DeFi News Hub

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin detailed his local-first AI stack in a new blog post, including custom tools that rely on human approval.

Jonathan, a nearly 200-year-old tortoise, was widely mourned Wednesday—but his purported demise was a hoax, and there's a crypto connection.

Polymarket has expanded beyond crypto and event-based contracts into traditional financial assets, integrating oracle provider Pyth Network as the resolution source for a new suite of equity, index, and commodity markets.

The collaboration, announced on Wednesday, launches with daily up/down and daily close markets for major equity indices, commodities including gold, silver, WTI crude, and natural gas, and more than a dozen U.S. equities such as TSLA, COIN, PLTR, NVDA, and AAPL.

Alongside the integration, Pyth unveiled Pyth Terminal, a live data interface that allows traders to explore and verify price feeds in real time. The tool includes benchmark comparisons for U.S. equities and foreign exchange, publisher-level transparency for each feed, and free API key access for new sign-ups.

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He built systems that moved billions in customer funds. Now, the CFTC has closed his case with no civil penalty, citing his cooperation.

Federal prosecutors in Connecticut seized over $600,000 in crypto linked to a fraud case that hit at least one Ledger hardware wallet user.

Kraken launched an opt-in rewards program for xStocks on Thursday, offering users up to 1% rewards by holding tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs. The rewards program addresses a gap in traditional equities markets, which typically lack accessible yield mechanisms beyond dividends. xStocks, Kraken's 24/7 permissionless onchain equities products, enable crypto-native investors to access U.S. stocks and ETFs outside traditional market hours.

The opt-in structure allows users to choose participation in the rewards program without mandatory enrollment. xStocks were designed to bring familiar equity products into decentralized ecosystems where many investors already transact, extending traditional market access into crypto environments that operate around the clock.

Sources: Kraken Blog | Kraken Support | Kraken xStocks

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Ethereum's dominance in non-USD stablecoin supply has shrunk to 65% as of February 2026, down from 90% in early 2023, according to data published by Dune and Visa on Thursday. Despite the decline, Ethereum remains the default chain for stablecoin issuance, though other blockchains are catching up in market share.

While Ethereum leads in issuance, it ranks only fifth by unique senders across stablecoin networks. The absolute growth in activity has been significant, with unique senders increasing from 2,000 to 12,000 year-over-year as of February 2026, indicating expanded user adoption across the stablecoin ecosystem.

Sources: Dune

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The Tokyo-listed firm is now the third-largest Bitcoin treasury company—though that's partly down to MARA Holdings' recent sale of 15,000 BTC.

SoFi launched Big Business Banking, an enterprise platform on Solana that combines traditional fiat banking with stablecoin services on a single regulated platform. The nationally chartered bank, which has 13.7 million members and over $50 billion in assets, is offering 24/7 payment support enabling companies to hold dollars, convert to stablecoins, and move money instantly. Initial participants include Cumberland, Bullish, BitGo, B2C2, Fireblocks, Wintermute, Galaxy, Jupiter, Mesh Payments, and Mastercard.

The platform represents a significant integration of traditional banking infrastructure with blockchain technology, leveraging Solana's network to enable real-time settlement for enterprise customers. The service allows participating firms to conduct both fiat and crypto operations within a regulated banking framework, eliminating the need for separate banking and crypto rails.

Sources: Solana (Official) | CoinDesk | The Block

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The crypto exchange's top lawyer dismissed banking industry concerns about deposit flight as lawmakers work to finalize stablecoin provisions.

Venture capital firm Paradigm is developing a prediction markets trading terminal targeted at professional traders and market makers, according to Fortune. Paradigm partner Arjun Balaji is spearheading the project, which has been in development since late 2025. The move comes as Paradigm has emerged as one of the most active backers of prediction markets, participating in three successive funding rounds for leading platform Kalshi in 2025.

Paradigm's push into prediction markets infrastructure reflects growing institutional interest in the sector. The venture firm's involvement with Kalshi, combined with this new trading terminal development, signals deepening commitment to the prediction markets ecosystem as platforms like Kalshi and Coinbase's prediction markets offering expand.

Sources: Fortune

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Markets slumped as Trump claimed the Iran war was “nearing completion” while offering no clear plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Volatility Shares, the company that launched the first leveraged crypto fund in the U.S., is expanding its roster to smaller digital assets

Crypto markets started April in the green, snapping a bruising first quarter with a late-March relief rally that continued into Wednesday as hopes of geopolitical de-escalation lifted risk assets across the board.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $68,000 after reaching as high as $69,200 earlier in the day. ETH climbed 2% to $2,140, and SOL was flat at $84 in the wake of the Drift exploit. Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) was unchanged at $1.35.

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Solana-based perpetuals DEX Drift Protocol has suffered an exploit impacting more than $200 million in funds.

Google's cheapest video model yet targets developers burned by high generation costs, arriving just days after OpenAI pulled the plug on Sora.

Federal prosecutors in California have charged ten foreign nationals from four crypto market-making firms with orchestrating wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes to artificially inflate token prices at the expense of retail investors.

Three defendants were arrested in Singapore, extradited to the United States, and made their initial appearances in federal court in Oakland on March 30.

The firms named in the indictments are Gotbit, Vortex, Antier Solutions, and Contrarian.

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Elon Musk’s rocket company has confidentially submitted IPO paperwork to U.S. regulators, potentially setting up one of the largest public listings in history.

