DeFi News Hub

Fintech groups are pressing the Fed to loosen payment access for non-banks, setting up a clash with banks over risk and crypto exposure.

UC-Berkeley and Yale researchers found that AI tools don't reduce work; they intensify it by creating workload creep and widespread burnout.

Global trading firm Jump will score stakes in prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket for its market-making services, per a report.

Cango is the latest publicly traded Bitcoin miner to embrace AI, and it's fueling that push by selling a bunch of Bitcoin.

MrBeast's Beast Industries just acquired fintech startup Step, a banking platform for teens, following a crypto trademark application.

The DeFi super application space is facing headwinds following the Infinex token generation event (TGE) in January, but despite the adverse market conditions, Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje is launching Flying Tulip’s (FT) public sale next week.

Flying Tulip confirmed the sale date on Saturday, and prediction markets are giving the platform a 50-50 chance of trading above a $400 million fully diluted valuation (FDV), albeit on low volumes.

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CME Group, the world's largest derivatives marketplace, has announced plans to introduce regulated futures contracts for Cardano (ADA), Chainlink (LINK), and Stellar Lumens (XLM) on February 9, pending regulatory review. This move marks a significant expansion of CME's cryptocurrency offerings, which already include Bitcoin and Ether futures.

The new contracts will be available in both standard and micro sizes. ADA futures will be offered in 100,000 ADA contracts and Micro ADA in 10,000 ADA contracts. Similarly, LINK futures will be available in 5,000 LINK contracts, with Micro LINK at 250 LINK. Stellar futures will see contracts of 250,000 Lumens, along with Micro Lumens at 12,500 Lumens.

"Given crypto's record growth over the last year, clients are looking for trusted, regulated products to manage price risk as well as additional tools to gain exposure to this dynamic market," said Giovanni Vicioso, CME Group's Global Head of Cryptocurrency Products. He emphasized the greater choice and enhanced flexibility these new products provide to both retail and institutional clients.

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With temporary bans of prediction markets poised to take effect in Massachusetts and Nevada, Polymarket is asking a federal court to intervene.

OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT on Monday, hours after Anthropic's Super Bowl commercials mocked the idea. The $8 billion loss explains why.

CoinShares noted that the market may have reached an ‘inflection point’ as outflows from Bitcoin investment products slowed.

Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technology added to its ETH holdings last week, even as its paper losses grew.

The crypto market went through another round of wild swings in early February after Bitcoin suddenly plunged to the low-$60,000s in just a few hours on Feb. 5, dragging the rest of the market down with it, before bouncing back to near $70,000.

As of Monday morning, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap is trading around $68,860, down 3.2% in the past 24-hours and almost 12% over the past seven days.

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South Korean regulators are investigating Bithumb after its accidental $43 billion Bitcoin handout to customers last week.

Farcaster is a social media protocol that lets multiple applications share data while giving users control over identity and content.

Bitcoin giant Strategy spent another $90 million on BTC last week, but the leading cryptocurrency's decline has put its holdings underwater.

Crypto markets saw a modest bounce after last week’s broad sell-off, though the sector remains in the red. Total market cap is down 2.2% today and most large-cap crypto assets are seeing losses on the daily and weekly timeframes.

As of Monday morning, Bitcoin (BTC) was still down about 3% on the day, trading near $69,280, after briefly dipping as low as $60,000 on Thursday.

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Nearly 4,700 victims lost $6.27 million in January as scammers exploit cheaper Ethereum fees and familiar wallet habits

Japanese stock indexes soared on the news, but crypto majors are lagging despite a major relief rally on Friday.

Hyperliquid is up almost 42% over the past two weeks, fueled by an 88% monthly token unlock cut and Ripple tie-up.

Four years after the "Crypto Bowl," only Coinbase advertised during Sunday's game as the industry retreats from the marketing spotlight.

The banking regulator will revise transparency policies to settle Coinbase's "Operation Choke Point 2.0" lawsuit.

Authorities in France launched the manhunt after a magistrate and her mother were abducted overnight and found injured.

Analysts maintain a cautious stance even after Bitcoin’s 12% relief rally clawed back recent losses amid a surging Coinbase Premium.

New research says today’s quantum computers are far too weak to threaten Bitcoin’s cryptography, leaving the network years to prepare.

Crypto-native brand Pudgy Penguins is hosting a pop-up Valentine's Day event in New York City, complete with a plush bouquet.

