DeFi News Hub

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev called on US policymakers to modernize securities rules so tokenized stocks can trade in America, in a long post published Tuesday that named the absence of US Stock Tokens as “one glaring gap” in the company’s tokenization push. The post landed five days after the SEC... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Regulation Crypto Assets on Aug. 18, a framework that would let token issuers raise up to $75 million a year without registering the offering and, under a separate safe harbor, remove some tokens from the definition of a security altogether. The... Read the full story at The Defiant

The proposed rules would let crypto projects raise capital through token sales without full securities registration and create a path for tokens to separate from investment contracts.

Traders are betting OpenAI's next frontier model lands within weeks—even after the company pumped the brakes.

WorldClaw accepts World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin while offering AI models from Chinese companies facing U.S. national security restrictions.

The Swiss hardware-wallet maker found two severe bugs with the help of frontier AI models, and warns that older firmware leaves you exposed.

The bankrupt airline’s internal communications and business records could soon be used to improve Google’s AI systems.

The banking giant plans to let institutional clients hold Bitcoin and traditional assets through the same custody framework.

The Tokyo-listed firm will seed gaming media company Super League—to be renamed Superplanet and trade as SUPA—with 2,100 BTC.

The address received 8.54 BTC in June 2011 when the coin traded around $14 and stayed silent for 15 years before moving roughly $538,000 in a single transaction.

Plus, Ethereum researchers are prioritizing privacy; Robinhood is rolling out agentic trading; and Ansem debuts his own launchpad.

The bid protest, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, challenges ICE's sole-source award for blockchain forensic tools, pitting the two biggest names in crypto tracing against each other.

Austria's Financial Market Authority fined the Vienna-based exchange 70,000 euros for procedural and disclosure breaches, an early marker of how EU regulators intend to enforce the bloc's new crypto rulebook.

Payward is joining Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s program for giving vetted organizations access to its powerful cybersecurity AI.

Elon Musk’s AI firm says the state’s first-of-its-kind nudification ban violates the First Amendment. Minnesota says it regulates a tool, not speech.

Printr, a token launchpad that deployed assets across eight chains from one interface, said Monday it has begun winding down and will cease all operations by Aug. 31, cancelling the token generation event and airdrop it had told users to expect. The shutdown removes one of the few launchpads that... Read the full story at The Defiant

Crypto influencer Zion "Ansem" Thomas opened ansem.io on Aug. 17, a site where token teams pay for his promotion by giving supply to holders of his memecoin. The trade replaces the standard influencer deal, in which a team pays social media influencers, known as Key Opinion Leaders, in cash or... Read the full story at The Defiant

Traders across Polymarket, Kalshi, and Myriad are leaning the same way: no change at the September meeting.

Deel said on Aug. 17 that its DLUSD stablecoin wallet is live in more than 80 countries, 11 weeks after a launch limited to Argentina. The expansion routes a payroll platform that processes $22 billion a year into distributing dollar balances to contractors in markets where local banks make dollar... Read the full story at The Defiant

Neynar has started looking for a new team to run Farcaster, the token launcher Clanker and its own developer platform, co-founder Rish Mukherji said on Aug. 17, seven months after the company acquired the decentralized social protocol from Merkle Manufactory. That puts Farcaster into its second... Read the full story at The Defiant

Exchanges and other crypto platforms would face new restrictions on selling stablecoins to US customers beginning in 2027.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman's new essay cites his company's own hack of Hugging Face to push urgent AI-powered defense.

Worldwide search interest in prediction markets has returned to roughly where it sat before the 2026 World Cup, and the two venues that take almost all the category's trading volume are moving apart as it does. Both peaks in Google's data land on tournament dates. The decline since is a return to... Read the full story at The Defiant

XRP is clinging to the dollar price line it's defended since Trump's 2024 win. But both the daily and weekly charts are now flashing red.

The native token of Solana's Pump.fun is up 8%, and the pattern bulls have been waiting for is starting to form on the daily chart.

A proposed package would let privacy pools pay their own transaction fees without relying on intermediaries.