Solana-based perpetuals exchange Drift Protocol has suffered a series of large-scale outflows, with roughly $270 million in assets moving from the protocol's vault address in a matter of minutes.

The transfers spanned more than 15 distinct token types — including stablecoins, wrapped Bitcoin variants, liquid staking tokens, Jupiter’s JLP vault token, and even memecoins — all originating from an address Arkham labels as "Drift Protocol: Vault (JCNCM)," which corresponds to Drift's documentation.

The vault's holdings have fallen from $309 million to just $41 million.

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The Fed governor has previously said that stablecoins risk undermining the U.S. central bank’s credibility.

Chinese authorities have arrested Li Xiong, former chairman of Huione Group, linked by U.S. regulators to billions in illicit crypto flows.

Two papers published this week have reignited debates about the risk posed by “Q-day” to the cryptography that underpins digital assets.

Moody's has rated a New Hampshire Bitcoin-backed bond—a first for BTC as direct bond collateral.

Franklin Templeton has agreed to acquire 250 Digital, an active crypto investment management firm spun out of venture firm CoinFund in January, establishing a dedicated division called Franklin Crypto aimed at institutional investors.

The deal, announced Wednesday, includes the full 250 Digital investment team and all liquid cryptocurrency strategies previously run by CoinFund. Franklin Templeton will also invest in those strategies as part of the agreement. The deal terms were not disclosed.

Notably, the transaction will include BENJI tokens — which represent shares in the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) — as payment consideration. The company described the move as "an important and innovative step toward conducting M&A transactions using tokenized assets."

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Global asset manager Franklin Templeton is acquiring a CoinFund spinoff to build out its own crypto wing, Franklin Crypto.

Michael Selig argued that prediction markets operating offshore in “unregulated space” could lead to an FTX-style collapse.

The novel platform allows CFOs and their treasury teams to manage fiat and digital assets in a single system, Ripple said.

Unique senders of non-USD stablecoins on Solana nearly tripled year-over-year, according to data from Dune released April 1, 2026. The growth is being driven by adoption of EURC and BRZ stablecoins. Solana is positioning stablecoin payments as a core use case, leveraging its sub-second finality and near-zero fees, with institutional integrations from Visa, Stripe, PayPal, Mastercard, and Western Union.

The adoption surge follows Solana's February 2026 launch of a stablecoin payment infrastructure. Dune published the findings alongside research conducted with Visa, detailing the expansion of regional stablecoins on the network. The growth reflects broader momentum toward cross-border payments on blockchain networks with high throughput and minimal transaction costs.

Sources: Dune

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Experts cite portfolio rebalancing and geopolitical easing as driving the crypto market rally, though caution persists.

Researchers at Caltech announced that a functional quantum computer may be feasible by 2030, requiring only 10,000 to 20,000 qubits rather than the millions previously estimated. The revised timeline comes as Google's Quantum AI team identified approximately 6.9 million BTC as potentially vulnerable to quantum attacks, though no such capable machine currently exists.

The Caltech findings suggest the crypto industry faces a compressed timeline to develop quantum-resistant security measures. Bitcoin and other cryptographic systems relying on current encryption standards could face theoretical attack vectors once quantum computers reach the projected capability threshold, prompting ongoing discussions about protocol upgrades and post-quantum cryptography adoption.

Sources: BSCNews

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European crypto asset manager CoinShares positions for U.S. expansion as institutional players consolidate market share against Wall Street giants.

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao posted on X on April 1, 2026, addressing growing concerns about quantum computing's threat to cryptocurrency. CZ stated that the crypto industry can upgrade to quantum-resistant, or post-quantum, cryptographic algorithms to neutralize the risk, urging users not to panic over the potential threat.

CZ emphasized that upgrading to post-quantum algorithms is straightforward in theory, though he did not detail specific timelines or implementation plans. His comments come as debates persist in the crypto community about which protocols and assets—including Bitcoin's original coins—may be vulnerable to quantum computing advances.

Sources: CZ (Changpeng Zhao) on X | BeInCrypto

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Federal grand juries have indicted ten individuals tied to alleged pump-and-dump schemes, following an FBI undercover operation.

New Hampshire issued a Bitcoin-backed municipal bond that received a Ba2 rating from Moody's on April 1, 2026, marking an unprecedented first in public finance. The bond represents the first time a U.S. municipality has secured a credit rating for a debt instrument backed by cryptocurrency assets.

The Ba2 rating places the bond in the upper-medium grade category, indicating moderate credit risk. This development signals growing acceptance of Bitcoin collateral in traditional municipal financing, though the long-term implications for public finance remain untested.

Sources: Cointelegraph

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Square has introduced a Bitcoin point-of-sale payments program for US merchants with zero processing fees through the end of 2026. The fee waiver removes transaction costs for small shops and local vendors accepting Bitcoin, addressing a key barrier to cryptocurrency adoption in everyday commerce. Merchants can receive US dollars instantly in their accounts while customers pay with Bitcoin.

The program aims to drive digital currency into mainstream retail by eliminating the financial friction of payment processing. The two-year fee waiver period extends through December 2026, giving merchants an extended window to test Bitcoin acceptance without losing revenue to transaction costs.

