DeFi News Hub
Live updates • Sourced from The Defiant and Decrypt DeFi
The chipmaker failed to rebut claims its crypto disclosures affected its stock price, allowing the case to move forward.
The decision leaves unresolved whether developers of non-custodial crypto tools must comply with federal money-transmission rules.
Regulators are beginning work on legal and market infrastructure for tokenized assets, moving from pilot programs to real-world implementation.
The technique reduces the memory required to run large language models as context windows grow, a key constraint on AI deployment.
Google just issued a 2029 deadline to encrypt its systems against quantum computers. Bitcoin may not have the same luxury of time.
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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Bitcoin options worth $15 billion expire Friday—just as a Trump-Iran diplomatic deadline runs out. Should traders expect greater volatility?
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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Reigning Formula 1 champion McLaren will join Google, FedEx, IBM, and other firms in helping to guide Hedera’s growth.
Analysts argued that Circle's selloff was overblown after shares fell Tuesday amid crypto bill developments and a stablecoin rival's moves.
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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CoinShares filed for three Bitcoin volatility ETFs: a base, leveraged, and inverse fund. The funds could begin trading in early June 2026.
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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Five Franklin Templeton ETFs will be tokenized via Ondo Finance as the firms seek to broaden access to traditional assets on-chain.
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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Visa will help banks bring stablecoin payments and settlement on-chain while preserving privacy on the institutional blockchain network.
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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Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee said BitMine’s Ethereum staking platform, MAVAN, was set to become the world’s largest following its debut.
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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Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an immediate freeze on crypto donations to political parties, following the independent Rycroft review.
Cipher Digital revealed a 15-year lease deal and a $200 million revolving credit facility, continuing its shift away from Bitcoin mining.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and other tech leaders will advise President Trump on emerging technology policy.
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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Bitcoin ETFs show "incredible fortitude" with $2.5B monthly inflows, erasing YTD losses despite a 40% price drawdown, experts say.
Circle just had its worst day ever, while the CFTC is building a task force for crypto, AI, and prediction markets.
Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau accessed 500 BTC worth $34 million with the help of Europol, breaking into wallets seized in 2019.
Baltimore's consumer protection suit against xAI will test whether local law can hold AI companies liable where federal regulation has failed.
A swift reset in the crypto ATM operator’s leadership comes as regulatory oversight has hurt its core kiosk business.
The proposal would create a state licensing regime for stablecoin issuers while bolstering Delaware’s position to attract digital asset firms.
The agency has outlined a three-phase plan for lunar infrastructure and says the effort will serve as a proving ground for future missions to Mars.
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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OpenAI will discontinue the Sora app and API, ending its AI video-generation platform months after launching the standalone product.
Circle (CRCL) stock plunged 20% on Tuesday as stablecoin rival Tether made a long-awaited move and Clarity Act speculation grew.
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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Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees as Fortnite engagement falls, but CEO Tim Sweeney says it's not AI's fault.
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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Aleksei Volkov facilitated dozens of attacks across the U.S. as an "initial access broker," causing over $9 million in actual losses.
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 CFTC launched a new task force designed to create a clear framework of rules for technologies like AI, crypto, and prediction markets.
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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BMO joins CME Group and Google Cloud to enable 24/7 tokenized cash settlement for institutional clients.
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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The analysts highlighted Bitcoin giant Strategy's flagship preferred share as an alternative source of funding amid tepid market conditions.
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 first independent audit of Tether’s claimed $192 billion stablecoin reserves could pave the way to USDT’s approval under the GENIUS Act.
Securitize was selected by the New York Stock Exchange as a "digital transfer agent" for a platform dedicated to tokenized securities.
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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Major financial players are building via the Solana Developer Platform, which is meant to streamline enterprise development on the network.
AI altcoins notched double-digit gains amid conflict-related volatility, buoyed by last week's Nvidia GTC conference.
Strategy just unveiled a $44 billion war chest to keep buying Bitcoin, while Congress is moving to ban sports bets on prediction markets.
The payments infrastructure firm has unveiled an open-source framework enabling AI agents to manage crypto funds across multiple chains.