At a conference dedicated to the riskiest traders in finance, Miami's crypto scene appeared far different than during its pandemic-era boom.

The Justice Department's release of millions of files related to Jeffrey Epstein has unearthed some wild Bitcoin and crypto stories.

The error was quickly corrected, Bithumb said, but not before some users sold off their Bitcoin, temporarily crashing its listed price.

Japan heads to polls as crypto industry watches tax reform, stablecoin rules, and legal reclassification timelines.

Unusual trading in BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF, iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), has led traders to speculate that this week’s sharp Bitcoin drop may have been triggered by one or more Hong Kong–based hedge funds, rather than selling pressure from crypto traders.

The theory was laid out in a post on X by Parker White, the COO and CIO of DeFi Development Corp, and centers around record trading and options activity in IBIT.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell sharply over the past week, dropping 16%, and trading as low as $62,000 on Thursday before rebounding to around $70,400 on Friday, per CoinGecko. On Thursday, IBIT recorded its highest daily trading volume to date, with about $10.7 billion traded. Despite the heavy volume, IBIT recorded only $175 million in net outflows, according to SoSoValue.

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MegaETH, the real-time blockchain and Ethereum Layer 2, is launching its mainnet on Feb. 9, but the token generation event (TGE) will be dependent on network performance milestones.

The MegaLabs team has defined three key performance indicators (KPIs), and at least one of these must be met for the TGE to proceed. The chain must either establish a baseline of $500 million in USDM circulating, see 10 “mafia mainnet”- aligned apps deployed with more than 100,000 transactions across at least 25,000 wallets, or host three apps that generate at least $50,000 in daily fees for 30 days.

Once the token is circulating, MegaETH will use priority fees from its proximity markets and yield from its native stablecoin, USDM, for MEGA token buybacks.

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Back when NFTs were hot, Justin Bieber dropped $1.3 million to join the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The Ethereum NFTs now start at just $12K.

The White House is betting that a new cash-pay platform—built around blockbuster GLP-1 drugs—can pressure Big Pharma and bypass the middlemen who keep U.S. prices high.

Publicly traded Bitcoin miner Bitfarms is planning a move to the United States and a name change as it transitions from crypto to AI compute.

XRP outperformed the broader cryptocurrency market on Friday, Feb. 6, rising nearly 20% over the past 24 hours.

The token was trading around $1.50, after briefly touching a high near $1.53, per The Defiant’s price page. XRP’s market capitalization now stands at about $91.3 billion. XRP also strengthened against Bitcoin (BTC), gaining more than 13% on the BTC pair, according to CoinGecko. Meanwhile, 24-hour trading volume climbed to roughly $16.5 billion.

The rally came as investor sentiment improved following a series of Ripple announcements this week, with the latest being the company teasing major upgrades to the XRP Ledger (XRPL) on Feb. 5.

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Coinbase customers faced losses in fresh ways through the exchange’s crypto-backed lending product as Bitcoin and Ethereum tumbled this week.

Zcash (ZEC) has fallen roughly 60% from its November 2025 high, extending a multi-month slide that has reversed much of the asset’s Q4 gains.

The privacy-focused coin, which was the top-performing large-cap crypto asset of 2025, began its downward trend in December, shortly after the Winklevoss-backed Zcash treasury company Cypherpunk Technologies last disclosed a ZEC purchase, its third since launching.

Cypherpunk, which launched in November as a Zcash-focused treasury company, last reported buying ZEC on Dec. 30, 2025, bringing its holdings to 290,062.67 ZEC. The spot price of Zcash has dropped over 50% since then.

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Bithumb, one of Korea’s leading centralized exchanges (CEX), made a multi-billion dollar mistake overnight when management accidentally sent 2,000 BTC, worth almost $140 million, to more than 200 users instead of 2,000 WON, which is worth less than $1.5.

As users received the BTC, they immediately attempted to sell and offramp funds, briefly sending BTC on Bithumb almost 18% below the market price according to LookOnchain.

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Strategy (MSTR), BitMine (BMNR), and Coinbase (COIN) helped lead the crypto stock rebound as Bitcoin bounced back from a dip near $60K.

Self-custodial Ethereum wallet Rainbow debuted its native token RNBW yesterday, Feb. 5. But the project’s token generation event (TGE) on Base, and the token’s debut for trading across exchanges, were met with reports of delayed distribution to ICO participants, which contributed to the token’s poor day-one performance.

