DeFi News Hub

Nous Research added animated mascot sprites to the self-improving AI agent—and the only thing they do is look cute while your AI works.

Baton Corporation, the UK-headquartered development company behind Pump.fun, is recruiting a Chief Legal Officer at a base salary of $1M to $5M, co-founder Alon Cohen posted Wednesday on X. A $1M base floor for a CLO is well above the median for senior in-house legal executives at most crypto... Read the full story at The Defiant

A wallet attributed to venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) withdrew 25,560 ETH, worth about $42.62M, from Binance on Tuesday, per onchain intelligence tracker Lookonchain. The move has drawn attention as a potential accumulation play amid a sustained ETH drawdown. Lookonchain identified the... Read the full story at The Defiant

A leaker found new strings inside Claude Code that hint at weekly Fable 5 usage built into subscription plans, not sold separately as before.

A physicist's formal critique argues Microsoft has not demonstrated the topological qubit behind its Majorana 2 quantum chip.

Shares of Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, fell below $100 on Wednesday for the first time since March 2024, leaving the company trading at a discount to the Bitcoin on its balance sheet and turning investor attention to which layer of its capital structure is still worth owning.... Read the full story at The Defiant

STRC fell even lower Wednesday while MSTR bleeds. CryptoQuant says that Strategy needs to stop buying Bitcoin and start stacking cash.

Senator Cynthia Lummis announced Wednesday morning that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act will reach the Senate floor in July, setting the first hard public commitment to a floor date from the bill's lead sponsor. Lummis made the announcement on Fox Business's "Mornings with Maria," saying the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Binance has withdrawn its MiCA license application in Greece and confirmed it will seek authorization in a different EU member state, with seven days before the bloc's regulatory wind-down deadline takes effect. The exchange confirmed the withdrawal Wednesday in a post on X, saying the target... Read the full story at The Defiant

Crypto exchange Binance formally withdrew its MiCA license application in Greece, one week after a report said it would be denied.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed suit against Kentucky on Tuesday, bringing the total number of states facing federal litigation over prediction-market jurisdiction to nine. The CFTC's complaint seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to block Kentucky from enforcing state gaming... Read the full story at The Defiant

Noman Saleem impersonated crypto influencers on Telegram, luring victims into a fake staking scheme before vanishing with their funds.

As Bitcoin falls below the $60,000 mark, 21Shares said that its prediction that BTC breaks the historical four-year cycle hasn't come true.

Following a series of setbacks for South Korea, a delegation from one of Asia's most active crypto markets met with the SEC's task force.

Uniswap has added a no-code token auction tool to the Uniswap Web App, letting any team configure and launch an onchain token sale from a browser without writing code. The tool runs on Uniswap's Continuous Clearing Auction mechanism, which conducts price discovery entirely onchain. In a CCA, bids... Read the full story at The Defiant

Built with Broadcom, the LLM-focused accelerator is the first step in OpenAI's effort to design the hardware behind ChatGPT and beyond.

President Trump said he won’t sign the popular bill until Congress passes a controversial bill restricting voting rights.

Bitcoin fell to a two-week low price Wednesday as Strategy shares dove below the $100 mark for the first time since March 2024.

Arthur Hayes put out a bull case for the CARDS token, and the Clarity Act is facing some surprising opposition from a new group.

The seizure hits a cloud account that powered Huione Guarantee, a Telegram marketplace tied to billions in Southeast Asian scam proceeds.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called the gift from Christopher Harborne a “private matter” amid a standards investigation.

Five senior Senate Democrats sent a formal letter to Republican committee chairs Tuesday demanding immediate hearings into a reported $500 million transaction in which Abu Dhabi royalty acquired a stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm tied to President Donald Trump, and into the federal... Read the full story at The Defiant

Both chambers of Congress have passed legislation barring the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through 2030, with the bill heading to President Trump for signature after the House cleared it Tuesday. The House passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act with a large... Read the full story at The Defiant

Cody Carbone, chief executive of The Digital Chamber, testified before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday pressing for passage of the CLARITY Act, arguing the crypto market-structure bill is a prerequisite for reducing financial costs that fall hardest on lower-income households. In written... Read the full story at The Defiant

Someone fine-tuned Fable 5's reasoning style into a local Qwen model. Then someone else removed its conscience.