The derivatives give users synthetic exposure to major U.S. equities while using Bitcoin and other crypto holdings as collateral, with plans to expand into tokenized assets later this year.
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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Bitcoin surged above $71,000 on March 23 after President Donald Trump announced a five-day postponement of planned U.S. strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure. In a Truth Social post, Trump stated he had instructed the Department of War to delay strikes based on "productive conversations" and "constructive" diplomatic engagement with Iran. The price climb to $71,500 triggered liquidations of nearly $270 million in short positions.
The rally came as the White House signaled progress toward diplomatic engagement, with administration officials citing backdoor channels and potential breakthroughs. However, Iranian state media contradicted the U.S. narrative, claiming there was no direct or indirect contact with Trump and alleging he backed down after threats to strike energy facilities across West Asia, creating a credibility standoff between both sides.
Sources: Decrypt | CryptoSlate | Milk Road
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U.S. lawmakers are set to introduce a bipartisan bill that would prohibit sports betting on prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The legislative action targets the growing use of decentralized and offshore prediction platforms for wagering on sporting events.
Polymarket and Kalshi are among the largest prediction market platforms, with Polymarket operating on the Polygon blockchain and Kalshi operating as a regulated U.S.-based platform. The move reflects ongoing regulatory scrutiny of prediction markets and sports betting activities outside traditional regulated channels.
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BlackRock and Fidelity purchased approximately $400 million in Bitcoin last week while selling $250 million, resulting in net institutional buying pressure, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham on March 23. Total Bitcoin ETF inflows for the week reached $93.1 million, indicating institutions are accumulating the cryptocurrency at current prices.
Arkham made tracking data available for BlackRock's Bitcoin holdings on its platform. The buying activity suggests institutional investors are using market weakness to increase positions despite concurrent selling activity.
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An attacker has exploited Resolv Labs' USR stablecoin to mint 80 million tokens, causing the stablecoin to depeg from its $1 peg. The attacker has reportedly cashed out at least $25 million from the exploit, marking a significant security breach for the protocol.
The incident represents a critical failure in Resolv Labs' token minting controls and represents a major loss for USR holders and the protocol. Stablecoin exploits of this magnitude underscore ongoing risks in DeFi protocols, particularly around access controls and minting mechanisms.
Sources: ResolvLabs on X, PeckShieldAlert on X
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World Liberty Financial (WLFI) on Thursday released the AgentPay SDK, an open-source toolkit that enables AI agents to autonomously hold, send, and receive funds across Ethereum-compatible blockchains.
Transactions are settled in USD1, WLFI's dollar-pegged stablecoin, which currently has roughly $4.4 billion in circulation, according to DefiLlama.
How It Works
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Electric Capital published a research report on Monday, cataloging 501 distinct sources of real-world yield and cross-referencing them against tokenized assets with meaningful on-chain traction today.
The venture firm found that only 34 of those yield sources have any on-chain presence above $50 million, and they cluster in familiar territory: U.S. Treasuries, private credit, corporate bonds, and non-U.S. sovereign debt.
The remaining 93% fall into seven groups defined by what's blocking tokenization, ranging from legal structuring challenges for asset-backed securities to real-world integration hurdles for commodities and compute infrastructure.
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Coinbase on Friday rolled out perpetual futures contracts tied to U.S. equities, becoming one of the first major centralized exchanges to offer the product and expanding its derivatives lineup beyond crypto.
The contracts cover all seven Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla — as well as ETF perpetuals tracking the S&P 500 (SPY) and Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) in select jurisdictions. They are available to eligible non-U.S. retail users on Coinbase Advanced and to institutions on Coinbase International Exchange.
The contracts trade around the clock, are cash-settled in USDC, and offer up to 10x leverage on individual stocks and 20x on ETF products. Like crypto perpetuals, they have no expiration date and use a funding rate mechanism to track spot prices.
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The World Gold Council, the gold industry's leading market-development body, announced Thursday it is building shared infrastructure designed to make digital gold products more interoperable, scalable, and easier to launch.