According to Coinbase data, RNBW hit a high of $0.05 on its first day of trading, but fell quickly and closed the daily session around $0.034, down more than 30%, putting its fully diluted valuation around $34 million.

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Bitwise’s Head of Europe argues that gold offers a cushion when markets fall, while Bitcoin boosts portfolios during rebounds.

Chinese regulators have locked in a sweeping crypto clampdown, banning unapproved yuan-linked stablecoins and curbing tokenized assets.

Noted tech investor Cathie Wood's Ark Invest dumped shares in Coinbase on Thursday amid Bitcoin's slide to nearly $60,000.

The biggest crypto venture linked to U.S. President Donald Trump is a DeFi project promising to help the unbanked. But how does it work?

Eurozone finance ministers are set to meet on Feb. 16 to explore the integration of euro-denominated stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to enhance the euro's global standing, Reuters has learned.

The European Commission is preparing a set of proposals aimed at strengthening the euro's role in the international monetary system. These proposals are expected to include the issuance of euro-denominated stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and CBDCs.

Currently, the euro accounts for approximately 20% of global currency reserves, compared to about 60% for the U.S. dollar, the report reads.

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Trump-linked tokens have fallen on news of an investigation into World Liberty Financial’s dealings with a member of the UAE royal family.

Thursday marked one of the worst days in crypto history, with majors plunging 15-20% before modest relief.

Crypto users lost about $370.3 million to exploits in January, according to data from security analytics firm CertiK.

CertiK said in a post on X that $311.3 million of the total was linked to phishing, with a single social engineering scam accounting for about $284 million. Phishing is a type of cybercrime in which attackers impersonate reputable entities (such as banks or employers) to deceive individuals into revealing sensitive information.

The firm said the single large incident targeted an individual user rather than exploiting a smart contract bug. This means that only about 16% of total losses were linked to non-phishing incidents, such as code flaws, price manipulation, or wallet compromises, according to CertiK’s breakdown.

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On one of BTC’s worst days in recent memory, JP Morgan’s quantitative strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou is taking the contrarian approach and says that not only is Bitcoin undervalued, but it looks “even more attractive compared to gold.”

Panigitzoglou says that liquidations have been “more modest” despite the asset’s poor recent performance, and highlighted that the bitcoin-to-gold volatility ratio is at a “record low” in a recent investor research note, according to Yahoo Finance.

However, BTC is currently down 13.3% today compared to gold’s 3% decline, so that ratio gap is closing quickly.

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World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol affiliated with President Trump’s sons, was forced to sell some Bitcoin at roughly $67,000 today to avoid liquidation on Aave.

According to Arkham Intelligence, the WLFI wallet was forced to liquidate more than 170 BTC, worth roughly $11 million, to repay its loans on Aave.

Meanwhile, the WLFI token is down 14% today, slightly underperforming BTC and ETH, which are both down 13%.

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ETHZilla has announced its acquisition of a portfolio comprising 95 manufactured and modular home loans valued at approximately $4.7 million, with plans to tokenize these assets on Ethereum Layer 2. This strategic move is aimed at enhancing transparency and accessibility in real estate finance.

The tokenization initiative will be executed through the Liquidity.io ecosystem, with the launch expected in late February or early March.

"Manufactured housing loans offer predictable cash flows and strong underlying collateral, which we believe makes them well suited for tokenization within a regulated, transparent structure," said McAndrew Rudisill, CEO of ETHZilla.

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Ethereum (ETH) traded under $2,000 on Thursday, Feb. 5, for the first time since May 2025, amid a broader sell-off across crypto markets.

ETH fell about 10% over the past 24 hours to trade near $1,925, extending its weekly losses to 30%. Paul Howard, senior director at Wincent, said Ethereum’s move lower was driven by a broader shift away from risk in global markets, rather than a crypto-specific event.

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Merkle Trade, the largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange on Aptos by trading volume, said in an X post on Feb. 3 that it will begin winding down operations over the coming weeks.

The team said the decision followed “careful consideration” and comes after the platform processed nearly $30 billion in cumulative trading volume since launch. Without specifying a reason for the winddown, the statement concludes: “But we are proud of what we built, and grateful to everyone who was part of it.”

