NEW REPORT: How Flare uses data to expand what capital can do.

Shane Molidor

FORGD

Crypto has never had a shortage of badges. There are audit stamps, transparency checklists, self-reported scorecards, and way too many superlatives. The industry has produced plenty of ways for projects to signal credibility. But many of these signals are deeply flawed. The industry needs a trusted, go-to metric to measure credibility. One that's verifiable and hard to game.
That’s what we’re launching today.
DefiLlama has teamed up with Forgd to launch the industry’s first continuously updated metric for scoring token disclosure and performance: Universal Token Ratings (UTR). We’ve intentionally designed the system so that a high rating is difficult to earn, and even harder to keep. 
Every rated project gets a standardized 0–100 score and a familiar AAA–CCC letter grade. Both recalculate as the market moves. If liquidity dries up, a new batch of tokens unlock, or a market maker falters under stress, the score will update automatically, without any human oversight required. 
Why UTR was built
DefiLlama exists to surface honest, unbiased data. For years, that has meant tracking what's verifiable: TVL, volumes, fees, unlocks, and other onchain analytics.
There is often a gap between what projects say and the realities of the market. A project can publish a beautiful tokenomics page and still trade with paper-thin liquidity. It can disclose a market maker engagement, but quickly let it lapse. Static transparency initiatives can't catch this, because they don’t continuously monitor the tokens they have rated. 
Universal Token Ratings close that gap by design. The methodology is built on two independently scored axes, each graded 0–10:
The Disclosure Axis (D) measures what a project reports about itself — team, tokenomics and vesting, legal and treasury structure, and service provider engagements including market makers, auditors, and exchanges.
The Performance Axis (P) measures whether live market behavior actually supports these claims by tracking liquidity depth, bid-ask spreads, volume, exchange coverage, derivatives conditions, market maker adherence, and on-chain tokenomics delivery.
The final score is deliberately multiplicative: UTR = D × P.
A project with perfect disclosures and a broken market can't score well. Neither can a project with deep liquidity, but missing disclosure statements. Only projects strong on both dimensions can earn top grades. Verified on-chain events like token unlocks, new listings, and changed market maker mandates flow straight into the score with no refiling and no human in the loop.
The incentive shift
Here's the part we care about most: how this rating will influence behavior across the industry.
When a rating is a one-time exercise, the rational strategy for token projects is to optimize for that audit — pass the review, frame the badge, and never worry about it again. Nothing about that structure rewards staying transparent or keeping markets healthy.
A continuous rating flips the incentive. When a token’s grade can deteriorate in near-real-time, transparency stops being a launch-week deliverable and becomes an operating principle. Projects are rewarded for maintaining liquidity, honoring vesting schedules on-chain, keeping market maker engagements active, and refreshing disclosures as facts change. Otherwise their stellar AAA-rating will drift toward CCC, and investors will quickly abandon the project.
As Shane Molidor, Founder and CEO of Forgd, puts it: “Crypto has had transparency checklists, but never a continuously updated rating system. A UTR score is something you have to keep earning.”
That's the kind of accountability institutional capital and regulators have been asking digital assets to develop. The industry needs something that functions more like a bond rating than a badge. 
Where the data comes from
The Performance Axis is powered by our data partnerships with Forgd, alongside Forgd's proprietary market maker monitoring infrastructure, which tracks live engagements across more than 500 token projects and 35 market-making firms. This builds on a partnership that started earlier this year with the integration of Forgd's market maker leaderboard on DefiLlama.
The full UTR methodology — every category weight, scoring rubric, and grading threshold — is published openly. If you want to know exactly why a project scored what it scored, you can trace it.
What you'll find at launch
Starting today, you can explore ratings for 100+ tokens directly on DefiLlama, with the ability to:
Track newly launched tokens from day one
Filter by valuation, sector, and exchange listing tier
And drill into full category-level breakdowns showing exactly where a project is strongest, and where the gaps are
The bigger picture
Ratings calculated from live market data are a natural extension of what DefiLlama has always done: give millions of users, researchers, and journalists a neutral, free, open source of truth. Universal Token Ratings take that a step further, drawing a line from a project’s disclosures and public statements to their measurable market performance.
We think the projects doing things right will welcome this. A market where credibility is continuously verified is a market where transparency confers a durable competitive advantage.
Explore Universal Token Ratings on DeFiLlama and learn how the scoring works.

DefiLlama has teamed up with Forgd to launch the industry’s first continuously updated metric for scoring token disclosure and performance: Universal Token Ratings (UTR). We’ve intentionally designed the system so that a high rating is difficult to earn, and even harder to keep.

A Rating You Have to Keep Earning: Forgd and DefiLlama Introduce Universal Token Ratings