The initiative, detailed in a white paper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group, proposes a platform called "Gold as a Service" — an open middleware layer connecting physical gold custody with the digital systems used to issue and manage gold-backed products.
The platform would standardize backend processes, including custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance, and redemption, while leaving front-end product design and branding to individual issuers.
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Privy, the embedded wallet infrastructure provider acquired by Stripe last year, has integrated Deframe, a DeFi aggregation API built by the team behind Pods Finance, to enable developers to offer yield strategies directly within their applications.
The integration gives apps access to Deframe's suite of yield strategies, spanning protocols such as Aave, Morpho, Lido, and Compound, across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Solana, and Polygon.
The partnership comes alongside a flurry of yield-focused moves from Privy. The company recently launched an Earn feature that lets developers connect app balances to curated DeFi vaults through API calls, powered by Morpho vault infrastructure with risk strategies from Steakhouse Financial and Gauntlet.
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Solana Foundation president Lily Liu said blockchain gaming is dead in an X post today, March 20. A later, self-proclaimed "shitpost" from the Foundation’s chief product officer poked fun at Liu’s statement, but the original post had already set off a wave of comments, both criticizing Liu’s take, and defending the future of web3 gaming.
Liu’s statement, which reads “Also, gaming on a blockchain is not coming back,” was a response to a March 18 X post from Polymarket claiming, somewhat misleadingly, that Meta is shutting down its metaverse division.
In what appears to be an act of self-aware irony, as of today, Liu’s X bio also says she is not only president, but also the “head of gaming” at Solana Foundation, a title that is absent from the exec’s LinkedIn and other profile bios.
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The SEC and CFTC's landmark crypto taxonomy has been widely hailed as a decisive break from years of regulatory limbo but legal experts say one of its most consequential provisions raises more questions than it answers, with no formal process for issuers to find out if they've gotten it right.
At issue is the guidance's framework for when a token initially sold as part of an investment contract can "separate" from that contract and trade freely.
Under the release, a non-security token becomes subject to an investment contract when an issuer sells it with promises to undertake "essential managerial efforts." That investment contract ends when the issuer either fulfills those promises or publicly abandons the project.
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CFTC-regulated prediction market platform Kalshi is raising around $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in a new funding round, according to multiple reports. The new round is led by Coatue Management, per The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the news on Thursday. March 19.
The deal doubles the valuation from Kalshi's previous round in November, which also raised $1 billion, but at an $11 billion valuation, as The Defiant reported.
A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg yesterday that Kalshi’s annualized revenue stands at $1.5 billion.
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Crypto markets deepened their losses on Thursday after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged and raised its 2026 inflation forecast yesterday, compounding a selloff triggered by hotter-than-expected wholesale inflation.
Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $70,000, down 1.3% over the past 24 hours. ETH and SOL fell 2% to $2,135 and $88.5, respectively. Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) slipped 1%.
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Publicly traded web browser Opera (NASDAQ: OPRA) announced that it has committed to being a long-term holder of Ethereum Layer 2 Celo’s native token, CELO, according to press release published today, March 19.
Celo Core Co., the primary developer and steward of the L2, submitted a governance proposal today outlining the plan to restructure its five-year-old partnership with Opera, namely proposing to shift the browser giant “from a distribution partner to a long-term network stakeholder.”
If approved by the Celo community, the new structure has Opera set to receive an allocation of 160 million CELO tokens — worth about $13 million at current prices — from the network's “unreleased treasury,” meaning the tokens would not be purchased from the open market.
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EtherFi, the crypto neobank and Ethereum restaking protocol with nearly $6 billion in total value locked (TVL), is integrating Plume Network's Nest Vault infrastructure to give its users access to tokenized real-world asset (RWA) yield.
The integration centers on Plume's nBASIS vault, powered by Superstate's USCC fund, which generates returns from basis spreads, the price differential between spot and futures markets, across multiple cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and XRP.
The rollout will proceed in two phases. EtherFi will first re-allocate capital to the nBASIS vault, with a direct integration into EtherFi's user interface to follow.