Sources: Square (X/Twitter) | Bitcoinist | MoneyCheck

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Research suggests fault-tolerant quantum machines could arrive sooner than expected, posing a threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptography.

P2P.me was established to push boundaries, but the startup admitted that wagering on itself via Polymarket may have been a bridge too far.

Support for Magic Eden's crypto wallet is ending soon, meaning users will have to export their private keys to avoid losing access to funds.

Governor Gavin Newsom orders stronger safeguards for AI companies seeking California contracts, escalating tensions with the Trump administration over national AI regulation.

Latin America's e-commerce giant Mercado Libre quietly killed its Mercado Coin loyalty token—pivoting to its own stablecoin.

A critical vulnerability in Zcash node software could have allowed attackers to drain millions of dollars of ZEC from a deprecated shielded pool.

Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Base published its 2026 mission, vision, and strategy on Tuesday, narrowing its focus to three pillars: building global markets for tokenized assets, scaling stablecoin payments, and positioning the chain as the default home for onchain builders, including AI agents.

The roadmap consolidates last year's five-pillar playbook around a thesis that the current phase of crypto is fundamentally about upgrading the financial system into a global, 24/7 onchain economy.

Base touted significant 2025 traction to justify the pivot: $17 trillion in stablecoin volume across 26 local currencies and 17 countries, the top onchain venue for BTC spot trading, the Base App live in 140+ countries, and 50+ teams funded through Base Batches. The chain overtook Ethereum and BNB Chain in weekly DEX volume earlier this year and currently holds $4 billion in TVL, making it the largest Layer 2 network.

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Stocks are surging while Bitcoin and Ethereum hit their highest prices in days after Iran's president said he's looking to end the conflict.

Resolv Labs co-founder Ivan Kozlov said in a video update on Monday that 98% of whitelisted USR holders have been redeemed at a 1:1 ratio, marking the first concrete recovery milestone since the protocol was exploited on March 22.

Kozlov said the team prioritized verified wallets because manual processing allowed them to act within 24 hours and limit further market impact. Non-whitelisted holders who held USR before the exploit will receive the same 1:1 commitment, he said, though the technical solution for those redemptions is still being finalized.

The protocol has retained Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant and blockchain incident response firm ZeroShadow to investigate the breach. Kozlov said no evidence of insider involvement has been found so far.

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The Tether-backed USAT stablecoin built for the U.S. market is expanding to Ethereum layer-2 network Celo with help from Google Cloud.

Claude Code exposed: Anthropic is scrambling to contain the leak, but the AI coding agent is spreading far and wide and being picked apart.

Aztec Network has launched its Alpha Network, delivering what it says is the first Ethereum Layer 2 with a complete execution environment for private smart contracts.

The upgrade, which followed a unanimous community governance vote, builds on the Ignition Chain that went live in November 2025 as the coordination layer for decentralized sequencing and block production.

AZTEC is up 5% in the past 24 hours, trading at a roughly $200 million valuation, according to Coingecko.

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Standard Chartered says stablecoin velocity has doubled in two years, driven by USDC's new use cases in TradFi and AI payments.

Plume, a blockchain focused on real-world assets (RWAs), has launched what it calls the first payroll pilot using a tokenized money market fund, enabling employees to convert part of their salaries into yield-bearing fund shares without interacting with crypto exchanges or moving funds onchain manually.

The pilot pairs Plume's onchain infrastructure with Toku's stablecoin payroll platform and WisdomTree's tokenized money market fund, WTGXX. Participating Plume employees can make a one-time election to route a portion of their pay into fund shares, which are purchased via WisdomTree Connect and held in verified wallets linked to WisdomTree Prime accounts.

WTGXX has emerged as one of the fastest-growing tokenized Treasury funds, surging more than 700% between May and August last year. WisdomTree has since expanded the fund's reach to Solana and integrated debit card spending functionality.

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A whitepaper published on March 30 by Google Quantum AI has dramatically compressed the estimated timeline for quantum computers to break the elliptic-curve cryptography that secures virtually every major blockchain — and the crypto industry is scrambling to assess the fallout.

The paper was co-authored by Google researchers Ryan Babbush and Hartmut Neven alongside Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh. It concludes that breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem underpinning Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction signatures would require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, roughly a 20-fold reduction from previous estimates that placed the threshold in the millions.

"We want to raise awareness on this issue and are providing the cryptocurrency community with recommendations to improve security and stability before this is possible," the Google researchers wrote in an accompanying blog post.

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The BlackRock-backed firm has a clear path toward pressuring financial incumbents, according Benchmark’s Mark Palmer.

Shares in publicly traded Bitcoin treasury Nakamoto (NAKA) hit a new low after the firm announced it sold around $20 million of BTC.

A federal court order has permanently prohibited the exchange from serving U.S. customers unless it registers.

Bitcoin briefly traded above $67,000 on Monday as a relief rally rippled through crypto markets, buoyed by signals that the U.S.-Iran standoff may be approaching a diplomatic resolution.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $67,000, up less than 1% over the past 24 hours. ETH and SOL rose 2% to $2,050 and $84, respectively. Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) was unchanged at $1.33.

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Steakhouse Financial warned users on Monday to stop interacting with its website and app after identifying a phishing attack targeting both domains.

"No deposits are at risk. No contracts are affected. All Steakhouse depositors are safe," the Zug, Switzerland-based firm said on X, adding that the threat primarily affects new users who may unknowingly interact with a compromised version of the website.