On 4 May 2026, Tydro suspended every market it operated. Chaos Labs, then its sole price data provider, had disclosed an attack on its infrastructure and recommended a halt. No incorrect price reached the markets, and no user positions were impacted. About 48 hours later, Chaos Labs approved a restart, but the markets remained closed as the operator migrated the feeds.
The incident exposed something structural. Tydro runs Aave v3, and a white-label Aave deployment does not inherit the system that would normally have handled a moment like that. Three functions go missing. Tydro bought two of them back within a week, and the third is why its v2 release will carry an independent Credora rating.
What a white-label Aave deployment inherits
Tydro is a non-custodial lending protocol on Ink, Kraken's Ethereum L2, carrying $56.15M in TVL and $48.67M in active loans across 11 pools per DefiLlama, roughly half of the chain's DeFi TVL.
The ARFC responsible for approving the deployment establishes the terms: Aave DAO will license the code and will take 'a share of all the revenue generated by the platform'. This share should be equal to or greater than the equivalent of a Reserve Factor of 5% calculated on the borrow volume in all pools.
That is where the relationship ends. Since the same ARFC states "the instance will initially be centrally governed by the Ink Foundation without a governance token", Aave DAO has no voting power over listings or parameters. BGD Labs, Aave's core development team, put it plainly: "the decision to include/not to assess in the listings set is of the friendly fork manager, not ours.” Bad debt is not covered by the backstop since "this instance will not be protected by the DAO-run Umbrella". The provision allowing trusted parties to modify the guardrails without a governance vote does not apply here.
This is the general form of the fork risk in Aave v3. The contracts are the same, and there is no oversight, leaving the operator with three functions they can replace: parameter stewardship, a loss backstop, and an external viewpoint on whether the markets are correctly priced from the start.
Of the 17 recorded security incidents across Aave forks tracked by DefiLlama, not including the Tydro incident, nine (just over half) were oracle-manipulation attacks, accounting for $52.0M of the $119.8M lost.
Aave's own governed instances have lost $918K in two incidents within the same dataset. One notable incident was a March 2026 oracle-parameter misconfiguration, which caused about $27M in liquidations. Aave DAO then voted to reimburse affected users, recovering $862K of the loss. No fork in the dataset has had an equivalent safety measure.
What an operator can buy
Two of the three are procurable. Feed redundancy is a vendor decision, and Tydro made it in May: Chainlink Data Feeds as primary, RedStone as the redundancy layer, migrated under a 48-hour timelock, with markets reopening around 10 May behind a grace period that halted liquidations while borrowers repaid or topped up.
That decision isn't the norm: across all DefiLlama-tracked protocols with an oracle on record, only 190 of 1,116 (17%) run two or more concurrent price feeds; most operators, forked or not, rely on a single source.
Transaction screening is software, and Hypernative's Transaction Guard now checks multisig transactions across Ethereum, Optimism, and Ink against policy before execution.
Both closures were the result of budget constraints and the use of engineering time; any operator possessing either of them could carry out the same action.
The part that has to come from outside
The third function does not work that way.
The reason that Aave's listing votes and Risk Stewards were useful had nothing to do with the mechanism itself; it was because the mechanism was situated outside the entity that held the position. A deployment that evaluates its own markets and then releases the grade is engaging in marketing. The value of a risk assessment lies in the fact that the assessor has no interest in the outcome, a property which no operator can create internally regardless of how much money they spend.
The gap remained open into May, and the v2 release is what closes it.
Adding a DeFi risk rating layer
Assets and markets with exposure to kBTC and USDC will carry a Credora rating on an A+ to D scale, shown in the Tydro interface, under the same methodology applied to every protocol on that scale.
The two metrics behind the letters differ by object. Markets are scored on a Probability of Significant Loss: the annualized probability that a market will lose more than 1% of its principal over a one-year horizon. That threshold suits a lending market, where the realistic failure mode is a partial loss which lenders absorb rather than a binary default. The estimate comes from 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations of price movements, liquidity conditions, and correlated shocks affecting the market's collateral, the probability being determined by the proportion of simulation paths that exceed the threshold. The five factors involving smart contract risk, liquidity risk, oracle risk, counterparty risk, and collateral quality risk are each modeled separately and thus affect the final rating.
Assets are scored on a Probability of Default, built by asset type: direct ratings where reserves are themselves rated tokens, published cumulative default rates for instruments such as T-Bills, and simulation for crypto-native reserves.
Both resolve onto one letter scale. For example, an ‘A’ corresponds to a PSL of roughly 0.1% to 0.4% annually, in the range of an investment-grade BBB/BBB- in traditional credit. Because the same scale covers markets on other protocols, a position here can be set against one on a protocol with entirely different mechanics, on a single axis, against a methodology published in full.
The scope is limited. A rating measures the downside associated with a particular market or asset that has been rated. It does not constitute an audit of the underlying protocol or chain, it does not claim that any position is free of risk, and it is not a replacement for a backstop. It is an assessment, and assessments do not cover losses.
The takeaway
A white-label Aave deployment inherits the code but not the oversight, and the three functions it leaves behind are not all equally replaceable. The feed and screening functions are acquired as external services. An independent assessment of the risk involves a party that does not report to the operator. It is the one function of the three that cannot, in principle, be set up in-house.
On Tydro v2, that party is Credora, rating every market and asset in scope.

On 4 May 2026, Tydro suspended every market it operated. Chaos Labs, then its sole price data provider, had disclosed an attack on its infrastructure.

On 4 May 2026, Tydro suspended every market it operated. Chaos Labs, then its sole price data provider, had disclosed an attack on its infrastructure and recommended a halt.

White-label Aave deployment: the risk function an operator cannot rebuild alone

The Landscape Of Stocks On The Blockchain
In the past year the industry has seen the growth of stocks on blockchain rails, both on spot and on perpetual DEXes. Tokenized equities' on-chain active market cap has gone from roughly $429M a year ago to $3.76B today — a ~9x increase — while a parallel and much larger market has emerged in leveraged synthetic exposure: perp venues referencing individual stocks, ETFs, and indices, which have moved $105.7B in the last 30 days alone.
These two verticals are new and growing fast — but as seen many times in crypto, growth in market capitalization and trading volume don’t necessarily correspond to long-term anti-fragile adoption. That’s the question this piece sets out to answer: do stocks on crypto rails actually have product-market fit so far? 
A Brief Explanation Of Stocks On-Chain And Stock Perps
Broadly speaking, there have been two categories of adoption for stocks on crypto rails and they operate under fundamentally different mechanics. 
On-chain tokenized equities are blockchain-native representations of real-world stocks. A regulated issuer holds the underlying shares with a qualified custodian and mints tokens that track those shares 1:1. The token lives on the blockchain and can be traded on decentralized venues, and in some cases, be redeemed for the underlying stock. The market currently stands at roughly $2.42 billion in active market capitalization.
Stock perpetuals are the other side of the coin. These perpetual futures contracts reference individual stocks, ETFs, or equity indices, and are traded on derivatives exchanges. But they carry no claim on the underlying share. What they offer instead is leverage — typically 2x to 20x — and 24/7 access to price exposure. 
In the last 30 days alone, perp venues referencing equities moved approximately $105.7 billion in notional volume. For context, the entire DeFi derivatives market across all assets (crypto pairs, forex, commodities, and equities) processed $489.5 billion over the same period. Stock perps alone represent roughly 21% of that.
Breaking Down The Landscapes 
On-Chain
Three major entities dominate the on-chain tokenized-equities landscape: Backed/Kraken's xStocks, Ondo Global Markets, and bTech Holdings.
Backed Finance, the issuer of xStocks, was acquired by Kraken in a deal announced December 2, 2025. Since its debut, xStocks has passed $10B in combined exchange and on-chain trading volume. On-chain, xStocks currently carry $866M in tracked market cap across 191 distinct assets.
Ondo Global Markets launched September 3, 2025 with 100+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on Ethereum, backed by securities held at U.S.-registered broker-dealers. It has since scaled to 415 total tracked assets, with $917.2M in tracked on-chain market cap, making it the largest on-chain issuer of tokenized equities.
bTech Holdings, a Binance Group affiliate registered in the Abu Dhabi Global Market, issues bStocks — the tokenized-equity product available on Binance and self-custodied on BNB Chain. bTech is the third-largest issuer, with $564.5m in on-chain market cap — 18% of the tracked market.
Issuer
Onchain Mcap
Share
Assets
Ondo Global Markets
$917.2M
30.26%
415
Backed (xStocks)
$866.0M
28.57%
191
bTech (bStocks)
$564.5M
18.62%
35
Perpetuals
The tokenized-equity perp landscape looks structurally different from the on-chain spot market — one venue has already mostly won. Across the 19 venues DefiLlama tracks for stock/index/ETF-referencing perpetuals, a single venue, trade.xyz on Hyperliquid, accounts for $93.5B — an 88.47% share.
Venue
30d Volume
Open Interest
30D Fees
Notes
trade.xyz
$93.55B
$2.90B
$23.39M
Hyperliquid HIP-3 deployer
Variational
$2.75B
$216.2M
$0
Standalone
Ondo (perp desk)
$2.37B
$35.7M
$415K
Permissioned, separate from Ondo Global Markets spot
Extended
$2.01B
$13.2M
$503K
Standalone
Trade.xyz isn't a standalone matching engine; it's a HIP-3 deployer running on Hyperliquid’s HyperCore infrastructure — builders can deploy their own perpetual markets on top of Hyperliquid under its HIP-3 framework. Trade.xyz's RWA flow alone equals 61.5% of all volume moving through Hyperliquid's derivatives engine over the same window ($118.4B against Hyperliquid's $192.5B 30-day total). RWA perps aren't a side product for Hyperliquid anymore, they're a majority of its printed volume.
This is very clearly a winner-take-most market. Beyond trade.xyz, the top five venues capture 96.86% of all 30 day volume, leaving no space for any other competitors.
Analyzing Product-Market Fit Across Both
To measure product-market fit, we will be examining both on-chain and perpetuals across the same set of metrics:
Name
What it measures
Methodology
Size
Growth over time and capital commitment
On-chain: active/on-chain market cap. 
Perps: open interest. 
Turnover
Is that capital moving, or just sitting there
On-chain: 30d volume ÷ market cap. 
Perps: 30d volume ÷ OI
Concentration
Is it broad-based, or a couple of players
On-chain: issuer/asset share 
 Perps: venue share 
Consistency
Is activity steady, or a few spike days doing all the work
Coefficient of variation on daily volume. 
Size - Growth Of The Asset Class 