Close to 100 Catholic bishops and church leaders have sent a letter to Senate leadership opposing the CLARITY Act, arguing that one of its core provisions would weaken federal safeguards against human trafficking and other financial crimes ahead of a Senate floor vote. The letter, addressed to... Read the full story at The Defiant

A Trump White House official is now directly negotiating an ethics compromise on the CLARITY Act with Senate Democrats, the last major sticking point standing between the crypto market structure bill and a Senate floor vote. The development was reported by journalist Pete Rizzo on Tuesday, citing... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Kentucky on Tuesday to stop the state from using its own laws to shut down federally registered prediction markets. The suit widens a campaign the agency has now pressed against a string of states. The CFTC filed a Complaint for Declaratory and... Read the full story at The Defiant

Industry leaders welcomed President Trump's quantum executive orders, while researchers said the accelerated timelines reflect growing urgency around post-quantum security and cryptocurrency infrastructure.

THORChain restored full operations Tuesday morning, bringing signing, churning, swaps, and liquidity-provider actions back online after a halt tied to a $10.7 million exploit in May. The protocol's official account announced the restart just before 3 a.m. ET Tuesday, confirming that signing,... Read the full story at The Defiant

A group of 82 Catholic leaders warned a key provision of the crypto bill, protecting software developers from prosecution, could enable human trafficking.

AI agents can now access 0x Protocol's Swap API by paying $0.01 per request in USDC from their own wallets, with no API key or account setup required. The integration, built with Alchemy AgentPay, runs on the HTTP 402 standard and extends the protocol's DeFi liquidity aggregation to autonomous... Read the full story at The Defiant

Synthetix founder Kain Warwick has acknowledged that sUSD has been depegged for over a year, taken personal responsibility for treasury mismanagement, and published a detailed thread this morning explaining the path forward: winding down the SNX-backed stablecoin and replacing it with a... Read the full story at The Defiant

Circle published a formal USDC method specification for the Machine Payments Protocol on Monday, standardizing how AI agents and automated services settle payments in USDC across EVM-compatible blockchains and Solana. The specification, posted at paymentauth.org/draft-usdc-charge-00.html, outlines... Read the full story at The Defiant

The initiative follows bets on stablecoins and the metaverse.

Mark Zuckerberg has directed a small internal Meta team to build a standalone prediction-market app codenamed "Arena," a move that puts the social media giant on a collision course with crypto-native platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. According to reporting by the New York Times, citing two... Read the full story at The Defiant

Securitize has been selected to tokenize economist Nouriel Roubini's Atlas America Fund into USAFi, a digital security issued under Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority and custodied at Bank of New York, designed to give institutional collateral round-the-clock portability. The product is... Read the full story at The Defiant

Delegates to the ENS DAO escalated opposition to a governance proposal that would hand the ENS Foundation broad control over the protocol's treasury Monday, with one Security Council member calling it a governance attack and ENS Labs founder Nick Johnson having already self-delegated enough tokens... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Ethereum Foundation has cut 54 employees, roughly 20% of its staff, in the most concrete austerity measure the organization has taken since pledging to reduce its treasury spending rate. The Foundation announced the changes Tuesday, saying the cuts conclude a months-long reorganization tied to... Read the full story at The Defiant

GPT-5.5-Cyber tops the CyberGym leaderboard as Anthropic's best models sit offline under a Trump administration export ban.

A new benchmark designed to test strategic reasoning found an AI-controlled empire spent 50 turns developing nuclear weapons to stop a rival's cultural victory—only to lose the game anyway.

Aztec is urging holders of funds on its Alpha V4 network to withdraw before June 25, when a planned governance step to bring V5 to the network will make the current version's security vulnerabilities publicly visible. The privacy-focused Ethereum layer-2 posted the warning on X, calling on users to... Read the full story at The Defiant

Prosus launched ToqanClaw, a no-code AI platform positioned as an European alternative to AI agents like OpenClaw.

The US Senate passed sweeping bipartisan housing legislation Monday by a vote of 85-5, sending a package that includes a statutory ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency through December 31, 2030 toward the president's desk. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R. 6644), led by... Read the full story at The Defiant

Investors are digesting a hawkish Fed, with risk-off sentiment driving a sell-off in AI and crypto

The non-profit is cutting 54 jobs as it reorganizes into focused "clusters," following a succession of leadership departures.

The Ethereum Foundation is reducing its annual budget by roughly 40% and cutting about 20% of its staff as part of a sweeping restructuring intended to turn the nonprofit into a leaner, endowment-based organization. The organization said in a blog post Tuesday that 54 employees are leaving... Read the full story at The Defiant

SBI Group, the Japanese financial conglomerate with $252 billion in total assets, plans to issue JPYSC, its yen-linked stablecoin, as early as this week. Cointelegraph reported Monday morning, citing Nikkei, that SBI has received FSA approval and will proceed with issuance within days. The launch... Read the full story at The Defiant

Thailand's DSI says a Chinese "grey capital" network used illegal crypto mining and cash mules to launder more than $300 million a year.