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Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager with €2.4 trillion in AUM, and tokenized fund platform Spiko have launched the Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund (SAFO), a tokenized UCITS vehicle with its shareholder register hosted on Ethereum and Stellar, with Chainlink providing on-chain NAV oracle infrastructure.
The fund is Amundi's second blockchain-based issuance following a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum in November.
Chainlink oracles bridge the gap between off-chain fund valuation and on-chain execution, recording SAFO's net asset value across both networks. The dual-chain architecture pairs Ethereum's smart contract ecosystem with Stellar's lower-cost transfer rails.
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Major League Baseball (MLB) on Thursday named Polymarket its official prediction market exchange partner and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, marking the regulator's first such agreement with a major U.S. sports league.
Under the partnership, Polymarket and its brokers will receive exclusive access to MLB marks and logos, official league data and brand exposure across the league's digital ecosystem and live events.
The deal centers on an integrity framework that restricts markets deemed to pose manipulation risk, including contracts on individual pitches, manager decisions, and umpire performance. Polymarket will also integrate those controls into its U.S. Rulebook so that all of its brokers are held to the same standards.
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LayerZero and Centrifuge are partnering to integrate Centrifuge's institutional tokenization infrastructure into the interoperability protocol’s ecosystem, according to a press release shared exclusively with The Defiant. The companies said that the deal aims to make access and distribution of tokenized real world asset (RWA) products broader with multichain reach from launch.
The partnership addresses the issue of blockchain fragmentation for institutional tokenization. Via LayerZero's OApp standard, issuers can extend products across over 165 blockchain networks, while retaining a unified supply, according to the release.
The first Centrifuge products to adopt LayerZero includes three of its tokenized funds, JTRSY — its largest by total value, with nearly $861 million in tokenized U.S. Treasuries — as well as JAAA, and SPXA, which launched in September as the first licensed tokenized S&P 500 index fund.
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OP_NET, a smart contract protocol that embeds execution directly into standard Bitcoin transactions, activates on Bitcoin Layer 1 (L1) today, March 19. The execution layer brings with it a live DeFi stack that includes a decentralized exchange (DEX), token issuance, permissionless smart contract deployment, and yield farming, without leaving Bitcoin mainnet via bridges or wrapped assets, per a press release shared with The Defiant.
The co-founder of OP_NET, Chad Master, told The Defiant that, unlike Bitcoin Layer 2 (L2) chains or “metaprotocols,” OP_Net operates as a “deterministic execution layer that runs directly on Bitcoin as it exists today - no soft fork, no hard fork, no new opcodes, no separate chain, no separate token. Every OPNet transaction is a real Bitcoin transaction.”
The result, as Master explained, is decentralized applications whose state is anchored to Bitcoin's settlement layer, with BTC as the only gas asset.
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The Algorand Foundation has cut 25% of its workforce due to macroeconomic uncertainty and lower cryptocurrency prices. The layoff at the organization behind the layer-1 Algorand blockchain reflects broader challenges facing the crypto sector as market conditions deteriorate.
The Algorand Foundation's reduction joins a wave of workforce cuts sweeping through crypto and blockchain companies. Other major players including Blockchain.com, Optimism Labs, and Gemini Space Station have similarly announced 25% staff reductions, signaling sustained pressure on the industry as crypto prices remain depressed.
Sources: Algorand on X
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Crypto markets erased most of their weekly gains on Wednesday after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that U.S. wholesale prices rose sharply in February and the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged.
Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around $71,300, down nearly 5% over the past 24 hours. ETH and SOL fell 6% to $2,190 and $90, respectively.
Meanwhile, Ripple (XRP) dropped by 5%, and BNB by 4%.
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Visa has unveiled Visa CLI, the first product out of its newly branded Visa Crypto Labs division, targeting the emerging market for AI agent payments. The tool is currently in closed beta, with access available by request through GitHub authentication.
The product positions Visa's payments infrastructure as a native layer for "command line commerce" — a term Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto, has used to describe a new era in which AI agents transact autonomously rather than humans navigating web interfaces. The CLI tool is designed to let agents pay for external API calls on demand, removing the need for pre-configured accounts or credentials.