According to the announcement, new positions will be disabled on Feb. 6, with all remaining positions forcibly closed on Feb. 10. Merkle Trade’s native MKL token will become redeemable without fees or withdrawal delays, while a final revenue distribution is scheduled for Feb. 12, after which staked MKL can also be redeemed, the announcement said.

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A governance delegation platform for Aave, the largest decentralized lending platform, with more than $29 billion in total value locked (TVL), has proposed pausing three underused Layer 2 deployments of Aave V3.

In a Jan. 29 governance proposal that moved to a snapshot vote on Feb. 3, the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) proposed that Aave freeze its V3 deployments on Ethereum L2s zkSync Era, Metis, and Soneium to cut costs.

“Over time, it has become clear that a small subset of instances contributes very little user activity, TVL, and revenue, while still requiring a non-trivial amount of attention from service providers and governance participants,” ACI wrote in the prospal.

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Circle announced on Thursday, Feb. 5, that it has partnered with Polymarket, the largest on-chain prediction market by trading volume, to provide its U.S. dollar stablecoin settlement infrastructure.

The partnership focuses on integrating Circle’s stablecoin USDC as the primary collateral currency for trading on Polymarket. The prediction market, which operates on Polygon, currently uses Polygon Bridged USDC (USDC.E), but will move to native USDC “in the coming months.”

With a supply of $70.77 billion, Circle’s USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization after Tether’s USDT.

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Tether announced a $100 million strategic equity investment in Anchorage Digital today, Feb. 5. The move is aimed at bolstering secure and regulated financial infrastructure within the cryptocurrency industry, according to a press release from Tether today, Feb. 5.

Anchorage Digital, recognized as the first federally chartered crypto-focused bank in the United States, both fiat banking services as well as crypto custody, staking, and stablecoin issuance, primarily for institutional clients. The bank obtained its charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in 2021, marking a pivotal moment in the regulation of digital assets in the U.S.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, emphasized the strategic alignment between Tether and Anchorage. "Our investment in Anchorage Digital reflects a shared belief in the importance of secure, transparent, and resilient financial systems," Ardoino said in a statement.

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Crypto derivatives-focused centralized exchange BitMEX has expanded its copy trading feature to let users copy the strategies of top traders from Hyperliquid, the largest decentralized perpetual futures platform by trading volume and open interest.

The new feature, called Hyperliquid Copy Trading, lets BitMEX users automatically replicate trades from selected Hyperliquid traders, according to a press release viewed by The Defiant.

Trades are opened directly on BitMEX and users can copy up to five Hyperliquid traders at once. Other features include basic risk-management tools, such as take-profit and stop-loss options.

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Retail investors in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland said they would invest more in funds if tokenized products with faster settlement and 24/7 access were available, according to a new report from Aptos Labs, Boston Consulting Group, and Hang Seng Bank.

The report is based on a Hong Kong pilot that tested tokenized funds settled using programmable digital money. In a survey of 500 retail investors across Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, 61% said they would double their fund allocations if tokenized funds were available.

Nearly all respondents (~97%) said they were interested in features such as instant settlement, around-the-clock access, and more transparency. Meanwhile, around 71% said access to 24/7 secondary trading would make them more likely to invest.

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Digital asset treasuries (DAT) were touted as a major unlock in 2025, with struggling companies being acquired and repurposed as crypto allocation vehicles; however, just one month into 2026, the new class of DATs are almost $20 billion in the hole.

According to Artemis Terminal, the 20 largest DATs are down a cumulative $17 billion as the crypto market continues to fall.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine Immersion stands out, accounting for almost 44% of that figure with $7.5 billion in unrealized losses on its ETH holdings, purchased at an average price of $3,900.

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Cap Protocol ended its “Frontier” rewards phase on Wed, Feb. 4, by distributing 12 million cUSD, its dollar-pegged stablecoin, to early users. The project is calling the initiative crypto’s “first-ever stablecoin airdrop.”

In a post on X, Cap explained it chose to airdrop a stablecoin rather than a governance token to give users a fixed-value reward, instead of one that could fluctuate with market prices. cUSD currently has a market capitalization of over $282 million, per CoinGecko.

Cap is a stablecoin and yield protocol that programmatically routes capital to professional yield‑generating institutions, while enforcing strict, on‑chain risk controls. It has roughly $315 million in total value locked (TVL), according to DeFiLlama.

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CME Group, the largest derivatives trading marketplace in the world, is looking at launching its own crypto token.