The House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a July field hearing dedicated to the CLARITY Act, the digital-asset market-structure bill, hours before Senator Cynthia Lummis renewed her push for a Senate floor vote before the August recess. The two moves narrow the legislative calendar to a... Read the full story at The Defiant

Crypto majors are selling off as big Tech gets routed; Saylor is hoarding cash; and ETH heavyweights team up to fund R&D with ETHLabs.

A bipartisan housing bill the Senate passed 85-5 Monday would block a Fed digital dollar through 2030, and now heads to the House.

Ripple has received a preliminary Crypto Asset Service Provider license from Luxembourg's financial regulator, a gate-opening step toward offering its payments platform across all 30 European Economic Area countries once final conditions are met. The approval, described as a "Green Light Letter,"... Read the full story at The Defiant

MoneyGram has launched an active validator node on the Solana network and joined Solana's institutional developer platform, marking the payments company's third blockchain infrastructure commitment and its first direct participation in Solana consensus. The company announced the move via press... Read the full story at The Defiant

SoFi's Bank-Issued Stablecoin Hits $150M as Bullish Becomes First CEX to List It SoFi Bank's stablecoin SOFIUSD crossed $150 million in circulating supply on Tuesday, the same day Bullish announced it is the first centralized exchange to list the token, according to on-chain data tracked by Artemis... Read the full story at The Defiant

Bithumb, South Korea's second-largest crypto exchange, has listed Canton (CC) in its Korean won market, bringing a blockchain used by Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Citadel Securities as Canton Network participants into one of Asia's most active retail trading venues. Bithumb announced the CC/KRW pair... Read the full story at The Defiant

The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated three individuals and six entities on June 22 for facilitating financial transactions on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, targeting a network that used money service businesses and cryptocurrency to move ISIS funds across... Read the full story at The Defiant

Synthetix governance has moved to retire sUSD, proposing to pay all holders back at face value in vested SNX under SIP-423, introduced June 12. The stablecoin now trades at roughly $0.25 against its $1.00 target, per CoinGecko and DefiLlama. Synthetix founder Kain Warwick and core contributor... Read the full story at The Defiant

Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment firm, has launched a tokenized corporate bond fund natively on Solana and Ethereum, making it the first publicly available, fully native UK-regulated tokenized fund issued on public blockchains. The fund, called the Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund... Read the full story at The Defiant

Sunrise and Backpack Securities brought tokenized Micron Technology stock to Solana on Monday, listing $MU on-chain exactly 48 hours before Micron reports its fiscal third-quarter earnings after the closing bell on June 24. Each token is backed 1:1 by a real Micron share held in custody by Backpack... Read the full story at The Defiant

Taiko's L2 bridge went dark early Sunday after an attacker used a signing key that had been left publicly exposed in the protocol's GitHub repository to forge withdrawal proofs and drain roughly $1.7 million from bridge contracts on Ethereum mainnet. The team urged all users to exit every bridge... Read the full story at The Defiant

Secret Network's cross-chain bridge to Axelar has been suspended after an attacker exploited a years-old minting flaw to drain $4.67 million in wrapped tokens over seven undetected days. Both teams disclosed the incident on June 19, confirming approximately $4.67 million in assets were taken from... Read the full story at The Defiant

The CFTC asked the public to weigh in on running standard futures around the clock and on listing perpetual contracts tied to physically delivered energy commodities such as crude oil. The request opens the door to importing the crypto-native perpetual design into the oil and gas derivatives... Read the full story at The Defiant

The analysts underscored that Strategy's Stretch (STRC) can't technically lose its “peg.”

Goldfinch Finance, the a16z- and Coinbase Ventures-backed DeFi lending protocol, is formally winding down after a governance proposal posted by its core developer confirmed the protocol cannot recover from widespread borrower defaults that have stranded depositors for nearly three years. Warbler... Read the full story at The Defiant

Some of Ethereum's largest holders are coming together to fund a new research and development lab aimed at boosting the network and ETH.

**Deck:** Chainlink launched APAC Equities Streams on Monday, putting live pricing for large-cap Asian companies on-chain to power equity perps, prediction markets and structured products in Asian time zones. Chainlink launched APAC Equities Streams on Monday, an oracle feed that brings pricing for... Read the full story at The Defiant

**Deck:** On-chain governance stripped admin control over Aztec's rollup contract, freezing the code in place and clearing the technical bar for L2Beat's top decentralization tier. Privacy-focused Ethereum layer-2 Aztec said it reached Stage 2 on L2Beat, the highest decentralization rating the... Read the full story at The Defiant

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders aimed at expanding U.S. quantum computing capabilities and speeding the transition to quantum-resistant encryption.