Compound Foundation named four executives recruited from Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital, the NEAR Foundation and Maple Finance to spend a $52 million budget on turning the 2018 lending protocol into credit infrastructure for banks and asset managers. The hires arrive with Compound at roughly a... Read the full story at The Defiant

TokenWorks will let artists launch new NFT collections directly into Fake World Assets' randomized pool through a mechanism called FWAir, extending the two-person team's protocol from trading existing NFTs to issuing new ones. Adam, the TokenWorks co-founder known as Rhynotic on X, announced the... Read the full story at The Defiant

The securities regulator cited an "unforeseen scheduling issue," but sources point to a legal threat from Wall Street trade group SIFMA and an administration waiting to see whether the Clarity Act passes in September.

Stripe just bought the layer that decides which AI model answers your prompt—and it was already collecting the money for it.

Stripe has finalized an agreement to buy AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. Neither company has announced the deal, and a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.... Read the full story at The Defiant

The firm says it's 96% of the way to owning 5% of Ethereum's total supply, according to Chairman Tom Lee.

SafePal disclosed on Aug. 16 that a flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed the personal data of 39,798 customers, and a threat actor is already advertising the records for sale on a cybercrime forum. The file pairs home addresses and phone numbers with proof of hardware wallet ownership, which... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Dutch cyber agency says attackers exploited an authentication flaw in macOS Screen Sharing to gain root access and plant Monero miners, with public proof-of-concept code now circulating.

The meeting comes while progress on the Clarity Act has been delayed and the SEC's latest rulemaking postponed.

The Bitcoin treasury firm halted BTC sales after three weeks, with equity issuance covering dividends, a STRC buyback and the dollar reserve.

Bitdefender says fake downloads of the newly released blockbuster are already spreading Lumma Stealer, malware that scrapes crypto wallets, passwords and browser sessions from infected machines.

The macro fund raised its iShares Bitcoin Trust stake 18.9% to 688,529 shares worth $22.9 million in Q2, while sharply cutting its call options—a shift from leveraged bets toward direct spot exposure.

The trustee says Knaken bought the coins in its own name, leaving customers with a euro claim against a company that has collapsed.

A flaw in an order-tracking plug-in of bitcoin wallet provider SafePal exposed names, addresses and phone numbers of nearly 40,000 customers.

Three weeks after a Flash release that couldn't produce a working file, Google's budget tier zero-shots a playable game. It still can't reason, and a free 27B model still writes better.

A California bill is awaiting an Assembly vote to "place guardrails" around AI chatbots and prevent them from acting as therapists.

Apple is pairing its in-house model with Alibaba’s Qwen as it prepares to bring Apple Intelligence to Chinese iPhones.

The filing would turn raw footage into labeled clips of who did what, without anyone opting in.

The proposed World Liberty Trust Company would take over issuance of the USD1 stablecoin from BitGo.

Tether said Thursday that KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on the financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V. for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, completing the first full financial statement audit in the company's history. An unqualified opinion is the cleanest verdict an... Read the full story at The Defiant

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global disclosed a 6,151,062-share position in BitMine Immersion Technologies valued at $81,870,635, according to a Norges Bank holdings filing for the quarter ended June 30. The holding gives the sovereign wealth fund indirect exposure to Ethereum through BMNR... Read the full story at The Defiant

Tempo on Aug. 12 launched Tempo Earn, a product that lets fintechs pay their users rewards on idle stablecoin balances and keep part of the return, with payroll platform Deel as the first named deployment. Section 4(a)(11) of the GENIUS Act bars any permitted payment stablecoin issuer from paying... Read the full story at The Defiant

Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets research said on Thursday that the $100 end-2030 price target he set for UNI in June may be too low, citing the rate at which Uniswap is now burning tokens with fees earned on Robinhood Chain. The burn rate Geoff Kendrick is extrapolating from is... Read the full story at The Defiant

SharpLink plans to stake $200 million of ETH through Lido, receiving wstETH that will be held with Anchorage Digital. Using Kraken’s displayed ETH price of $1,889.84, the dollar allocation equates to about 106,000 ETH, roughly 12% of the company’s 888,938 ETH holdings reported as of Aug. 3. The... Read the full story at The Defiant

Neutrl, which aims to provide market-neutral yield, paused minting, redemptions, and other protocol functions on Thursday, citing circumstances affecting protocol reserves. NUSD, the protocol’s synthetic dollar, had a market capitalization of about $53.3 million. Neutrl said it acted on advice from... Read the full story at The Defiant