On-chain tokenized equity market cap grew from $22.6 million in April 2025 to $2.42 billion by August 2026 — a 99x increase over 16 months. This incredible rate of change is only outmatched by the growth on the side of perpetual open interest, which grew from roughly $162.6 million in December 2025 to $3.25 billion by August 2026, a 20x increase in under eight months. However, when comparing the two during a common period — from the launch of perpetual open interest markets in December 2025 until now — perps grew by 20x, while on-chain equities only grew by 4.5x. 
Two things stand out from this apples-to-apples comparison:
Perps are growing faster than on-chain issuance, and have overtaken it in absolute size. Perp open interest started with less than a third of on-chain market cap and finished ~44% larger, in a shorter span of time.
On-chain growth is real but slower than the headline multi-year figure suggests. The ~99x figure spans the whole series from a very small April 2025 base (~$22.6M) — a base low enough that even modest dollar inflows produce large multiples. The 4.5x common-window figure is the fairer read of recent on-chain momentum next to perps.
While perps are growing faster than on-chain, one thing is clear: both are growing at astonishing rates that only products with PMF can exhibit.
Turnover - Capital Measurement Of Both Asset Classes

While size tells us how much capital each market has attracted, turnover tells us what that capital is actually doing — whether it's being actively traded or simply parked. We measure it on a consistent 30-day window for both sides (30-day volume ÷ active market cap on-chain, 30-day volume ÷ open interest for perps), scoped to the same universe (public equities, equity indices, and equity ETFs):
Metric
On-Chain
Perps
Total size (mcap / OI)
$2.36B
$3.26B
Total volume (30d)
$11.25B
$105.7B
Turnover ratio (native window)
4.66x/30d
32.39x/30d
Turnover ratio (daily-equivalent)
0.155x/day
1.08x/day
On a properly matched 30-day basis, perps turn over capital roughly 7x faster than on-chain tokenized equities per day. Despite holding a broadly comparable capital base (perp OI is only ~38% larger than on-chain active mcap - $3.26B vs $2.42B), perp venues moved $105.7B over 30 days, more than 9x the on-chain figure over the identical window.
However, the lack of turnover on-chain doesn’t necessarily mean the market is fake. The more likely answer is that the two markets are built for, and attracting demand for, genuinely different trading profiles.
Perps exist to be traded. A leveraged derivative position accrues funding costs and requires active management — margin rebalancing, rolled positions, funding paid. One can say that high turnover is the mechanical requirement of the product. The $111.4B moved in 30 days is unambiguous evidence that people are actively using these venues as trading instruments, at real scale.
On the other hand, on-chain tokenized equities exist to be held. A wrapped share is functionally closer to a brokerage position than a trading chip. And at 15.5%/day, while modest next to perps, is still decent. 
Concentration - Measuring The Playing Field
Metric
On-Chain Issuers
Perp Venues 
Entities in scope
21 issuers
19 venues
Top-1 share
30.26%
88.5%
Top-3 share
77.45%
96.9%
Both markets are concentrated, but perps are in an entirely different tier. On-chain issuance sits at the highly concentrated threshold, with the Top-3 gaining 77% market share. Yet the top perp venue has a market share that represents almost 90% of all volume traded via equity perps. This is near-total dominance. 
On-chain: Ondo Global Markets and Backed Assets hold 30.26% and 28.57% of scoped mcap respectively ($917.2M and $866M), with bTech (Binance) at 18.62% - three players covering 77.45% of the market.
Perps: trade-xyz alone holds 88% of open interest ($2.9B of the $3.26B total) - essentially one venue is the perp stock market by this measure.
Volume tells a similar but slightly different story. By 30-day volume (rather than size), perp concentration is nearly identical — Trade.xyz still does close to 90% of volume — so its dominance isn't just in open interest. Trade.xyz is where the trading happens. 
On-chain volume concentration is heavily two-sided. Of the issuer groups with any tracked 30-day volume, bTech Holdings and Ondo Global Markets alone account for 98.6% of the market (64.8% and 33.8% respectively), with everyone else combined barely registering. Notably, bTech is the smaller issuer by market cap but drives most of the trading activity, probably because it is on Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, and is featured as Binance’s on-chain stock solution. 
Consistency - Whether activity is steady, or spiked across a few key days
On-chain tokenized equity volumes are choppy from a day-to-day perspective, but the 7-day average line traces a clear staircase upward. The perp volume has the same overall shape, but much bigger swings — the bars are spikier and less even throughout. 
Overall, perps are lumpier day-to-day, but on-chain concentrates into fewer big days. Both markets tell the same underlying story: volume is trending up. The 7-day average on-chain volume roughly tripled from $90-120 million a day in March and April to $330-400 million by early August. Perps show an identical shape at roughly ten times the scale, with the 7-day average rising from $1-1.2 billion a day in March to a peak of $4.86 billion in July. This shows that it’s not a few spike days doing all the work but expansion with some volatility layered on top. 
Looking deeper, we can see that half of all perp volume happens in just 31 days out of 150. On-chain takes 38 days to accumulate half of all current on-chain volume. This draws similar conclusions to the concentration section: a few big pairs on both these platforms do outsize volume on certain days.
Concluding Thoughts 
For both on-chain and perpetual markets, all the data points to a few conclusions:
Perps are ahead of on-chain tokenized stocks on every measurable dimension of product-market fit. Perps are larger, faster, and spikier. On-chain is smaller, slower, and steadier. 
Activity is concentrated in a small number of specific issuers/products for both.
But ultimately, they both seem to have product-market fit, but at different scales. Both rails are real and growing; one faster than the other.
Across four metrics - size, turnover, concentration, and consistency, the data points the same way. Stock perps have more capital at work, that capital turns over faster, and the market is more active day to day. On-chain tokenized stocks are smaller, slower, and steadier. In both cases, you have users showing up and using something actively at scale - but the signal is much stronger for perps than for on-chain tokenized stocks. 
However, the difference can be boiled down to the fact that the two markets are not the same thing. A perpetual swap is a trading swap, while a tokenized stock is ownership infrastructure. The perp attracts a user who wants exposure and wants it now — leverage, 24/7 access, no custody of the underlying asset. The on-chain user, however, wants to hold an asset that can sit in a wallet, be used as collateral, or be redeemed. The former user exists at large in the financial markets, while the latter is still growing. 
The data supports this. The turnover numbers tell you that on-chain capital turns over ~4.6x every 30 days. Thus, it’s a user base that doesn’t want to trade, but rather is consistent with money that mints, sits, and gets used as exposure or collateral. Perp turnover numbers of ~32x every 30 days is consistent with behavior at a typical trading/speculation venue. So they both have different economic functions — low turnover for a holding instrument, high turnover from a leverage/speculation instrument. 
Both are growing,. But for perps, it is quite clear they’ve already reached product market fit. On-chain tokenized stocks, meanwhile, are seeing real, growing capital, but there’s some ways to go before we can conclude that they’ve enjoyed long-term anti-fragile adoption. , they have both shown incredible signs of success from where they began.