During the company’s earnings call today, Chairman and CEO Terrence Duffy discussed the role of tokenized collateral and the importance of collateral integrity, with 24/7 crypto futures trading confirmed to be coming to CME soon.

“Right now, we are looking at different forms of margin, but we are not going to put the enterprise at risk by taking something that we cannot get our arms around on a token. So if you were to give me a token from a systemically important financial institution, I would probably be more comfortable than maybe a third or fourth-tier bank trying to issue a token for margin,” he said.

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Just over six months after Shopify partnered with Coinbase, payments using USDC on Base via the integration remain only a small fraction of the e-commerce giant’s activity.

The integration, announced in June of last year and involving Shopify, Coinbase and Stripe, allows merchants at Shopify to accept USDC payments settled on Base. The payments are settled via the Commerce Payments Protocol, an open source protocol developed by Shopify and Coinbase and launched at the time of the integration.

So far, however, adoption appears relatively low. According to data from blockchain analytics platform growthepie, since June, just $1.2 million in USDC payments on Base has been processed from about 3,200 customers across 5,700 merchants via the Commerce Payments Protocol.

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Crypto markets continued to plunge on Wednesday as disappointing tech earnings and a fragile political truce in Washington triggered a global sell-off.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell 6% over the past 24 hours to trade around $73,600, bringing its seven-day losses to 19%. Ethereum (ETH) slid more than 6% on the day to about $2,134.

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Opinion, a prediction marketplace founded in 2023 by Forrest Liu, announced today, Feb. 4, that it has raised $20 million in a pre-Series A round as it quietly moves into the top tier of on-chain betting.

The round was backed by Hack VC, Jump Crypto, Primitive Ventures and others, and comes about three months after the platform’s launch, according to a press release shared with The Defiant.

Before the pre-Series A, Opinion Labs, the firm behind the platform, raised $5 million in seed funding, led by YZi Labs, an investment vehicle spun out of Binance, with participation from Animoca Ventures and others.

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Euro-pegged stablecoins are poised to scale rapidly in Europe, according to a new report by S&P Global Ratings. The driver won’t be payments, but tokenized investments, the firm said.

In the report, published on Tuesday, Feb. 3, S&P Global projected that the euro stablecoin market will grow from its current value of €650 million to anywhere between €25 billion and €1.1 trillion in the next four years. Most of that expansion, in the firm’s baseline view, will be driven by real-world asset (RWA) tokenization for investment purposes, “and, to a lesser degree, payments with stablecoins,” the report reads.

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The native token of Limitless, a prediction market on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 network, is soaring this week after trading volume on the platform hit an all-time high in January.

The LMTS token, which launched in October, has struggled until now, falling as much as 86% to $0.05. However, it’s up 135% this week and another 2% today amid rising platform activity, which cleared $200 million in notional volume in January, according to Dune Analytics.

This marks a 56% jump from December, when it processed $128 million in volume.

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After years of Layer 2 (L2) networks popping up in an attempt to scale Ethereum and claim market share, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says that the L2 model for scalability no longer makes sense due to the Layer 1’s (L1) scaling efforts.

“The original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path,” Buterin wrote on X, citing issues such as slow progress towards decentralization, while noting that the Ethereum mainnet is scaling and consistently maintaining low gas costs.

Gas costs, in particular, were a major obstacle for decentralized finance (DeFi) power users in 2021 and 2022, when network activity surged amid the popularity of DeFi and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). During high-demand periods, such as a hyped NFT mint or a capped DeFi vault deposit, gas fees could skyrocket to thousands of dollars just to attempt a transaction, with no guarantee of its success.

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The number of tokens launched on AI agent launchpad Clanker, which runs on Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 Base, skyrocketed to new daily highs following the recent rise of AI-only social media platform, Moltbook.

Yesterday, Feb. 2, the number of tokens created on Clanker reached 21,870, breaking its previous all-time highs from over the weekend, per data from Dune Analytics.

Daily trading volumes on the AI-powered Base launchpad also surged, reaching an all-time high of over $364 million on Jan. 31.

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Crypto markets moved lower on Tuesday after the U.S. government shutdown delayed key macroeconomic data, adding to investor uncertainty.

Bitcoin (BTC) was trading at around $77,686, down 1.5% over the past 24 hours, while Ethereum (ETH) fell about 4% to $2,288. Among other large-cap tokens, BNB slipped nearly 1% to $771, XRP declined 2.5% to $1.60, and Solana (SOL) dropped 3.5% to $101.