Blockchain security firm Blockaid flagged the attack as using code from Angelferno, which it described as one of the largest active wallet-drainer operations onchain. Drainers work by tricking users into signing malicious transactions that grant attackers full access to withdraw their funds.

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Valinor, a New York-based startup building what it calls "Open Credit" infrastructure at the intersection of institutional capital and decentralized finance (DeFi), has raised $25 million in a seed round to bring private credit onto the blockchain.

Castle Island Ventures led the round. Other investors include Susquehanna's crypto arm, Maven11, Apollo, Neoclassic Capital, The Venture Dept, 57Blocks, The Fintech Fund, and the founders of Bitcoin miner-turned-AI company TeraWulf, according to the company's website. The round's valuation was not disclosed.

Co-founders Connor Dougherty and Lily Yarborough both worked in Blackstone's GSO Special Situations credit division before launching Valinor in late 2023.

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Aave V4 is now live on Ethereum mainnet, marking a fundamental architectural overhaul of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, which has over $24 billion in total value locked (TVL).

The upgrade introduces a hub-and-spoke design that allows markets to operate independently while sharing liquidity through a unified system — a shift the team says resolves a core limitation that has constrained DeFi lending since its inception.

"DeFi has built deep liquidity. Aave V4 shifts the focus to the demand side, putting that liquidity to work across real credit markets," said Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov.

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Metals.io, a new commodity tokenization platform built in the Tezos ecosystem, went live on Monday, giving users access to tokenized gold, uranium, and a basket of rare-earth metals through a single web application.

Developed by Trilitech, a London-based Tezos R&D hub, the platform launches with three assets: xU3O8 tokenized uranium, VNX Gold (VNXAU) — a gold-backed token representing allocated bullion held in Liechtenstein vaults — and the RARE token from Noemon Tech, which offers exposure to a diversified basket of five strategic metals, including hafnium, rhenium, indium, neodymium oxide, and praseodymium oxide.

The platform leverages Tezos' smart-rollup technology, which the team says delivers sub-50ms latency for near-instant transaction confirmations.

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Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a new Layer 1-to-Layer 2 framework designed to let rollups compose synchronously with Ethereum mainnet and with each other — eliminating the need for bridges and fragmented infrastructure.

The project, announced at EthCC in Cannes, is being co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation.

How It Works

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The World Foundation, which supports the Worldcoin (WLD) digital identity project, completed a $65 million over-the-counter token sale via its subsidiary World Assets Ltd. The block trades were executed with four private counterparties over the past week, with initial settlements beginning March 20, 2026, according to a March 28 statement. Tokens were priced at an average of $0.2719 per token.

The foundation stated the sale was conducted to fund Orbs manufacturing operations. The transactions represent a significant token liquidation by the organization backing Sam Altman's Worldcoin initiative, which provides digital identity services including iris scanning verification.

Sources: World Foundation

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A European Central Bank working paper challenges the notion that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) deliver on their promise of distributed governance, finding that token holdings and voting power across four major DeFi protocols are heavily concentrated among a handful of actors.

The study examined governance structures at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap using data from late 2022 and mid-2023. The researchers analyzed the top 100 token holders and top 20 voters for each protocol, reviewed 248 governance proposals, and attempted to trace the real-world identities behind pseudonymous blockchain addresses.

The findings land at a moment when governance disputes are roiling some of the very protocols examined in the study, and DeFi projects more broadly are grappling with whether the Labs-plus-DAO structure is fit for purpose.

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Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, on Friday announced a new $600 million direct cash investment in Polymarket, completing the exchange operator's structured investment arrangement with the prediction market platform.

The investment is part of a broader equity capital fundraise by Polymarket, according to a press release from ICE. The company also expects to purchase up to $40 million in Polymarket securities from existing holders, which would close out its obligations under the deal first announced in October 2025. The valuation of Friday's investment is expected to be disclosed after Polymarket completes its fundraising.

ICE made an initial $1 billion direct investment in Polymarket at that time, in what was the largest single investment ever made in a prediction market company. That deal valued Polymarket at roughly $8 billion pre-investment and established ICE as a global distributor of Polymarket's event-driven data.

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Bitcoin fell to its lowest level in more than two weeks on Friday, dropping below $66,000 as a $14 billion options expiry collided with escalating Middle East tensions and a broader risk-off rout across global markets.

BTC was trading near $65,900 at press time, down roughly 4.5% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Ether slipped to $1,983, also off 4%, while Solana tumbled 5.5% to $83. The total crypto market cap fell 3.4% to $2.36 trillion.

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MARA Holdings, the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner in the U.S., sold 15,133 BTC for approximately $1.1 billion between March 4 and March 25, deploying the proceeds to retire roughly $1 billion in convertible debt, the company said Thursday.

The transactions represent one of the single largest BTC liquidations by a public miner and mark a decisive break from the accumulation-first playbook MARA pursued through much of 2024 and 2025, when it raised billions through zero-coupon convertible note offerings specifically to buy more Bitcoin.

Debt Slashed by 30%

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Felix Protocol has launched tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds on HyperEVM, delivering on a partnership with Ondo Finance that was first announced in January.