In the past year the industry has seen the growth of stocks on blockchain rails, both on spot and on perpetual DEXes. Tokenized equities' on-chain active market cap has gone from roughly $429M a year ago to $3.76B today — a ~9x increase.

These two verticals are new and growing fast, but as seen many times in crypto, growth in market capitalization and trading volume don’t necessarily correspond to long-term anti-fragile adoption. Do stocks on crypto rails have product-market fit so far?

Stocks On The Blockchain - Do They Have Product-Market Fit?

Gate's derivatives-heavy trading book sits on top of a reserve base that's both verifiably substantial onchain and, by the exchange's own broader accounting, comfortably over-collateralized. Here's how the two pictures fit together.
DefiLlama tracks 87 centralized exchanges, with a combined $31 billion in 24-hour spot volume and $128.5 billion in 24-hour derivatives volume — a total market of roughly $159.5 billion per day. On the reserve side, the same 87 exchanges collectively hold $212.9 billion in tracked "clean" reserves (balances excluding an exchange's own native token).
Trading activity is heavily concentrated at the top. Binance alone processes $50 billion in daily volume, about 30% of the entire tracked market. OKX does $17.7 billion, and Gate follows with a combined 24-hour volume at $9.5 billion.

Gate As a CEX — How It Stacks Up
As shown above, Gate ranks third among the top 15 tracked exchanges by 24-hour spot volume, sitting just behind OKX and ahead of Bybit:
Spot volume: 3.85 billion per day, 113% larger than Bitget(1.80B), and about 8% ahead of Bybit ($3.57B)
Spot share of the top-15 cohort: ~6.7% of the combined 24h spot volume across these 15 exchanges
Gate's position among the top three exchanges by spot volume reflects strong spot-market activity in its own right.
Gate's spot ranking above tells only part of the story. That same day, Gate's derivatives volume was $21.7 billion, roughly 5.6x its spot volume, bringing its combined spot + derivatives volume to 25.6 billion.On a combined basis,Gate trails Bybit (34.6B combined, ~26% larger) but still runs about 20% ahead of Bitget's combined volume ($21.3B). This confirms Gate's overall trading activity leans derivatives-heavy.
Exchange
30d Net Inflow
OKX
+$1.35B
Gate
+$308.1M
MEXC
+$24.5M
Bybit
-$91.0M
Bitget
-$116.0M
Binance
-$142.4M
On top of that, Gate's on-chain tracked reserves have seen sustained net accumulation over the past month: DefiLlama data shows Gate pulled in $308.1M in cumulative net inflows over the trailing 30 days, with positive inflow days outnumbering outflow days across that window. That places Gate 2nd of 6 major exchanges we tracked side-by-side (behind only OKX's $1.35B) — and notably ahead of Binance (-$142.4M), Bitget (-$116.0M), and Bybit (-$91.0M), all of which saw net outflows over the same period. 
Gate’s Reserve & Coverage Ratio 
From Defillama data, Gate currently holds $4.61 billion in onchain tracked reserves (this excludes their GT token), placing them seventh of the 87 exchanges DefiLlama tracks. This is substantial and puts them just behind Bitfinex. 
Asset
Amount
USD Value
BTC
19,942.19
$1.28B
GT (own token)
108.8M
$727.9M
WETH
357,212.65
$709.0M
USD1
370.7M
$370.5M
(stablecoin, unlabeled)
312.8M
$312.2M
DOGE
2.30B
$161.3M
stETH
61,599.82
$115.7M
USDT (spUSDT)
105.6M
$108.4M