Initial use cases listed on the product page include image-generation APIs, music-generation endpoints, and proprietary data feeds, such as market data and research databases, locked behind paywalls.
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Aster, the decentralized perpetuals exchange backed by YZi Labs, is expanding its collaboration with World Liberty Financial, the DeFi project affiliated with the Trump family, adding USD1-denominated perpetual contracts and an incentive program aimed at bootstrapping stablecoin liquidity ahead of the platform's Layer 1 launch.
The exchange is starting with BTC, ETH, and SOL pairs, with more than 10 additional pairs planned in the coming weeks. USD1 is also supported as a core margin asset and collateral equivalent to USDT, and Aster is offering zero maker fees and a 0.5-bps taker fee on USD1 pairs, an approximately 87.5% reduction compared to its standard 4-bps USDT taker fee.
Up to 2.5 million WLFI tokens will be distributed monthly through the USD1 perpetual trading incentive program based on trading activity, with rewards distributed weekly.
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1inch, the decentralized exchange aggregator with nearly $797 billion in total trading volume, has launched 1inch Forward, a DeFi education campaign across universities in the United States. According to a press release shared with The Defiant, the initiative was unveiled today, March 18, at the DC Blockchain Summit and is aimed at preparing students for a future career in decentralized finance.
Central to the campaign is an open letter to the deans and faculty councils of major U.S. business and law schools, co-signed by more than twenty crypto and DeFi organizations including the Blockchain Association, DeFi Education Fund, Aave Labs, Messari, Delphi Digital, and ETHGlobal.
The letter argues that DeFi and the tech behind it has long moved past its experimental phase — adopted by BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and the NYSE itself — yet most curricula still treat the subject as a fringe elective.
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S&P Dow Jones Indices has licensed the S&P 500 to TradeXYZ, enabling the launch of the first officially sanctioned perpetual futures contract based on the index.
This marks the first time eligible non-U.S. investors can gain leveraged exposure to the S&P 500 through an officially licensed, digitally native instrument designed for 24/7 trading on a decentralized platform. Unlike traditional S&P 500 futures, the contract carries no fixed expiry, allowing traders to hold long or short positions without rolling.
The S&P 500 sits at the center of a global trading ecosystem generating over $1 trillion in daily volume across linked exposures in exchange-traded futures, options, ETFs, and structured products, the company noted in a press release. The new perp extends that ecosystem on-chain using official SPDJI index data, a distinction TradeXYZ frames as critical for institutional-grade liquidity.
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Kraken has halted its plans to go public, according to CoinDesk reporting. The move comes despite the company's parent filing a draft S-1 registration statement with the SEC in November 2025, signaling serious preparation for a U.S. listing at a $20 billion valuation.
Market headwinds have forced crypto companies to reassess public market entry timelines. Kraken had previously been exploring debt financing options and focusing on financial strength and regulatory compliance as preconditions for an IPO, but current conditions have made the path forward uncertain.
Sources: Coindesk
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The Ethereum Foundation has deposited another 3,400 ETH — worth roughly $7.5 million at today's prices, near $2,220 — into DeFi lending protocol Morpho, with 1,000 ETH allocated specifically to Morpho Vaults V2, according to a X post from the EF today, March 18.
The move follows an initial deployment in October 2025, when the EF put 2,400 ETH (~$5.3 million) and approximately $6 million in stablecoins into the protocol — bringing the Foundation's total Morpho commitment to just under $19 million to date.
According to the post, the DeFi deployments are a direct expression of the EF's refreshed treasury policy, first unveiled in June 2025, which codified a new "Defipunk" framework to guide on-chain capital allocation.
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Payments-focused blockchain Tempo, developed by Stripe and Paradigm, announced the launch of its mainnet today, March 18. Also today, Stripe and Tempo revealed a new open standard for AI agent payments, Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), per a separate X post.
Today's mainnet launch opens public RPC endpoints to developers. The headline addition is the MPP, an open, rail-agnostic standard for autonomous agent-to-service payments. MPP introduces a "sessions" primitive that lets agents authorize a spending limit upfront and stream micropayments continuously without an on-chain transaction per interaction.