The launch gives on-chain traders access to more than 250 tokenized equities through Felix's native trading interface, with assets backed by real shares held off-chain through Ondo Global Markets. Felix claims users can execute orders as large as $1 million with net execution costs below 10 basis points — a threshold the protocol says addresses one of the key barriers to on-chain equity adoption.

"On-chain traders no longer have to off-ramp funds to gain exposure to US capital markets," the protocol said in a post on X. The offering is not available to U.S. users or those in other prohibited jurisdictions.

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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Law No. 15,358 on March 25, establishing what the government calls the Legal Framework for Combating Organized Crime. The legislation, also known as the Raul Jungmann Law, gives judges the authority to freeze, seize, and forfeit crypto and other digital assets tied to criminal organizations — and funnel the proceeds into public security funds.

The law is notable for explicitly incorporating digital assets into Brazil's anti-crime toolkit. Article 9 of the legislation authorizes judges to order the "seizure, attachment, blocking or freezing of movable and immovable property, rights and assets, including digital or virtual assets" during investigations, as well as prohibit operations on crypto exchanges and block access to digital wallets — all without prior notice to the accused.

Crucially, the measures don't require a conviction. Judges can authorize the provisional use or early sale of seized cryptoassets, with proceeds directed to state or federal security funds to finance police operations, intelligence work, and officer training. In cases where illicit origins are clear, an "extraordinary forfeiture" process allows assets to be declared lost even without a criminal judgment.

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Coinbase and Better Home & Finance announced a partnership on Thursday to offer token-backed mortgages. The product aims to expand access to homeownership while carrying the same Fannie Mae backing as other conforming mortgages.

Qualifying Americans can now pledge Bitcoin or USDC as collateral to fund their cash down payment, securing a standard conforming mortgage without liquidating their digital assets or potentially triggering a taxable event.

How It Works

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Tether announced Wednesday that its tokenized gold product, XAU₮, is now available on BNB Chain, expanding the token's reach to the third-largest decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem by total value locked (TVL).

Each XAU₮ token represents one fine troy ounce of physical gold held in Swiss vaults as a London Good Delivery bar. The token is issued by TG Commodities under El Salvador's Digital Asset Issuance Law.

The move comes at a turbulent moment for gold markets. Spot gold is trading at roughly $4,400 per ounce, well below its all-time high of approximately $5,589 hit in January but still sharply higher year-over-year. Gold surged 64% in 2025, its largest annual gain in 40 years, as investors piled into safe-haven assets amid geopolitical tensions and trade uncertainty.

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Crypto markets sold off sharply on Thursday as oil surged back above $93 per barrel after U.S.-Iran peace talks stalled, dragging risk assets lower across the board.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $68,400, down 3.5% over the past 24 hours. ETH and SOL slipped 5% to $2,050 and $87, respectively. Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) dropped 4.5%.

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LayerZero has integrated with the institution-focused blockchain Canton (CC), becoming the first interoperability protocol to go live on the network, per a press release shared with The Defiant.

The integration, announced today, March 26, lets traditional financial institutions on Canton route tokenized assets, including securities, digital bonds, and equities, across the more than 165 public blockchains supported by LayerZero, while maintaining their compliance and confidentiality requirements, according to the release.

Also part of the integration, investors can now use stablecoins on external public chains to fund primary purchases of Canton-based tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), while Canton-native tokenized instruments can move into other ecosystems for secondary market trading.

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YPF Luz, the electricity subsidiary of Argentina’s largest energy company, has partnered with Buenos Aires-based blockchain infrastructure company Justoken to launch an energy tokenization platform built on XRP Ledger (XRPL), the firms announced earlier this month.

The platform, dubbed Enertoken, tokenizes, commercializes, and manages electricity contracts via XRPL, the public blockchain originally developed by Ripple Labs, which remains a core contributor. Meanwhile, Justoken recently emerged as the largest real-world asset (RWA) tokenization platform on XRPL by total value.

Per the announcement, the new platform from YPF Luz, developed by Justoken, is aimed at corporations and large energy consumers to help manage everything from consumption tracking, to billing, to contract execution, “fully supported by tokenized energy assets recorded on blockchain.”

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Decentralized finance (DeFi) produced roughly $8 billion in onchain yield in 2025, according to a detailed analysis published by researcher Vadym that maps the full spectrum of where DeFi returns actually originate. The breakdown reveals that yield is abundant in aggregate but unevenly distributed, often circular, and in many cases difficult to package into structured products.

The findings land as yields across DeFi have dried up. Borrowing rates on major lending platforms have converged with the Federal Reserve's policy rate, and "safe" stablecoin supply rates now average roughly 3% — below U.S. Treasuries and the Secured Overnight Financing Rate. On Aave, the 30-day average yield on USDC and USDT sits around 2%. Out of more than $20 billion in stablecoin vaults across Ethereum and its Layer 2s, 58% of TVL is earning under 3% APY, the report notes.

Where the $8 Billion Comes From

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Crypto markets drifted sideways on Wednesday as spot ETF flows whipsawed between inflows and outflows, and lawmakers grilled witnesses at a hearing on tokenized securities.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $71,000, up 2% over the past 24 hours. ETH and SOL gained 3% to $2,175 and $91.5, respectively. Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) climbed 1.5%.

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Obex, the stablecoin incubator administered by Framework Ventures and backed by a $2.5 billion mandate from the Sky ecosystem, on Tuesday announced its inaugural cohort of eight projects and began deploying up to $1 billion in USDS across them.

