DeFi News Hub

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 Chief Strategy Advisor 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. Aerugo, who identifies as CSA... 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

The leading Ethereum treasury firm inched closer to its goal of accumulating 5% of the ETH circulating supply.

Macro uncertainty, STRC finding a new low and another $227M in ETF outflows weren't enough to keep Bitcoin down over the past week.

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

Michael Saylor’s firm topped up its USD cash reserve to $1.4 billion as it made its smallest Bitcoin buy since selling 32 BTC three weeks ago

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

With ETF outflows persisting and selling "nearly exhausted," analysts say Bitcoin is range-bound and waiting for a catalyst.

A Wall Street Journal probe found none of the roughly $1.9 million in bets shown across 1,100-plus creator videos were real.

Both models trade word-by-word generation for parallel denoising. Only one of them does it without losing intelligence in the trade.

New research outlines how chatbot behaviors, including personalization, mirroring, and excessive agreement, reinforce delusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exodus Movement has opened a tokenized-equities storefront inside its self-custody wallet, letting eligible users trade more than 200 tokenized stocks and ETFs on Solana. The product, Exodus Markets, runs on tokens issued by Ondo Finance and pushes a TradFi-style equity menu into an app where users... Read the full story at The Defiant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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