Stripe, Visa, and Lightspark have already extended MPP to support cards, wallets, and Bitcoin Lightning payments respectively. A payments directory launching alongside mainnet lists over 100 compatible services.
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Kraken Pro has expanded margin leverage across 44 trading pairs, marking the exchange's largest single leverage expansion to date. The expansion spans four distinct asset categories: stablecoins, gold tokens, BTC and ETH regional pairs, mid-cap assets, and DeFi blue-chips. The rollout is designed to allow traders to size positions that better reflect their conviction without hitting leverage limits.
The expansion builds on Kraken's recent push to grow its margin trading offerings. The exchange previously increased collateral currency options and added new margin pairs including MON and NIGHT, bringing the total number of available margin markets to over 240. The latest expansion reinforces Kraken Pro's positioning as a platform for advanced traders seeking deeper leverage access across multiple asset classes.
Sources: Kraken Blog | Kraken Pro
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Tally, a prominent DAO governance platform, has announced it is shutting down after six years of operation. The platform served more than one million users, supported governance across hundreds of organizations, and processed over $1 billion in payments before ceasing operations.
The shutdown marks a significant turning point for the DAO governance sector. Co-founder and CEO Dennison Bertram cited reduced demand for DAO tools, attributing the decline to relaxed regulatory stances and a lack of consumer-facing applications in the broader ecosystem. Tally had previously decided against pursuing an ICO, concluding it no longer made sense as the company prepared to wind down.
Sources: Tally on X
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Ethereum is moving forward with a Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) designed to dramatically accelerate bridge times between Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions, as well as exchange deposits. The mechanism targets completion times of approximately 13 seconds—a reduction of 80–98% compared to current timelines—and achieves this without requiring a hard fork to the network.
The FCR leverages attestations rather than blocks to verify transactions, representing a shift in how Ethereum handles cross-layer confirmation speed. This proposal aligns with broader Ethereum roadmap efforts to reduce finality times and slot durations, part of a longer-term vision to make the network faster and more efficient for users and institutions.
Sources: Julian (@_julianma) on X | Binance Square
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OpenSea has pushed back the launch of its long-awaited SEA token for the second time, with co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer announcing Monday that the previously planned March 30 token generation event will not go ahead as scheduled.
"A delay is a delay. I'm not going to dress it up, and I know how it lands," Finzer wrote on X, adding that the OpenSea Foundation opted to hold off rather than force a debut in challenging market conditions. No new date has been set.
The SEA token was first announced in February 2025 as part of OpenSea's broader strategy to transform the platform beyond NFTs into a multi-chain trading hub.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have jointly released a sweeping interpretive guidance that formally classifies major crypto assets and activities under federal securities law, a long-awaited move that ends years of regulatory ambiguity that industry participants described as "regulation by enforcement."
The guidance, Release No. 33-11412, establishes a five-category taxonomy for crypto assets and clarifies the legal status of a range of on-chain activities including staking, mining, airdrops, and token wrapping.
A New Taxonomy
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Blockchain oracle network Pyth has unveiled what it calls the first continuously updating crude oil composite index, designed to fill pricing gaps left by traditional commodity markets that operate on fixed trading schedules.
The Pyth 24/7 Oil Index aggregates both onchain and offchain data, pulling from institutional trading desks and exchanges during regular hours and from decentralized derivatives venues during nights, weekends, and holidays. The goal is to eliminate stale reference prices during periods when legacy benchmarks like NYMEX WTI futures stop updating.
The launch comes amid extreme volatility in global energy markets. Joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran and subsequent Iranian retaliation triggered immediate surges in oil and gas prices and heightened volatility in financial markets.
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Zcash (ZEC) surged as much as 20% on Monday evening, March 16 — spiking from $231 to as high as $284 — after ZEC digital asset treasury (DAT) firm Cypherpunk Technologies (Nasdaq: CYPH) released its full-year 2025 financial results showing a swing to profitability.
ZEC remains up roughly 9% on the day as of press time today, March 17, trading over $270, making it the top performer among the top-100 large-cap crypto assets, per CoinGecko data.
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