The first class includes Maple, USDAI, Daylight, Centrifuge, Securitize, River, TVL Capital, and Better. All eight are either already part of, or intend to join, the Sky ecosystem, spanning structured credit, fintech lending, energy finance, AI infrastructure, tokenization, crypto capital markets, and real estate.

"Our industry is at an inflection point. We're moving beyond circular DeFi yield sources and toward high-quality yield from private credit markets, fintech, energy infrastructure, AI CapEx, real estate, and other productive sectors," said Parker Edwards, partner at Framework Ventures, in a press release viewed by The Defiant.

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Ondo Finance has partnered with Franklin Templeton to tokenize five of the asset manager's exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The deal marks the first time Templeton-managed ETFs are available on-chain, extending the $1.7 trillion asset manager's blockchain footprint beyond its tokenized money market fund.

The five ETFs span a broad range of asset classes: the Franklin Focused Growth ETF (FFOG), an actively managed fund targeting innovative U.S. companies; the Franklin U.S. Large Cap Multifactor Index ETF (FLQL); the Franklin Responsibly Sourced Gold ETF (FGDL); the Franklin High Yield Corporate ETF (FLHY); and the Franklin Income Equity Focus ETF (INCE). The products will be available through Ondo’s Global Markets platform.

Under the arrangement, Franklin Templeton continues to manage the underlying ETFs while Ondo provides tokenization infrastructure and digital distribution. Ondo will acquire shares of the ETFs and issue blockchain-based tokens representing their economic exposure — tokens that do not grant direct ownership of the underlying shares but instead pass through returns to holders. That structure opens the door to DeFi use cases, such as on-chain collateralization, that are not available with traditional fund shares.

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Coinbase has integrated Chainlink's DataLink service to publish its premium exchange data onchain for the first time, the companies announced on Tuesday.

DataLink is an institutional-grade data publishing service powered by the Chainlink data standard. Through the integration, DeFi protocols can now access a range of Coinbase's datasets directly onchain, including order book data, spot prices, perpetual futures data from Coinbase International Exchange, e-mini futures data, and additional datasets spanning crypto, metals, energy, and equity futures via Coinbase Derivatives Exchange.

The data is designed to power more accurate pricing, stronger risk management, and new onchain market types, from derivatives and perpetuals to tokenized real-world assets, structured products, and next-generation lending protocol risk engines.

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Ripple has joined a pilot program run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), partnering with trade finance platform Unloq to build blockchain-based cross-border settlement infrastructure, according to a press release today, March 25.

The pilot will leverage Unloq's trade finance platform, which bundles trade obligations, settlement conditions, and financing workflows into a single execution layer, alongside Ripple's XRP Ledger and its enterprise-focused stablecoin, RLUSD. The pilot is part of BLOOM — short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency — a MAS initiative to extend settlement capabilities using tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins. MAS is both Singapore's central bank and primary financial regulator.

The use case targets a persistent inefficiency in global trade: payments that must be released only when predefined commercial conditions — like shipment verification — are confirmed, according to the release. Ripple says the structure improves risk transparency and could open up financing access for small and medium sized businesses caught in cross-border settlement limbo.

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Whop has launched Whop Treasury, an on-chain earning feature for its e-commerce platform powered by Aave, Plasma, and Veda. The feature allows creators to generate yield directly on their account balances. According to the announcement, millions of users can now access on-chain earning capabilities through the platform.

The launch represents an integration of DeFi infrastructure into a mainstream fintech platform. Aave founder Stani Kulechov highlighted the development as a milestone for bringing Aave into broader fintech adoption, with the Treasury feature giving creators direct yield-generation capabilities on their platform balances.

Sources: Stani Kulechov on X | Stani Kulechov on X

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BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR) has officially launched MAVAN — the Made in America Validator Network — its proprietary institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform, the company announced on Wednesday, March 25.

The move marks a major operational milestone in BitMine's pivot from Bitcoin miner to what Chairman Tom Lee is calling “one of the leading staking and on-chain infrastructure platforms globally,” per the release.

MAVAN is designed to serve institutions and custodians requiring U.S.-based validation, with a globally distributed architecture for international clients. Per the release, via MAVAN, BitMine will eventually expand staking services for other proof-of-stake blockchains beyond Ethereum, as well as provide crypto infrastructure services.

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The United Kingdom has imposed an immediate moratorium on all cryptocurrency donations to political parties, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Wednesday.

The move follows the publication of the Rycroft Review, a 50-page independent assessment of foreign financial interference in UK politics led by former senior civil servant Philip Rycroft.

The government will legislate the moratorium through amendments to the Representation of the People Bill currently before Parliament, and the new rules will apply retrospectively to any crypto donations received from Wednesday onward, Communities Secretary Steve Reed confirmed in the House of Commons.

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Summer Mersinger of the Blockchain Association testified before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, advocating for regulatory differentiation between DeFi protocols and traditional financial intermediaries. Mersinger stated that DeFi systems should receive "appropriately tailored equivalent consideration by the SEC" rather than being subjected to intermediary-based compliance frameworks, to preserve their role as open, neutral infrastructure while maintaining oversight of activities presenting traditional financial risks.

The statement reflects ongoing efforts by the crypto industry to shape SEC policy around DeFi regulation. The distinction between infrastructure and intermediaries has become a focal point in broader debates over how financial regulators should approach decentralized protocols versus centralized service providers.

