is pushing to extend its CFTC-regulated perpetual futures beyond crypto into a wider range of asset classes. Kalshi's perpetual futures business crossed $5.5 billion in trading volume in its first two weeks, according to... Read the full story at The Defiant

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed SB 3019, the Digital Asset Privilege Tax Act, according to ChainCatcher via Bitget News, making the state the first in the country to impose a transaction-based tax on everyday digital-asset activity. The Crypto Council for Innovation, a global industry... Read the full story at The Defiant

Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork reached its final devnet stage Tuesday, locking in the EIP bundle that core developers expect to carry the network through public testnets and on to mainnet activation in the second half of 2026. The release is being framed as the largest protocol change since the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Coinbase used its latest "System Update" on Tuesday to push deep into territory long held by retail brokerages, rolling out an SEC-registered AI investment advisor, stock and ETF trading on its professional platform, and options markets for both equities and crypto. The bundle moves the exchange's... Read the full story at The Defiant

Matter Labs, the company behind the zkSync Ethereum layer-2 network, cut staff on Tuesday and said it is committing the entire organization to Prividium, an institutional on-chain privacy infrastructure platform it began building in 2024. Matter Labs co-founder and chief executive Alex Gluchowski... Read the full story at The Defiant

Collector Crypt, the Solana-native platform that tokenizes graded physical trading cards for on-chain trading, posted a 129% week-over-week jump in fee revenue after Solflare embedded its card-pack mechanic directly into the wallet interface. The platform generated $3.86 million in fees over the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Uniswap's UNI token climbed 22% in 24 hours to $3.28 on $621 million in trading volume Tuesday, one day after Standard Chartered published a $100 long-term price target for the asset. The move hit the 100th percentile of CoinGecko's recent price-change distribution for UNI, meaning no comparable... Read the full story at The Defiant

Greece's financial watchdog is preparing to reject Binance's application for a pan-European crypto license, according to Reuters, putting the world's largest exchange on course to lose access to European Union clients as soon as July 1. Binance disputes the characterization and says its application... Read the full story at The Defiant

A coalition of federally recognized tribes and Indian regulatory bodies filed amicus briefs in two federal cases this month, arguing that allowing Kalshi and the CFTC to override state gaming laws would equally nullify tribal-state gaming compacts and strip tribes of authority to regulate... Read the full story at The Defiant

Fees across DeFi's largest lending protocols and decentralized exchanges fell by as much as much as 65%, a broad contraction that lending and credit-market operators attribute to leverage unwinding after early June's selloff rather than a structural break in onchain credit. Rolling seven-day fees... Read the full story at The Defiant

Coinbase said Tuesday it will launch tokenized stocks backed one-for-one by shares of U.S. companies. The exchange announced the product on its official X account, writing that "the first real, 1:1 backed tokenized stocks are coming" and that customers will be able to own, trade, hold and redeem... Read the full story at The Defiant

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called on the U.S. government to overhaul its accredited-investor framework on Monday, arguing that wealth-based restrictions on private investment lock ordinary Americans out of opportunities available only to the already wealthy. Armstrong's call came shortly after... Read the full story at The Defiant

Humanity Protocol has announced a full token migration and 1:1 airdrop of a new H token, the project's first concrete step to compensate holders after the $36 million exploit on June 8. The team posted the recovery plan on X on Monday. It confirmed that the former H token on Ethereum, BNB Chain,... Read the full story at The Defiant

BlackRock this week listed the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA) on Nasdaq, extending its spot-bitcoin franchise into structured-income territory by overlaying a covered-call strategy on top of its flagship IBIT fund. The fund began trading on June 9, with bitcoin priced at $61,825.37 per... Read the full story at The Defiant

Robinhood is cutting roughly 10% of its full-time employees in a corporate restructuring CEO Vlad Tenev has framed as a push for a "high performance culture." In a Form 8-K filed Tuesday with the SEC, Robinhood Markets said the reduction in force covers approximately 10% of full-time staff, plus... Read the full story at The Defiant