From the table above, we can see that Gate’s on-chain reserves are well diversified and aren’t concentrated in 1 or 2 assets. In fact, they are comfortably collateralized and have their holdings in many different assets, which is good to see for an exchange. 
We would also like to highlight that Gate has reserves beyond what we can observe onchain. On July 27, 2026, Gate published a report that announced an overall reserve coverage ratio of 117%, spanning ~500 user asset types, including reserves of 26,775 BTC (24.2% over-collateralized) and 456,798 Ether (22.02% over-collateralized). 
This follows reports in June and January that detailed the following figures: 
On June 22, 2026, Gate claimed a coverage ratio of 115%, with 25,292 Bitcoin and $782 million in USD1
Asset
User Holdings
Platform Reserves
Coverage Ratio
Overall (all ~500 assets)
—
—
117%
BTC
21,557 BTC
26,775 BTC
124.2%
ETH
374,348 ETH
456,798 ETH
122.02%
GT (native token)
—
—
131.13%
XRP
—
—
116.5%
Stablecoins (USDT+USDC+USD1+GUSD)
1.336B tokens
1.59B tokens
118.97%
And so — although there seems to be a discrepancy between DefiLlama's centralized exchange data and Gate's own reserve reports, that's to be expected —there are subtle but important differences in how the organizations track reserves. Here's how to read them together:
The DefiLlama table measures only onchain wallet balances for addresses Gate has disclosed to us. Those balances are independently verifiable — we can see the Bitcoin, WETH, USD1, and other assets sitting in Gate's tracked wallets in real time. But it's necessarily a floor, not a ceiling: it only counts what's onchain and disclosed, so it structurally cannot capture off-chain custody, undisclosed wallets, or the full ~500-asset scope Gate reports internally.
Gate's Proof of Reserve reports measure a self-attested comparison of platform reserves against user liabilities, across roughly 500 asset types, something no blockchain explorer or onchain tracker (including DefiLlama) can independently verify, because liabilities (what Gate owes users) simply aren't an onchain-observable fact. Only the exchange itself knows that number.
This is why Gate's self-reported total reserve figures run meaningfully ahead of DefiLlama's onchain read. The January report claims $9.4 billion in total reserves, while DefiLlama reports just $4.6 billion in clean reserves. The two numbers are measuring different parameters — DefiLlama for the verifiable, onchain floor, and Gate’s reports for a broader total that includes offchain assets and custody arrangements. 
Taken together, the two data sets are complementary rather than competing. DefiLlama independently confirms that Gate's disclosed onchain reserves are real, substantial, and well-diversified. No single asset dominates the tracked balance sheet, and Bitcoin (the largest holding) makes up just 23.1% of onchain tracked value. 
Gate then supplements that with its own report, which includes its full, undisclosed reserve base and its liabilities. This fuller picture shows that coverage runs comfortably above 100% across every major asset category, according to Gate. The company’s latest report also shows a particularly comfortable reserve base for the two largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (124.2%) and Ether (122.02%).
Conclusion
Gate's position in the CEX landscape is best understood as two distinct but complementary pictures. On the trading side, Gate is a genuine top-tier player. That's a derivatives-heavy franchise punching above its overall size, and one of the strongest, most defensible data points in Gate's favor.
On the reserves side, the picture is solid. Gate’s reserves are genuinely diversified, spread across many distinct tracked assets with no single holding dominating the balance sheet. Bitcoin, the largest position, is only 23.1% of the total. On top of that, with a self-reported reserve coverage ratio that has stayed persistently above the 100% safety benchmark across its last three published reports, and with every major asset category—BTC, ETH, GT, stablecoins—individually over-collateralized, they have sound reserves. 
Thus, Gate is a top exchange backed by a substantial, diversified reserve base that extends into comfortable over-collateralization across its full ~500-asset reserve program. They are substantial and well-run, fully covered with room to spare.

Gate's derivatives-heavy trading book sits on top of a reserve base that's both verifiably substantial onchain and, by the exchange's own broader accounting, comfortably over-collateralized. Here's how the two pictures fit together.

Inside Gate’s Reserve Position: Diversified & Comfortably Over-Collateralized

Hyperliquid

In October 2025, Hyperliquid activated HIP-3, opening the platform to permissionless RWA Markets. Our first report found these markets pulled in real new users, 169,514 wallets, 31.7% of all new wallets between January and June 2026, but not significant revenue: RWA-first wallets generated just 8.3% of new-user fees, since they stayed confined to RWA Markets while Other-first wallets showed strong volume performance on both markets.
That left an open question: do these newly onboarded users actually stay on the platform and trade frequently? Asked simply, is retention good on both markets and for both cohorts? This follow-up uses two new datasets that track, at the wallet level, the number of active days per market and per cohort, and the time it takes wallets to cross over. The goal is to assess how each cohort behaves in its own market versus the other.
The key insight: engagement stays low for both cohorts, with RWA-first less active than Other-first, and the two cohorts remaining largely segregated by entry market, with one exception, a newly derived cohort of frequent, market-agnostic traders.
Quick definitions: RWA Markets cover the HIP-3 builder-deployed markets (tokenized equities, indices, commodities). Other Markets are everything else, mainly crypto perpetuals. RWA-first and Other-first classify a wallet by the market type of its first trade on Hyperliquid, same methodology as the first report.
Engagement plateaus, and RWA-first lags Other-first
If RWA-first and Other-first wallets kept trading at the pace they arrived at, weekly active wallets should be climbing alongside the cumulative base. That's not what the data shows. Cumulative wallets grew 82.6% for RWA-first (92,830 to 169,514) and 93.3% for Other-first (188,732 to 364,781) between April and June, while weekly active wallets barely moved: RWA-first stayed between 7,000 and 12,000, Other-first between 20,000 and 33,000. 
Looking at the two cohorts, if we measure daily active wallets over cumulative wallets on their own market, RWA-first averages 5.0% through the April-June window against 8.1% for Other-first. RWA traders are roughly 38% less active than Other-first traders on their respective home markets, something we hinted at in the first report.
This is confirmed by the trading frequency: nearly half of RWA-first wallets (47.4%) traded on the RWA Markets exactly once and never came back, and 68.0% traded three days or fewer over the full six-month window. Other-first wallets show more staying power: around one third (34.7%) traded once, 59.0% traded three days or fewer. And looking at high-frequency traders leads to a similar conclusion: of the roughly 13,000 wallets that traded nearly twice a week (51+ active days on their market), 10,978 were Other-first wallets (3.0% of the cohort), and 2,023 were RWA-first wallets (1.2% of the cohort).
RWA-first wallets trade less often, stick around for fewer days, and make up a smaller share of the platform's most active users. 
Crossing is rare but is immediate when it happens
If Other-first is the more active cohort, it should also be the more adventurous one, crossing into RWA Markets more often than RWA-first crosses into Other Markets. That's not what the data shows. 80.9% of RWA-first wallets and 82.0% of Other-first wallets have never touched the Other Markets at all, an almost identical split. 
When we take a look at the wallets that do cross, we can note that the move happens fast: 31.4% of RWA-first and 32.6% of Other-first crossers do it the same day as their first trade, and 59.3% (RWA-first) and 53.5% (Other-first) cross within three days. This means that crossing is not a barrier and confirms what is said above: the crossers are global traders that are more asset-agnostic.
The overall takeaway is that most traders are asset specific: TradFi traders trade TradFi, crypto traders trade crypto. The ones who cross show a different pattern: they are more asset agnostic, and the fact they cross within days rather than weeks suggests they don't need specific events or incentives to get on the Other Markets.
Other first crossers carry outsized weight on the opposite market 
With a near-identical crossover rate, we might assume both cohorts weigh the same on the market they cross into but that assumption ignores absolute size. Other-first's 65,834 crossers alone equal 38.8% of RWA-first's entire cohort (169,514), while RWA-first's 32,319 crossers amount to just 8.9% of Other-first's cohort (364,781). In other words, the Other-first wallets crossing into RWA Markets represent a meaningful chunk of that market's user base. But are these wallets active enough to matter?
Looking at how crossers distribute across activity levels confirms they are. Other-first makes up between 30% and 40% of RWA Markets's wallets in every active-day bucket (except the first). Conversely, RWA-first's presence on Other Markets is low, staying between 5% and 11% across every bucket. The tie to the first report is direct: we found that Other-first generated roughly 40% of trading volume on RWA Markets, and that volume comes from broad participation across the cohort, not a handful of big wallets.
The busiest traders go fully agnostic
Staying focused on the crossers, frequency of trading has something interesting to tell us: as trading activity rises, so does the agnostic behavior of participants, and this holds in both cohorts.
As displayed clearly in the charts, the more a cohort trades on its market, the more it trades on the other one. Among RWA-first crossers who trade 51+ days on RWA market, 58.2% also trade 20+ days on Other Markets, and among Other-first crossers who trade 51+ days on Other Markets, 53.8% also trade 11+ days on RWA Markets. That pattern reverses almost completely at low frequency.
The takeaway is that the most frequent traders are asset agnostic and trade across both markets, leading to the definition of a third, smaller cohort in our dataset: the Frequent Traders who treat RWA and crypto as just assets, without real preferences.