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MetaMask, a self-custodial crypto wallet developed by Consensys, has added support for tokenized U.S. stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and commodities through an integration with Ondo Finance, the companies said on Tuesday, Feb. 3, in a press release shared with The Defiant.

The update lets eligible users of MetaMask’s mobile app in supported non-U.S. jurisdictions buy, hold, and trade more than 200 tokenized U.S. securities via Ondo Global Markets, Ondo’s tokenized real-world assets (RWA) platform, which launched in October 2025. The assets can be accessed directly inside MetaMask’s self-custodial wallet, without requiring a separate trading platform or traditional brokerage account.

The integration comes as interest in tokenized RWAs continues to grow, with large institutions increasingly offering tokenized versions of traditional financial products. The tokenized RWA market currently exceeds $23 billion globally, up about 13% over the past month, according to data from RWAxyz.

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AI-powered crypto bot Bankr added support for the Solana network, allowing AI agents to deploy tokens that run on Raydium, the sixth-largest protocol on Solana by the total value locked.

Following the expansion to Solana, the price of BankrCoin (BNKR) rose about 21% to $0.00063, making it one of the day’s top gainers as on Monday, according to CoinGecko. The token is still up over 120% on the weekly timeframe.

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The official Spanish affiliate of the International Red Cross, also known as Creu Roja in Catalonia, has rolled out a blockchain-based aid platform aimed at improving transparency while keeping recipient data private, according to a press release shared with The Defiant.

The system uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify donations without exposing who receives them. Francisco López Romero, Creu Roja’s chief technology officer in Catalonia, Spain, said in the press release that with blockchain, donors can confirm their contributions make an impact, while beneficiaries retain privacy.

The platform replaces paper workflows with digital aid credits in the form of ERC-20 tokens stored in mobile wallets. Recipients can spend these tokens at authorized local merchants using QR codes. “People seeking assistance shouldn't have to choose between getting help and protecting their privacy,” Romero said.

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Crypto markets traded higher on Monday evening after a stronger-than-expected U.S. manufacturing report helped lift broader risk sentiment.

Bitcoin (BTC) was trading around $78,338, up roughly 2.1% over the past 24 hours, while Ether (ETH) rose about 1.5% to $2,338, according to CoinGecko.

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A recent post by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on creator coins has sparked fresh debate, with experts agreeing on the problem but split on how to fix it.

In his post, shared on Feb. 1, Buterin argued that the biggest problem in today’s creator economy is no longer motivating people to create content. Instead, he said the challenge is finding quality in a world flooded with posts, videos, and AI-generated material.

“In the 20s, there's plenty of content, AI can generate an entire metaverse full of it for like $10. The problem is quality. And so your goal is not *incentivizing content*, it's *surfacing good content*,” he wrote.

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Zama's highly anticipated $ZAMA token has made headlines as the first production-scale use of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) on the Ethereum mainnet.

However, the token is currently trading at $0.035, marking a 30% decrease from its initial coin offering (ICO) price).

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The native token of Stable, the Layer-1 blockchain backed by Bitfinex, reached new highs this week ahead of its v1.2.0 mainnet upgrade, which is slated to launch on Wednesday.

STABLE is up 43% this week, tapping an all-time high of $0.03 per token on Jan. 29 and Feb. 2.

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Decentralized exchange and Layer-1 blockchain Hyperliquid is building on its strong price performance this week and announced the upcoming launch of HIP-4 markets, enabling prediction-market-like outcome trading.

“Outcomes are fully collateralized contracts that settle within a fixed range. They are a general-purpose primitive that are useful for applications such as prediction markets and bounded options-like instruments,” said the official X account.

HYPE jumped on the announcement and is up 7% over the last 24 hours amid the broader market rebound.

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World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token rose by as much as 15% on Monday, Feb. 2, before giving back some gains.

WLFI is currently trading at around $0.13, up roughly 11% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, after touching $0.135 earlier in the morning. The rally comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed over the weekend that a prominent royal from the United Arab Emirates acquired a 49% stake in the crypto venture just days before President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

Roughly $250 million was paid upfront by lieutenants to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security advisor and brother of the UAE’s president, with $187 million sent to Trump-affiliated entities, according to the Journal.