Kraken and Coinbase each launched new perpetual futures products on Monday, marking the broadest single-day expansion of US-regulated derivatives in the crypto era. Kraken activated CFTC-regulated perpetual futures for eligible US clients through Bitnomial, a crypto derivatives exchange owned by... Read the full story at The Defiant

Paradigm has led a roughly $9 million funding round in El Dorado, a stablecoin-powered payments application built for Latin America. The deal pushes one of crypto's largest venture firms deeper into dollar-rails for emerging markets. The round was reported by The Block, which said Paradigm led the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Standard Chartered's research division initiated coverage of Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange, with a thesis that ties its governance token to the institutional tokenization wave. The bank's Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research, argues Uniswap is positioned to become... Read the full story at The Defiant

The SIREN token has lost about 95% of its value in a week after a single whale sold roughly 670 million tokens, near 92% of the total supply, for $64.8 million. The sell-off traced to one dominant wallet draining its position into a thin market. On-chain intelligence platform Lookonchain first... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Sui blockchain has moved nearly $65 billion in stablecoins in five days, the payoff from a protocol change that made those transfers cost nothing. The figure measures transfer throughput over the window, and it lands as Mysten Labs pitches the network as a replacement for traditional payment... Read the full story at The Defiant

Bitcoin pushed above $67,000 on Monday, its highest level in roughly two weeks, after President Trump said the US-Iran deal was "complete" and that he had authorized reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The largest cryptocurrency traded around $67,170, up 4.9% over 24 hours, touching an intraday high... Read the full story at The Defiant

Ventuals is shutting down its on-chain pre-IPO trading platform and folding its team into another project building on Hyperliquid. The wind-down ends one of the first venues that let traders take leveraged positions on the valuations of private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The platform... Read the full story at The Defiant

An attacker drained roughly $2.1 million from a deprecated Aztec Connect smart contract on Sunday, three years after the privacy bridge was shut down, by abusing a flaw in how the contract verified zero-knowledge proofs. The exploit hit the RollupProcessorV3 contract at around 8:26 a.m. ET Sunday,... Read the full story at The Defiant

The on-chain options and structured product protocol Thetanuts Finance was exploited for $2.1 million. Security firm Blockaid published the exploit transaction and exploiter address shortly after the attack. A white-hat intervened and recovered approximately $2 million of the stolen option tokens.... Read the full story at The Defiant

Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 1,587 bitcoin for about $100 million last week, its first purchase disclosed since the firm broke a multi-year buying streak with a small sale in late May. The latest coins came in well below the average price Strategy has paid to build the largest corporate bitcoin... Read the full story at The Defiant

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The Blockchain Association brought member executives to Capitol Hill this week and reported meeting with more than half the Senate, pressing lawmakers to preserve a key developer-protection provision of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act before an August recess deadline tightens the floor-vote... Read the full story at The Defiant

World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-backed crypto venture, funded a $250,000 fighter bonus pool at UFC Freedom 250 on Sunday, distributing the awards in its USD1 stablecoin on the South Lawn of the White House. The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) announced the arrangement on June 13:... Read the full story at The Defiant

CFTC staff issued a no-action letter Friday enabling designated contract markets to convert existing perpetual-style digital commodity futures into true perpetual futures, the latest piece of regulatory plumbing in the agency's construction of a domestic crypto derivatives market. The letter,... Read the full story at The Defiant

Hester Peirce delivered her farewell remarks at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday and called the speech "Peirce Out." She is leaving Washington after nearly thirty years for a teaching post at Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach in November. Her second commissioner term expired... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed suit Thursday in federal court against New Mexico, seeking to prevent the state from applying its gaming laws to CFTC-registered prediction-market exchanges. The CFTC's complaint seeks a declaratory judgment that federal law grants the agency exclusive... Read the full story at The Defiant

Gary Gensler, the former chair of both the CFTC and the SEC, filed an amicus brief Thursday with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that sports-event prediction markets are not federally regulated swaps under Dodd-Frank. The brief sides with state regulators against Kalshi, one of the... Read the full story at The Defiant