Conclusion
Retention stays low across the board, and RWA-first lags Other-first on every measure, number of daily active wallets, engagement rate and trading frequency. Most wallets in both cohorts, over 80%, never touch the market they didn't enter through, and the ones that do decide within days, without the need of incentives or market events.
But those crossers matter more than their share suggests. Because Other-first is more than twice the size of RWA-first, its 65,834 crossers alone equal 38.8% of RWA-first's entire cohort, a broad enough footprint to explain the volume weight the first report found on RWA Markets. And as we move into the higher end of the trading-activity spectrum, the concept of RWA-first and Other-first makes less and less sense, leading to the finding of a third, smaller cohort composed of high-frequency traders who treat RWA and crypto as one and the same.
Three cohorts, not two, is the headline here: RWA-first and Other-first traders who stay largely market-specific, and a frequent-trading core that's genuinely asset agnostic. The next step is looking at what that core actually trades, position size, duration, and leverage, to see whether it's also the most valuable one.
Methodology: This piece uses the same RWA-First and Other-First cohorts and the same January 1 to June 30, 2026 window as the first report, built from two new datasets: daily active wallet counts by cohort and market, and a wallet-level table tracking active days on each market and the date of first crossover, where applicable. Data provided by Llama Eden.

If RWA-first and Other-first wallets kept trading at the pace they arrived at, weekly active wallets should be climbing alongside the cumulative base. That's not what the data shows.

Hyperliquid and the RWA retention question: what the data shows

For years, financial executives touted the revolutionary potential of tokenized equities. While many remained cautious about cryptocurrencies, they recognized that blockchain infrastructure could transform how stocks and bonds are traded. For much of that time, widespread adoption always seemed just over the horizon. Suddenly, it’s at our doorstep. 
The value of all tokenized equities has grown 140% in 2026, to more than $1.9 billion, according to DefiLlama data. Bitget, Binance, Kraken, Ondo, and Bybit have launched tokenized equity products. The momentum extends beyond crypto-native platforms. Robinhood recently launched its own blockchain for tokenized real-world assets, highlighting growing interest from traditional finance firms.
In our latest report, we take a look at Bitget’s Stocks 2.0, a product suite that offers users two ways of gaining exposure to both private and publicly listed companies, including companies such as SpaceX and Nvidia. 
In the report, our analysis found that Bitget’s tokenized equities products feature some of the tightest spreads and deepest liquidity in the market, which aligns with the strong trading activity observed since launch.
The traditional option 
Bitget Stocks 2.0 introduced two products: Bitget Stock+ and Reality rTokens. 
The former offers conventional ownership in company equity. Users remain in the Bitget app, but execution, clearing, settlement, and custody of the securities are handled by traditional financial institutions. 
Securities purchased through Stock+ are held in their own account and are not issued as onchain tokens. As such, they cannot be withdrawn to a crypto wallet or used in the broader DeFi ecosystem. They do, however, confer direct ownership of company shares, as well as the right to any dividends or participation in shareholder votes. 
Stock+ serves users looking for a traditional brokerage experience, while Reality rTokens target crypto-native investors seeking onchain exposure. 
rTokens’ retail rush 
Bitget’s Reality rTokens are, as their name implies, tokenized equities. Here’s how they work. 
Bitget’s Reality Protocol handles the minting and burning of rTokens. It also maintains the relationship between the supply of rTokens and the securities they represent, which are held in segregated reserve accounts. Finally, the protocol distributes dividends and adjusts user balances based on actions taken at the corporate level, such as stock splits or reverse splits. 
To be sure, rTokens have their drawbacks. Holders are not registered owners of the underlying securities. That means holders have no voting rights, among other things. They are, however, able to withdraw their tokens to crypto wallets and use them across DeFi applications such as lending markets, liquidity pools, and more. It also means they can be minted or redeemed 24 hours a day, five days a week. Secondary trading on Bitget is available 24/7. 
Bitget’s rTokens have generated significant momentum since their launch. Between June 2 and July 19, rToken spot markets saw $1.16 billion in cumulative trading volume. The increase wasn’t limited to the initial launch period. The average daily trading volume in June was $17.9 million. Through the first 19 days of July, it was $33.8 million. 
The overwhelming majority of that volume has come from retail traders. Individual users accounted for $1.1 billion, or 95%, of cumulative spot volume. Their average trade size was just $422. These figures reflect the promise of tokenization, which allows for fractionalization of stocks that might otherwise be too expensive for a small-dollar investor to purchase. 
Thus far, users have shown interest in just a handful of stocks, with 10 markets accounting for 83% of spot volume. Semiconductor tokens accounted for just under half of spot volume, reflecting strong demand for AI-related equity exposure. Other tech companies, such as SpaceX and Tesla, accounted for another 34%. 
An apples-to-apples comparison of five markets across five separate issuers of tokenized equities, Bitget, Bybit, Binance, Kraken, and Ondo, shows that Bitget recorded some of the tightest bid-ask spreads and deepest order-book liquidity among the platforms analyzed.
To read the rest of our analysis, including how Bitget’s real-world asset perpetuals fare against the competition, read our report here.