Sources: Blockchain Association (@fund_defi)

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Dune Analytics and Visa published research titled "Beyond Dollarization" on March 25 revealing significant growth in non-USD stablecoin adoption. Non-USD stablecoin supply grew 3x, while holder addresses increased from 40,000 to 1.2 million (a 30x jump) and monthly transfer volume expanded from $600 million to $10 billion.

The research found that approximately 80% of non-USD stablecoin activity is driven by payments and treasury flows rather than DeFi activity. Transfer patterns show weekend drops that mirror payroll cycles, indicating use of local currency stablecoins as functional money rather than speculative assets.

Sources: Dune Analytics | The Block

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Decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) protocol Bittensor's native TAO token has rallied roughly 90% over the past month from around $180 at the start of March to above $332 as of March 24, and the momentum is spilling over into its subnet token ecosystem.

According to CoinGecko data, the Bittensor Subnets category is up 30% over the past 24 hours to a combined market capitalization of $1.47 billion, with trading volume topping $118 million. Of the subnet tokens tracked on the platform, a significant number have posted triple-digit percentage gains over the past month.

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The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Tuesday announced the formation of an Innovation Task Force aimed at developing clearer regulatory frameworks for crypto assets, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets within U.S. derivatives markets.

"By establishing a clear regulatory framework for innovators building on the new frontier of finance, we can foster responsible innovation at home and ensure American market participants are not left on the sidelines," Chairman Michael Selig said in a statement.

The unit will operate alongside the CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee, which was formed in February and includes more than 30 executives, including Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman.

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Crypto industry leaders reviewed the draft stablecoin yield language in the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act during a closed-door session on Capitol Hill on Monday, and the opening reaction was that the text was overly narrow and unclear, according to CoinDesk.

The draft, negotiated by Senators Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), bans yield payments for simply holding a stablecoin and restricts any structure that is economically equivalent to a bank deposit, CoinDesk reported. Activity-based rewards tied to loyalty programs, promotions, subscriptions, transactions, and platform use remain permitted, but the mechanics for determining what qualifies as a valid activity remain uncertain.

Circle shares fell 19%, while Coinbase dropped 8% on Tuesday after the draft raised the prospect of strict limits on stablecoin yield.

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Invesco, one of the world's largest asset managers with $2.2 trillion in assets under management, will become the investment manager of Superstate's flagship tokenized U.S. Treasuries fund USTB, the two firms announced Tuesday, March 24.

Under the arrangement, Invesco's Global Liquidity team — which manages over $200 billion in money market and short-duration assets — will take over day-to-day portfolio management of USTB, while Superstate continues to run the fund's on-chain infrastructure, including blockchain-based settlement and digital transfer agency services.

Invesco will be the first asset manager to use Superstate's digital transfer agent rails, per the release. The transition is expected to close in Q2 2026, after which the fund will be renamed the Invesco Short Duration US Government Securities Fund while keeping the USTB ticker, smart contracts, and token address.

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The Ethereum Foundation on Tuesday launched a dedicated website consolidating the organization's post-quantum (PQ) security work into a single public resource.

The site represents the public-facing culmination of what the EF describes as an 8-year effort that began with early STARK-based signature aggregation research in 2018.

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The New York Stock Exchange and real world asset (RWA) tokenization platform Securitize have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on tokenized securities infrastructure, the two companies announced on Tuesday.

Under the deal, Securitize will become the first digital transfer agent — a transfer agent that uses a blockchain-based ledger and smart contracts to process transactions — eligible to mint tokenized securities for issuers on NYSE's upcoming Digital Trading Platform.

Per the release, NYSE plans to work with Securitize as a premier design partner to develop a digital transfer agent program supporting on-chain settlement of tokenized securities transactions. The two firms will also collaborate on setting regulatory, operational, and technology standards for the emerging digital transfer agent category — effectively writing the rulebook for institutional-grade tokenized securities infrastructure.

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Bank of Montreal announced it will allow clients to convert dollars into tokenized cash and deposits on CME and Google Cloud's Universal Ledger infrastructure, enabling 24/7 settlement for margin, collateral and business-to-business payments. The move integrates one of North America's largest banks by assets into the CME's continuous settlement rails, expanding institutional access to tokenized financial services beyond traditional trading hours.

The Universal Ledger platform, operated jointly by CME and Google Cloud, supports real-time asset movement and settlement outside conventional market windows. BMO's integration represents a major adoption milestone for institutional tokenization infrastructure, allowing the bank's client base direct access to around-the-clock digital asset settlement capabilities.

Sources: BMO

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Crypto markets dipped slightly on Tuesday as geopolitical uncertainty persisted and investors considered the implications of the U.S. Senate’s revised draft of the crypto market structure bill, or Clarity Act.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $70,000, down less than 1% over the past 24 hours. ETH and SOL fell 0.6% to $2,135 and $90, respectively. Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) slipped 3%.

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Tether announced on Tuesday that it has engaged a Big Four accounting firm to conduct what the firm says is its “first full independent financial statement audit.” The issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin by market cap with over $184 billion, did not name which specific firm would conduct the audit, and described it as potentially the largest inaugural audit in financial markets history.

The company, which reports a global user base of more than 550 million, said the engagement follows a competitive onboarding process during which multiple audit firms assessed Tether's systems, internal controls, and financial reporting.