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Coinbase Derivatives is moving its US-regulated gold and silver futures to around-the-clock trading effective Friday evening, the first time these CFTC-registered contracts will not close for weekends. Coinbase Institutional said Friday afternoon the US commodities futures market "just changed... Read the full story at The Defiant

Binance, Bybit and Bitget Wallet canceled their tokenized SpaceX IPO allocation campaigns Friday and refunded subscribers in full after xStocks, the tokenized-equity provider routing the deals, could not source the underlying shares — even as xStocks' own onchain token and competing protocols... Read the full story at The Defiant

Crypto data and media company Blockworks has acquired rival research platform Messari, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Bloomberg also confirmed the deal. The acquisition joins two of the most prominent names in crypto data and research. Blockworks, cofounded by Jason Yanowitz and Michael... Read the full story at The Defiant

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered her farewell remarks on Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Capital Markets Summit in Washington, D.C. The address closed a tenure that made her the agency's most prominent voice for crypto-industry clarity. In the speech, titled "Peirce Out," Peirce... Read the full story at The Defiant

Q2 2026 has become the most-hacked quarter in DeFi history by incident count, according to DefiLlama, which logged approximately 70 separate exploits across April, May and the first two weeks of June. The quarterly dollar total stands at roughly $746 million. The figures reflect a structural shift... Read the full story at The Defiant

Sam Bankman-Fried’s bid to overturn his criminal conviction has failed. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed his conviction on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy Friday, along with his 25-year prison sentence. Bankman-Fried’s defense had argued that... Read the full story at The Defiant

SpaceX opened for trading on Nasdaq Friday under the ticker SPCX, completing what Nasdaq and Morgan Stanley confirmed as the largest initial public offering in history. The offering was priced at $135 per share and raised $75 billion pre-greenshoe, implying a $1.77 trillion valuation at open.... Read the full story at The Defiant

Monero surged roughly 30% to an intraday high of $438 late Thursday ET after blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced a $120 million USDT movement that included large purchases of the privacy coin, with Tether subsequently freezing $72 million in connected funds. ZachXBT posted to his Investigations... Read the full story at The Defiant

Japan's lower house passed a bill on Thursday that reclassifies cryptocurrencies as financial instruments under the country's securities framework, clearing a path to regulated spot ETFs and a flat 20% capital-gains tax. The legislation amends the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA),... Read the full story at The Defiant

Most real-world asset projects in crypto tokenize what is already liquid: treasuries, money-market funds, gold. AetherStrike picked the opposite end of the spectrum — an illiquid physical commodity in structural undersupply – one that every state DOT in America must buy, can’t substitute for, and... Read the full story at The Defiant

SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX tomorrow. The same day, a stack of crypto-native tokenized-equity products designed to mirror or redeem against SPCX goes live in parallel. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on Thursday, offering roughly 555.6 million shares for a $75... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Solana Foundation launched Frontier Traders Thursday afternoon, a formal institutional program for elite trading firms, with the first qualifying campaign opening on SpaceX tokenized equity Friday. The entry bar sits at $500 million in trailing 30-day onchain DEX volume combined with $16... Read the full story at The Defiant

Bitcoin climbed above $63,000 Thursday after President Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that he was canceling scheduled U.S. military strikes against Iran and signaling that a multi-nation agreement was close. Trump wrote that “discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought... Read the full story at The Defiant

DBS Bank, Singapore's largest lender by assets, plans to offer tokenized physical gold to retail customers through its digibank app in the second half of 2026. Each DBS Physical Gold Token will be backed by one gram of gold held in a dedicated bank vault in Singapore. DBS announced the product... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Fidelity Digital Dollar reportedly deployed liquidity to both Curve Finance and Uniswap in a single Ethereum block Thursday evening, with an on-chain watcher flagging the move as the Fidelity-branded stablecoin's first foray onto permissionless DeFi rails. LytninCrypto, an on-chain data... Read the full story at The Defiant