Bitget’s tokenized equities products feature some of the tightest spreads and deepest liquidity in the market, which aligns with the strong trading activity observed since launch.

Bitget's Tokenized Stocks Gain Traction as Retail Demand Accelerates

DefiLlama

NEW YORK, August 5, 2026 — Crypto traders and analysts can now evaluate market-maker performance the same way they evaluate volume, TVL, and fees. Forgd, a Web3 investment bank and advisory platform, today announced that its Market Maker Leaderboard is live on DefiLlama, bringing standardized market-maker performance data to one of crypto's most widely used analytics platforms.
The leaderboard ranks leading crypto market makers, the firms whose constant buying and selling keeps tokens tradable, on standardized measures of pricing, market depth, reliability, and execution quality. How well these firms do their job affects every trade, yet until now there's been no way to check their track record.
"Crypto traders already look at volume, liquidity, TVL, unlocks, fees, and other market indicators," said Shane Molidor, Founder and CEO of Forgd. "Market-maker quality is another indicator that should be closely analyzed. You can't accurately judge a token's liquidity without understanding who's providing it, and how well they perform.”
What traders and analysts can do with the data
Because the leaderboard lives inside DefiLlama and other widely used analytics platforms, users can fold market-maker quality directly into their existing workflows, including:
Token research — check whether a token's liquidity is backed by firms with a strong execution record before taking a position
Liquidity and risk analysis — distinguish durable liquidity from headline volume, and flag markets likely to break down under stress
Venue comparison — see how the same firms perform across different exchanges and market environments
“Volume alone does not tell you whether a market has healthy, reliable liquidity,” said Ryan Celaj, Head of Research at DefiLlama. “Bringing Forgd’s market-maker performance data into DefiLlama gives traders another practical signal for evaluating execution quality and market resilience, directly within the research workflow they already use.”
Behind the data
The leaderboard is powered by data from more than 500 token projects and 35 market-making firms that use Forgd's tools to monitor liquidity across live engagements — a standardized record of how firms have performed across different tokens, venues, and market conditions. Forgd first introduced the leaderboard in May 2026 as a tool for token projects evaluating market makers; the DefiLlama integration extends that same data to the broader market.
The integration is part of Forgd's ongoing effort to make crypto market structure more transparent.
About Forgd
Forgd is a Web3 investment bank and advisory platform equipping blockchain projects with tools for tokenomics design, market-maker engagement, liquidity monitoring, and exchange listing support. With options for bespoke advisory services and free self-service products, Forgd helps token projects design, launch, and manage healthier markets. New projects can join for free at Forgd.com.
About DefiLlama
DefiLlama is the largest open-source data platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) and the broader onchain economy, tracking key metrics across thousands of protocols and chains. Its coverage spans stablecoins, real-world assets, blockchains, yields, and traditional finance, built on an open-source, publicly auditable methodology that gives researchers, traders, institutions, and journalists a neutral source of truth for the crypto industry. Beyond its free core dashboards, DefiLlama offers a growing suite of products, including LlamaAI, its AI-powered data assistant, the DefiLlama Mobile App, and DefiLlama Pro, a subscription tier with advanced dashboards and premium tools. Explore the data for free at defillama.com.

Forgd, a Web3 investment bank and advisory platform, today announced that its Market Maker Leaderboard is live on DefiLlama, bringing standardized market-maker performance data to one of crypto's most widely used analytics platforms.

Traders and analysts can now see how the firms behind a token's liquidity actually perform, from inside the platform they already use every day

Forgd's Market Maker Leaderboard Is Now Live on DefiLlama, Offering Traders a New Source of Alpha