Robinhood Ventures Fund II priced 8 million common shares at $25 each, creating a $200 million gross initial public offering for a fund designed to give retail investors exposure to private companies. Robinhood said the shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 13... Read the full story at The Defiant

Trezor said a breach at third-party shipping provider ShipMonk exposed personal and order data belonging to 13,689 recent customers, including names and contact details that can be used for targeted phishing. Shipping addresses also create a potential physical-security risk by tying named customers... Read the full story at The Defiant

ether.fi is adding tokenized stock trading, portfolio-wide borrowing and global fiat transfers to its app, moving the liquid staking protocol further into retail banking products. The company announced the changes Thursday as part of what it calls its Summer release. The launch continues a shift... Read the full story at The Defiant

Securitize reported record average tokenized assets under management of $4.3 billion for the second quarter, up 16% from a year earlier, but revenue fell 5% to $14.4 million and its net loss widened to $21.7 million in its first results released after it began trading publicly. Tokenization revenue... Read the full story at The Defiant

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said the team renounced all creator fees from “Uniswap employee testing” after tokens created during Pools testing were discovered, redirecting the fees to an automated buy-and-burn contract. TradePools said Wednesday that test tokens made while building Pools no longer... Read the full story at The Defiant

Boltz’s original founders have stepped down, and an unnamed group of “veteran Bitcoiners” has agreed to take over the suspended Bitcoin swap service, the company said Wednesday. The incoming operators will provide capital and engineering resources, while work to find and fix vulnerabilities is... Read the full story at The Defiant

Circle renewed its push for cirBTC as neutral institutional collateral in an Aug. 12 post, but the product is not a new launch. It has been live on Ethereum since June 8 and had only about 40 tokens outstanding at the time of review, compared with more than 116,000 WBTC and 97,000 cbBTC. cirBTC... Read the full story at The Defiant

BitGo Chief Financial Officer Edward Reginelli will resign effective Sept. 15, the digital-asset infrastructure company disclosed on Aug. 12. In the same announcement, BitGo reported a $19.0 million second-quarter net loss, reversing a $38.3 million profit a year earlier even as revenue climbed... Read the full story at The Defiant

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Investment Management said Wednesday that it would not recommend enforcement action if Franklin Templeton’s U.S. registered funds hold shares of its onchain money market fund through an affiliated blockchain-integrated custody and... Read the full story at The Defiant

A wave of launchpads on Robinhood Chain took most of pump.fun's share of the token-launch business in the first two weeks of July. Still, pump.fun is now earning more per week than before they arrived. The launchpad business grew faster than pump.fun lost ground in it. Weekly fees across the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Solana came within roughly 4.5 percentage points of losing transaction finality early Wednesday, when 28.83% of staked SOL went delinquent, according to staking protocol Marinade Finance. Marinade said the episode affected 90 validators and cost them a combined 333 SOL in rewards. The reported... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Securities and Exchange Commission is advancing an “innovation exemption” for tokenized listed securities that Chair Paul Atkins says would give market participants a cabined framework to begin facilitating compliant onchain trading while the Commission develops long-term rules. Bloomberg... Read the full story at The Defiant

Flash.Trade founder Anas Khader gave three reasons for shutting down his Solana perps exchange on Aug. 7, and the second one named the Solana Foundation. Four days later the Foundation's president was publicly rejecting the word "kingmaking." The underlying discussion is how an organization with a... Read the full story at The Defiant

Bitwise Asset Management has cut about 14% of its workforce, reducing headcount to roughly 155 from around 180 as the crypto-focused manager contends with a sharp retreat in assets. Bloomberg reported that Bitwise confirmed the reduction in an emailed statement. The reported totals amount to... Read the full story at The Defiant

Harmony released a mainnet patch on Aug. 12 that changes two verification paths after reports of an unauthorized ONE mint: a quorum check affecting pre-staking-epoch committees and a cross-shard receipt mechanism that could apply the same transfer more than once. The v2026.1.1 release came after... Read the full story at The Defiant

Barça Mobile, FC Barcelona’s official mobile telecom service operated by New Era Visionary Group, is developing an in-app digital wallet using infrastructure from Wirex, Crossmint and the Stellar Development Foundation. New Era announced the partnerships on Aug. 5. Its announcement described the... Read the full story at The Defiant