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Aave’s decentralized stablecoin GHO reached over $500 million in market capitalization, hitting a new milestone in adoption. According to data from CoinGecko, circulating supply has stayed above half a billion as of early February, and has grown more than 245% since the start of 2025.

Data from analytics firm Token Terminal shows that GHO’s holder count also grew over the past year, now standing near the 23,000 mark, up roughly 300% since January 2025.

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Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB) said it has upgraded its multi-currency, real-time clearing network, SGB Net, to support stablecoins alongside fiat currencies, allowing institutional clients to manage both within a single banking platform.

Under the new setup, clients will be able to trade, mint, convert, hold and transfer stablecoins including Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT across blockchains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum and Solana. According to a spokesperson for the bank, the service is only available to SGB’s corporate clients.

The upgrade extends Singapore Gulf Bank’s clearing system into the stablecoin market, according to a press release viewed by The Defiant. SGB Net currently processes about $2 billion in monthly fiat transaction volumes, the bank said.

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For years, warnings that quantum computers could “break Bitcoin” appeared in headlines and on social media, but many dismissed them as alarmism. Practical quantum machines capable of such attacks simply didn’t exist and the risks seemed far off.

But recently, the tone has shifted. In mid-January, Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at multi-billion investment bank Jefferies reportedly removed a 10% Bitcoin allocation from his widely followed “Greed & Fear” model portfolio — its entire BTC allocation — citing concerns that long‑term advances in quantum computing could eventually undermine Bitcoin’s security.

Just days after that, U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase formed an advisory board including crypto and quantum experts to assess risks and outline migration paths to post-quantum-secure signatures. But how immediate and real is the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin?

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A small group of startups is quietly showing that crypto can be spent at regular stores without forcing merchants to change their point-of-sale systems or learn complicated new procedures.

They work through a pay-on-behalf system, where shoppers scan the merchant’s usual bank QR code, send crypto into an app or escrow wallet, and a local partner pays the merchant in fiat.

The crypto goes to the local partner after the merchant gets paid, so the app or escrow wallet holds the funds until the payment is settled, acting like a temporary promise to pay.

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Infinex, the wallet and tool suite led by Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, conducted its token generation event (TGE) today after concluding its initial coin offering (ICO) earlier this month.

The INX token debuted at a $330 million fully diluted valuation, or $0.033 per token, and has since dropped to $0.021 as airdrop recipients and ICO investors take profits, as is typical when new tokens launch.

Infinex functions as a decentralized super app, connecting dApps such as decentralized exchanges, bridges, and derivatives aggregators across more than 25 different blockchain networks, accounting for “85% of the top 100 assets on CoinGecko,” according to a release shared with The Defiant. Infinex plans to expand its token offerings throughout the first half of the year.

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Polkadot’s treasury became more active and more conservative in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2025, according to a new treasury report.

The Polkadot treasury spent $7.4 million in Q4, the lowest level since OpenGov was introduced. Polkadot's governance transitioned to the OpenGov model in June 2023.

After accounting for inflation and token burn, the treasury posted a net profit of 1.6 million DOT, its first positive result under the current system. At the end of the quarter, the treasury held about 32 million DOT, worth roughly $58 million.

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As MegaETH, the Ethereum Layer 2 and real-time blockchain, prepares for its mainnet launch and token generation event (TGE) in February, MEGA’s pre-market valuation has plunged by 20% over the last 24 hours.

The MEGA pre-market perpetual derivative on Hyperliquid plummeted 20% today, falling as low as $0.125, or a $1.25 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV), before rebounding to its current price of $0.148.

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Nado, a perpetual derivatives decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ink, Kraken’s Ethereum Layer 2 network, airdropped its official non-fungible token (NFT) collection to early users yesterday.

Dubbed Templars of the Storm, the collection was airdropped to the platform’s top pre-alpha phase users who chose to forgo a distribution of Ink points to receive the NFT instead. The floor price of the collection is currently 0.45 ETH ($1,200).

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The Ether supply is tightening as more ETH is removed from active trading, according to a new report from Sygnum.

About 45% of all ETH is now locked or hard to sell, Sygnum said in its Q1 2026 Investment Outlook. ETH held on exchanges fell 14.5% during the quarter, continuing a multi-year decline. Meanwhile, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) now hold around 10% of total ETH, and public companies own more than 6.1 million ETH, equal to roughly 5% of the circulating supply.