A new paper from Google DeepMind argues that disagreements over whether AI is conscious could spill into politics, law, and public institutions.

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, and crypto exchange OKX are forming a 50-50 joint venture to bring NYSE-listed equities on-chain. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will co-chair the venture. The two companies announced the venture Monday in a joint... Read the full story at The Defiant

A bill that would make crypto mining and staking more attractive is a top priority for industry leaders—and a growing concern for House Democrats.

The Ethereum Foundation's interim Executive Director published a six-part execution thread Monday, committing EF to treating MEV extraction as a structural threat, making privacy a protocol default, and moving its own compensation into ETH and Ethereum-native stablecoins. Bastian Aue, known as... Read the full story at The Defiant

The well-known trading bot took a hit this weekend after it fell victim to a series of transactions that left its logic exposed.

Five former Ethereum Foundation researchers have launched Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum, on the same day the EF's own Chief Strategy Advisor published a framework describing how spinouts from the foundation should be evaluated and funded. The lab's founding team is Ansgar... Read the full story at The Defiant

The pair will focus on advancing tokenization and digital asset infrastructure in a joint venture co-chaired by the former governor of New York.

Franklin Templeton has closed its acquisition of 250 Digital and switched on Franklin Crypto, a new active digital-asset arm aimed at pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional allocators. The close lands inside the second-quarter target the firm set when it announced the deal on... Read the full story at The Defiant

Google is investing $75 million in A24 as part of a new AI research initiative focused on filmmaking tools.

A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that roughly $1.9 million in bets displayed across more than 1,100 creator videos promoting Polymarket were not real, exposing a fake-engagement campaign at the world's largest prediction market as it pursues U.S. regulatory approval and institutional... Read the full story at The Defiant

The BoE scrapped individual holding caps for a £40 billion per-coin issuance limit and will let issuers hold more reserves in government debt.

DeFi risk curator Re7 Labs said this morning that wallets affected by the March exploit of Resolv Labs' USR stablecoin can claim a share of a 223,000 USDC compensation pool. The makeup payment closes one of the smaller curator-side liabilities tied to the incident. The pool covers users whose... Read the full story at The Defiant

USD1's circulating supply expanded 9.7% over the past seven days to $4.85 billion, a 100th-percentile move on the World Liberty Financial-issued stablecoin's three-month supply history. The dollar increase works out to roughly $427 million in new tokens between Monday last week and Sunday,... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Consumer Technology Association, the industry group that represents more than 1,200 technology companies including Amazon, Apple and Google, urged the Senate to bring the CLARITY Act to the floor without delay. Senator Cynthia Lummis followed the next morning with an on-record statement that... Read the full story at The Defiant

Researchers estimate more than $1.7 million was stolen after attackers allegedly exploited Taiko's proof verification process.

The ENS DAO opened a temp-check proposal Friday that would shift treasury control, grants administration and long-term capital strategy to an expanded ENS Foundation. Tokenholders would keep protocol-layer authority and the power to remove directors. Katherine Wu, an ENS Foundation board member... Read the full story at The Defiant

Morgan Stanley filled in the blanks on its two single-asset crypto trusts last Thursday, filing amended S-1 registration statements for a spot Solana Trust and a spot Ethereum Trust that now identify the custodians, sponsor fee and tickers left open in the original January filings. The Solana... Read the full story at The Defiant

An attacker drained more than $7.5 million from jaredfromsubway.eth, the Ethereum address widely considered the single most-active sandwich-attack operator on the network, over the weekend. The loss is a rare public setback for an MEV bot that has run as one of Ethereum's largest priority-fee... Read the full story at The Defiant

An Ethereum address linked to the HashFlare cloud-mining fraud transferred 10,600 ETH worth about $18.5 million on Monday morning after sitting idle for roughly three and a half years. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT flagged the movement, the first activity tied to the address since the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Andrew Cuomo will co-chair a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, the companies disclosed Monday. The former New York governor takes the role as ICE's strategic push into crypto markets reaches its highest-profile political appointment... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Bank of England published its policy statement and draft Code of Practice for systemic stablecoin issuers on Monday, replacing the per-person holding caps it consulted on last year with an issuer-level issuance ceiling and a more generous reserve-asset mix. Industry feedback can be filed until... Read the full story at The Defiant

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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