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Goliath Ventures Inc. and its chief executive, Christopher Delgado, on Tuesday, alleging the Florida company raised at least $397 million from roughly 1,600 customers by promising to place their bitcoin and ether in decentralized exchange liquidity... Read the full story at The Defiant

Riot Platforms has leased 191 megawatts of computing capacity at its Rockdale, Texas, bitcoin mining campus to an unnamed artificial intelligence company under a 20-year agreement the miner says will generate roughly $9.1 billion in revenue, according to an exhibit filed with the U.S. Securities... Read the full story at The Defiant

Rain acquired Ansa, a startup whose software lets merchants run their own branded prepaid wallets, the stablecoin card issuer announced. The purchase adds a product built on fiat. Ansa's wallets hold dollar balances that customers load in advance and spend at the brand that issued them, and neither... Read the full story at The Defiant

ENS tokenholders approved and executed a proposal that turns the ENS Foundation into a staffed organization with a full-time executive director and a five-seat board, and hands it onchain control of the DAO's endowment. The opposition centered on the keys. The executable swapped the sole owner of... Read the full story at The Defiant

Coinbase has received a Financial Services Permission from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market to build what it calls its international tokenization hub, clearing the exchange to arrange deals in investments and provide custody ahead of a launch of tokenized... Read the full story at The Defiant

Cole Villemain, the Pudgy Penguins co-founder whose holders voted him out in January 2022, sold out a 44,444-piece NFT collection on Robinhood Chain in under an hour early Tuesday, taking in roughly $1.28 million according to an onchain tally of the mint transactions. Villemain, who posts as... Read the full story at The Defiant

MoneyGram has extended MoneyGram Ramps, its cash-to-crypto and crypto-to-cash API, to Solana, the company said Tuesday. Rift, a self-custody trading app, is the first Solana wallet to integrate it. Until now, Solana wallets that wanted to route users into MoneyGram's retail cash network had to... Read the full story at The Defiant

eToro Group agreed to buy TradeZero, a U.S.-focused online brokerage for active traders, for up to $231 million in cash plus up to 2.5 million newly issued Class A shares, the Nasdaq-listed company said in a release filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The purchase... Read the full story at The Defiant

Bitcoin's BIP editors removed Luke Dashjr from the role on Monday, two days after the soft fork he championed split thousands of nodes onto a chain that has not produced a block since Aug. 8. The BIPs repository has no written procedure for taking the role away. BIP 3, the document that governs the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Two crypto prediction market startups announced they were winding down within 90 minutes of each other on Monday morning, both giving users until Sept. 30 to pull their money out. The venues that closed sat at opposite ends of the market. Trepa built its own mechanism on Solana, paying users by how... Read the full story at The Defiant

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Global crypto exchange-traded products drew a net $600 million in July, their first positive month since April, 21Shares said in a monthly flows report published Aug. 10. Ether-native products took $350 million of that, roughly twice the $176 million that went into bitcoin-native products. XRP... Read the full story at The Defiant

Vitalik Buterin overlaid his 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram onto the Ethereum Foundation's current strawmap on Monday and said the most striking part of the comparison is the set of items that were not on the 2023 diagram in any form: privacy, defenses against quantum computers, and an execution... Read the full story at The Defiant

The Bitcoin chain enforcing BIP-110 has not produced a block since Saturday night, and the proposal's supporters — including Luke Dashjr, who maintains Bitcoin Knots and is chief technology officer of the mining pool Ocean — are now discussing a change to Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm.... Read the full story at The Defiant

Attackers emptied Lightning nodes belonging to BTCPay Server users on Friday, including one run by hardware wallet maker Foundation, after the self-hosted bitcoin payment processor warned that a critical vulnerability was being actively exploited and told merchants to update to version 2.4.2 or... Read the full story at The Defiant

Flash Trade said on Friday it will wind down operations unless it finds a party to acquire the Solana perpetuals exchange, and that the decision was not driven by money. "This decision is not calculated based on monetary reasons," the team wrote on X, citing "direction, shrinking market... Read the full story at The Defiant

Joseph Chalom said SharpLink opposes EIP-8363, a draft Ethereum proposal that would burn part of validator rewards as the staking ratio climbs, in an article published on X on Friday. "Sharplink opposes it," he wrote. Chalom described the proposal, titled "Tapered Issuance Burn," as phasing in a... Read the full story at The Defiant