The report says this shrinking supply could lead to larger price moves, but only if demand increases. Ethereum prices remain under pressure, with ETH down roughly 40% from its short-lived all-time high after the October 2025 market sell-off. Currently, ETH is trading at $2,736, down 8% on the week.

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Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, plans to purchase $1 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) within the next month as part of its long-term plan to support the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

“We believe Bitcoin is the foundational asset of this ecosystem and the premier long-term store of value,” the company said on X.

The exchange also plans to top up the fund if its market value drops below $800 million post-conversion, according to a blog post.

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Crypto markets remained under pressure on Friday morning, Jan. 30, as risk assets extended yesterday’s losses following renewed macro uncertainty in the United States and globally.

Bitcoin (BTC) keeps sliding and as of press time the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is down 3% and trading around $83,200, after hitting as low as $81,300 over the past 24 hours. The past two days have brought BTC’s weekly losses to 6.5%.

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U.S. president Donald Trump announced via Truth Social his nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Chair of the Federal Reserve today, Jan. 30.

The decision comes as Trump continues to criticize current Chair Jerome Powell's monetary policy decisions, particularly his handling of interest rates.

The nomination also comes shortly after the Fed recently decided to leave interest rates unchanged in its latest meeting, as The Defiant reported earlier.

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Crypto asset manager Bitwise is dialing back expectations that Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade would meaningfully lift network revenue, according to a new research report from the firm, published on Jan. 28. The findings fall short of earlier bullish projections from Bitwise’s own chief investment officer, Matt Hougan.

In November, Hougan wrote in an X thread that Fusaka could drive a “5-10x” increase in Ethereum’s revenue capture, calling it “under-appreciated catalyst and one reason ETH could lead the crypto rebound.” However, new data from Bitwise tells a far less bullish story.

Positive Impact

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Story Protocol, an onchain platform focused on intellectual property (IP), and OpenLedger on Thursday, Jan. 29, announced a new standard meant to let artificial intelligence (AI) systems use creative work legally and pay the people who own it.

Under the partnership, IP registered on Story Protocol can be licensed for AI training and AI-generated outputs. Meanwhile, OpenLedger – an AI-native blockchain – will enforce those licenses inside AI systems and send payments to rights holders.

The companies are also building a shared onchain standard that records who owns the work, how it can be used, and who gets paid, according to a press release viewed by The Defiant.

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Optimism and OP Labs chief executive officer Jing Wang announced the launch of OP Enterprise today — a chain deployment suite for enterprise clients looking to build native blockchains while retaining revenue.

The product aims to provide easy-to-work-with infrastructure for “companies that want to build businesses, not become blockchain experts,” said Wang on X.

Chains built via OP Enterprise will become part of the OP Stack, which is home to more than $6 billion in total value locked (TVL) across more than 50 blockchains, including Base and Unichain.

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Staff at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, Jan. 28, issued new guidance explaining how existing securities laws apply to tokenized securities.

The statement – issued jointly by the Division of Corporation Finance, the Division of Investment Management, and the Division of Trading and Markets – points out that securities issued or represented on blockchains remain subject to the same rules as traditional securities.

Notably, the statement functions as guidance and does not create new rules or change existing law. Instead, it aims to clarify how current securities laws apply as more institutions begin experimenting with tokenized products.

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U.S. spot Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs) pulled in about $750-766 million in early inflows, showing stronger early demand than Ethereum ETFs did at launch – but still far behind Bitcoin.

According to a new report from Everstake, U.S. spot SOL ETFs launched in October 2025 and reached roughly $950 million in assets under management (AUM) by late December. That equals about 1.35% of Solana’s total market value.

By comparison, U.S. spot-Bitcoin ETFs, which launched in January 2024, attracted about $12.1 billion in net inflows during their first three months, according to SoSoValue. By the end of March 2024, Bitcoin ETF assets had climbed to roughly $59 billion, roughly 4% of Bitcoin’s total market capitalization at the time.

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Ethereum community members on Thursday said they are launching a new fund to use Ether tied to unresolved DAO contracts from 2016 to support Ethereum security.

During a live interview on Unchained, Griff Green, an Ethereum community member and co-founder of Giveth, said more than 70,500 Ether (ETH) will move into a new entity called The DAO Fund. The funds come from unclaimed balances in smart contracts created after the 2016 DAO hack.

At current prices, the ETH is worth about $220 million. The group also confirmed the plan in a post on X shortly after the interview.

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