The move comes after years of criticism over Tether's transparency practices. Rather than full audits, Tether has historically provided quarterly attestations from BDO Italia — a more limited form of financial review. In 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a $41 million fine over misleading claims that USDT was fully backed by U.S. dollars.

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The team behind veteran DeFi protocol Balancer has posted two sweeping governance proposals that would wind down Balancer Labs, consolidate all operations under a DAO-controlled entity, and end BAL token emissions entirely.

The operational restructuring proposal, posted on March 23, formalizes the wind-down of Balancer Labs OÜ, the Estonian entity that originally built the protocol, and consolidates all activity under Balancer OpCo Limited, a BVI entity that operates as a direct agent of the DAO.

The team would shrink from roughly 25 to 12.5 full-time equivalents, with an annual operating budget of $1.9 million — a 34% cut from the $2.87 million approved under the previous roadmap.

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Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the publicly traded company pursuing what it calls the ‘Alchemy of 5%’ of Ethereum's total supply, said its combined crypto and cash holdings have reached $11 billion as it ramps up purchases amid the U.S.-Iran conflict.

Chairman Thomas Lee framed ETH's recent performance as evidence of crypto's resilience during geopolitical turmoil. He noted that ETH has risen 18% since the Iran war commenced, outperforming equities, while gold, a traditional safe-haven asset, has fallen by more than 15%.

"Crypto is demonstrating itself to be a good 'wartime' store of value," Lee said in the company's weekly update.

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Polymarket on Monday announced updated market integrity rules across both its DeFi platform and its CFTC-regulated U.S. exchange, amplifying requirements governing insider trading and market manipulation. The new standards appear in the DeFi platform's Terms of Use and the Polymarket US Rulebook.

"Markets thrive on clarity," said Neal Kumar, Polymarket's chief legal officer, in a release.

Prohibited Behavior

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Two early Kalshi employees are raising up to $35 million for what may be the first venture fund dedicated to prediction market startups, according to a pitch document seen by Fortune.

The fund, called 5c(c) Capital, is led by Adhi Rajaprabhakaran, the second trader hired at Kalshi's affiliated market maker, and Noah Zingler-Sternig, Kalshi's former head of operations, Fortune reported. The fund's name references Section 5c(c) of the Commodity Exchange Act, the clause that grants the CFTC oversight of event contracts offered by Designated Contract Markets.

Notably, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, whose companies are locked in a multibillion-dollar valuation war and have a well-documented public rivalry, have both invested in the fund.

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MoonPay on Monday released the Open Wallet Standard (OWS), an MIT-licensed, open-source specification that defines how AI agents interact with crypto wallets, including key storage, transaction signing, and cross-chain account derivation, without ever exposing a private key to the agent process or the large language model driving it.

The standard launched with contributions from over 15 organizations spanning payments, exchanges, and blockchain infrastructure, including PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Tron, TON Foundation, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, Base, Polygon, Sui, Filecoin Foundation, LayerZero, and Circle.

"The agent economy has payment rails. It didn't have a wallet standard," MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said in a statement.

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On a quiet Sunday morning, someone turned $100,000 into $25 million in about seventeen minutes.

The target was Resolv, a yield-bearing stablecoin protocol. By the time Resolv paused its contracts, its dollar-pegged stablecoin USR had crashed to pennies. It remains deeply depegged, trading around $0.25 as of this writing, down more than 70% on the week.

The blast radius extended well beyond Resolv. Fluid/Instadapp absorbed more than $10 million in bad debt and had outflows of over $300 million in a single day, the worst outflow in its history. Fifteen Morpho vaults were hit. Euler, Venus, Lista DAO, and Inverse Finance all moved to pause USR-related markets.

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NovaBay Pharmaceuticals is changing its name to Stablecoin Development Corporation and its NYSE American ticker to SDEV, effective April 3, the company announced Monday. The rebrand completes a pivot from wound care to crypto that began with a $134 million private placement in January.

As of March 16, the company held approximately 2.06 billion SKY tokens — roughly 8.78% of the total supply of the Sky protocol's governance token. SKY is currently trading at around $0.07, according to Coingecko, implying the position is worth roughly $144 million. The token is up 10% over the past month.

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Aave V4 has passed the ARFC (Aave Request for Comments) stage, according to an announcement from Aave founder Stani Kulechov on March 23. The protocol is now moving toward final AIP (Aave Improvement Proposal) deployment and a controlled mainnet launch with a focus on security, Kulechov said.

The ARFC stage represents a preliminary governance phase where protocol proposals are discussed before formal on-chain voting. Aave's development team has been working to bring V4 to mainnet, with the next steps involving final AIP deployment followed by the launch itself.

Sources: Stani Kulechov (X/Twitter)

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Decentralized perpetuals exchange edgeX has confirmed that the token generation event (TGE) and listing for its native EDGE token will take place on March 31.

EDGE has a total supply of 1 billion tokens. At TGE, 25% of the supply will be airdropped, with up to an additional 5% for participants in the Pre-TGE Season points program. The remaining 70% is allocated to Ecosystem & Community, Core Contributors, and Foundation.

The token is already changing hands ahead of the official launch, with pre-market trading opening on Binance on March 19. EDGE is trading around $0.70, implying a fully diluted valuation of roughly $700 million.

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