Rarible said on Thursday that its NFT marketplace is live on Solana, opening with the Claynosaurz collection as its first featured drop. The marketplace now lists Solana as a supported network alongside Ethereum, MegaETH and Base, with dedicated Solana Explore, Mint and Gacha pages. Solana's... Read the full story at The Defiant

A checkout register at the Lawson Takanawa Gateway City convenience store in Tokyo took a 322-yen payment in the yen stablecoin JPYC on Aug. 6, printing "stablecoin" on the receipt as the payment method, according to CoinPost, whose reporter Ritsuki Kumazawa made the purchase during the... Read the full story at The Defiant

Browser-based tool lets investors and lenders cryptographically confirm that every loan in a tokenized pool belongs there and has passed eligibility rules, without seeing private borrower data Wayzata, MN — August 6, 2026 — Black Lake Digital Markets, the institutional rails for mortgage capital... Read the full story at The Defiant

ether.fi has removed all restaking exposure from weETH, making its flagship asset a plain liquid staking token and confining restaking to weETHs, a separate token built on Symbiotic. The protocol announced the split on X on Thursday. The change ends the arrangement that made ether.fi the largest... Read the full story at The Defiant

Uniswap Labs' launchpad passed Pons on daily token launches within a day of opening on Robinhood Chain, according to onchain data, taking the lead from a product that settles every trade on Uniswap's own automated market maker. Uniswap now runs a product in the same category as applications built... Read the full story at The Defiant

Robinhood Chain's decentralized exchange volume fell 72.5% between its Jul. 11 peak and Aug. 1, but every other headline metric on the chain kept climbing through the drop. While transactions, total value locked and stablecoin supply are all at record highs, the size of the average trade collapsed.... Read the full story at The Defiant

a16z crypto policy head Miles Jennings argued on X on Thursday that the banking industry's campaign against the CLARITY Act will backfire, because blocking the bill leaves in place the stablecoin yield arrangement banks have lobbied hardest to stop. "The bewildering thing about TradFi's extreme... Read the full story at The Defiant

Sentora is curating a Morpho lending vault that accepts as collateral a token backed by an actively managed credit portfolio run by Wellington Management, the Boston asset manager with more than $1.3 trillion under management as of December 2025. The token, mWIN, was issued by Midas on Aug. 5.... Read the full story at The Defiant

Uniswap opened pools.trade, a memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain, shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Aug. 5, four and a half hours after the public countdown it had set expired. The highest-valued token on it is FRONG, minted six days earlier by the same contracts, carrying the name of the video Uniswap... Read the full story at The Defiant

Aave founder Stani Kulechov and ether.fi chief executive Mike Silagadze have come out against the proposal to burn a rising share of Ethereum validator rewards, joining a list of DeFi founders, solo stakers and researchers who have spent two days arguing against it on X and on the Ethereum... Read the full story at The Defiant

Prediction-market traders cut the odds that the CLARITY Act becomes law this year after Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to file cloture on the motion to proceed to the crypto market structure bill on Tuesday night and instead filed cloture Wednesday morning on a college sports bill and... Read the full story at The Defiant

Dinari opened tokenized U.S. stock trading to U.S. investors on Tuesday, saying 724 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs — including every company in the S&P 500 — can now be bought with USDC from self-custody wallets by eligible investors in the United States. The company said it is the first platform... Read the full story at The Defiant

Circle on Aug. 5 named the founding validator cohort for Arc, its Layer 1 blockchain, listing BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa alongside Circle itself, ahead of a... Read the full story at The Defiant

Laser Digital, the digital assets arm of Japan’s Nomura Group, has taken a stake in ZIGChain’s ZIG token and agreed to structure and oversee risk on a pipeline of onchain private credit products built by ZIG Markets, the Layer 1’s product and access layer. The arrangement puts a Nomura subsidiary... Read the full story at The Defiant

Proof of Play, the studio behind the fully onchain game Pirate Nation, said on Tuesday that it is ceasing operations, telling players it "couldn't build a product and sustainable business that proved out this thesis at scale." The thesis, the studio said, was that "games using blockchain tech had... Read the full story at The Defiant

Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters said the ai16z token is "dead. Completely." and that the foundation behind it is winding down, after his side settled a class action brought by Burwick Law by handing over "the rest of the treasury and all the money we had." "Burwick sued us and we settled with a... Read the full story at The Defiant