Tokenization makes stocks more accessible, more liquid, and in principle tradable 24/7, from anywhere. Traditional exchanges still close on schedule, but the venues distributing tokenized versions of the same stocks don't have to. The question: who actually shows up when Wall Street doesn't?
As of August 2, roughly six weeks after launch, Binance's bStocks have already crossed $500M in AUM. On top, bStocks also recorded $2B in trading volume over a single weekend, a signal worth stress-testing against real usage data. In this article, we compare Binance's bStocks, Kraken's xStocks, and Ondo's Global Markets as they represent three distinct tokenized-stock models while offering consistent hourly volume data. Using six weeks of DeFiLlama data, from June 14 to August 2 , 2026, we examine how trading volume shifts between weekday market hours, weekday off-hours, and weekends, whether one platform takes the lead once traditional markets close, and what these patterns reveal about its users.
Weekdays - A Market That Never Fully Closes
The weekday hourly profile confirms the basic premise: trading doesn't stop when the traditional market does, and tokenized venues hold their promise of round-the-clock access. However, the profile isn't uniform. Activity clusters tightly around the moment TradFi opens, with volume across all three venues surging between 13:00 and 15:00 UTC and slowly decreasing until the market closes.
Visually, it's tempting to conclude that most of the volume concentrates during the opening hours. However, that picture needs nuance. If we count 13:00-20:00 UTC as TradFi's opening hours, 49% of weekday volume falls in those 7 hours. But the remaining 51% still happens off hours. That's significant, and it says something specific: traders are here round the clock, and TradFi's trading hours function as a constraint. In other words, traders have to adapt around the opening hours.
As 24/7 access becomes standard across more venues and more tickers, that concentration should fade. The more normal it becomes to trade a tokenized stock outside market hours, the less trading should cluster around the one moment TradFi happens to be open.
By venue, Binance's lead holds through the entire day, ranging from 64% to 86% of combined volume in any given hour. But the pattern underneath is clear: Binance's dominance actually increases during off-market hours and is strongest over the weekend. 
Off-market hours, Binance averages 82% of volume, against 15.2% for Ondo and 2.8% for Kraken. During market hours, Binance’s share moderates to 69%, while Ondo rises to 27% and Kraken to 4.0%.
That gap points to Ondo and Kraken being relatively more active while the underlying market is live. Two main reasons can explain this. First, user typology: Binance leans more retail while Ondo is more institutional. Second, the structural layer or how each product is actually built and what it relies on to function.
The products may look similar on paper, but their liquidity models are fundamentally different. bStocks are converted 1:1 from Binance Stocks positions and trade directly on Binance’s order book. That liquidity also extends to BNB Chain, creating a bridge between CeFi and DeFi positions, particularly interesting for market makers. xStocks, by contrast, rely on pre-funded liquidity pools. These pools can become thinner once the underlying market closes. Ondo follows another model: tokens are minted and redeemed against live trades on NASDAQ and the NYSE. As a result, its liquidity is closely tied to US market hours. These structural differences help explain why some venues perform better outside traditional trading hours and especially on weekends.
Weekends - How Token Design Sets The Dominance
Weekend trading is still a small slice of the total, about 4.3% of combined volume across the sample. That's likely a floor rather than a ceiling: as more venues and more tickers get built for continuous trading, weekend share could grow from here.
Interestingly, the pattern within the weekend is relatively flat. Volume stays mostly in the $380K-$2.04M range across the sample, with a notable dip in activity on Saturday evening and again on Sunday evening, both in UTC. It only picks back up as Sunday evening turns into the Asian start of the week, ahead of Monday. 
Across the roughly 350 weekend hours in the sample, Binance holds somewhere between 85% and 97% of combined volume in nearly every one of them, averaging 92.8%. Kraken averages just 3.24%, spiking as high as 50.4% in a handful of isolated hours. Ondo trails further still, averaging 3.93% and dropping to zero in some hours entirely.
The main factor explaining this is the same structural element mentioned earlier, and in the end it comes down to where the liquidity is actually sourced from. Ondo's tokens are minted and burned against an actual Nasdaq trade happening in real time, so once Nasdaq shuts for the weekend, there's no live transaction to mint or burn against, though that's starting to change: Ondo enabled 24/7 minting and redemption for six of its assets in late June. Kraken's xStocks trade against pre-funded liquidity pools rather than a live link to the exchange, and only 10 of its 141 tickers are enabled for weekend trading. As for Binance, once a bStock is converted, it can be traded on Binance’s own centralized order book, the same infrastructure that already runs every other asset on the exchange at any hour, and on-chain. In other words, it doesn't rely on a pool that can run dry, or a mechanism that needs traditional markets to be awake to function.
On the surface, these figures could be read as just one venue accumulating more liquidity. But they point to something more important: price discovery increasingly happening on Binance rather than elsewhere. Indeed, the venue holding the deepest, most continuous order book during the hours nobody else is trading isn't just capturing volume, it's becoming the place where the market actually finds its price.
Conclusion
Two things stand out from the full-period view. Raw volume splits almost evenly between opening hours and weekday off-hours, 46.2% against 48.0%, with weekend trading a small 5.8% slice on top. But those weekday periods aren't the same size, opening hours are a fraction of the week's hours compared to nights, and normalized for that, they account for 66.0% of volume-per-hour against 28.2% for weekday off-hours. In other words, TradFi's operating hours still set the tempo today, though that grip should loosen as adoption spreads across time zones and 24/7 access becomes the norm rather than the exception.
By venue, Binance leads across every segment, and its lead grows in off-hours: 69.0% during market hours, 82.0% overnight, 94.4% on weekends. Ondo moves in the opposite direction, from 27.0% down to 15.2% and then to just 3.7%, a trajectory that tracks almost exactly with how much live Nasdaq activity its mechanism has to work with. Kraken barely moves at all, hovering between 1.9% and 4.0% regardless of the segment, which suggests its volume is small enough in absolute terms that session timing isn't really the constraint, distribution and catalog coverage are.
As of now, Binance bStocks end up looking like the product that best matches two things at once: how crypto-native users already trade, i.e., continuously, and what tokenization was supposed to deliver in the first place, i.e., deep liquidity and access anytime, anywhere.
Methodology: hourly and daily USD trading volume for Binance bStocks, Kraken xStocks, and Ondo Global Markets, June 14 to August 2, 2026 (UTC). bStocks volume is measured on Binance (56 assets), Kraken’s xStocks volume on Kraken (141 assets), and Ondo volume on the Ondo Global Markets platform (400+ assets). Market hours are defined as NYSE regular sessions, 13:30-20:00 UTC (considered 13:00-20:00 UTC in the analysis), weekdays. Data extracted by the DeFiLlama team.
Raw data: https://gist.github.com/FelixBruguera/7d10c40fc0cd8a885e7c0d82dd2a09a2

Tokenization makes stocks more accessible, more liquid, and in principle tradable 24/7, from anywhere. Traditional exchanges still close on schedule, but the venues distributing tokenized versions of the same stocks don't have to. The question: who actually shows up when Wall Street doesn't?

bStocks After Hours: Who is Capturing Liquidity When Markets Close?

Hylo Leveraged SOL

This research provides a clear, balanced breakdown of Hylo’s xSOL leveraged token for the general public. It examines the genuine advantages (no liquidation risk and no continuous funding fees) while transparently showing the actual costs and trade-offs, including dynamic mint/redeem fees, volatility decay, variable leverage, and other risks. The goal is to help readers understand whether xSOL truly delivers “3x SOL without hidden costs” or if there are important realities every investor should know before using it.
Hylo markets its xSOL token on two guarantees: no liquidation and no funding rate. And so far this holds true, as nobody holding xSOL has ever been forced out of a position, and nobody pays an ongoing fee to hold leveraged SOL exposure the way they would on a perpetual exchange.
But no liquidation doesn't mean no loss. Between October 2025 and June 2026, under Hylo's first version, xSOL lost nearly all of its value, even though SOL itself, the asset it's meant to track with leverage, fell by a much smaller amount. Meanwhile, hyUSD, the stablecoin this whole system exists to protect, never lost its dollar peg through any of it, another outcome promised by the protocol.
That gap is the actual subject of this piece. If nobody was liquidated despite the leverage, where did the extra loss go, and who ended up paying for it? The short answer is dilution, and we will dig into why by revisiting the stress event that happened in the period mentioned above. Then we'll assess whether V2 actually changes things and limits or reduces that risk. But before any of that, let's briefly revisit how Hylo works under the hood.
Under the hood: the promise, and what it takes to keep it
No leverage, no funding rate…
Hylo's basic principle is as follows: take one pool of staked SOL, and split it into two claims on that pool, ranked. One claim, hyUSD, sits first in line and is always worth exactly $1, as long as there's enough value in the pool to cover it. The other claim, xSOL, gets whatever is left over, no ceiling, no floor, all of the pool's ups and downs land here. That's the entire mechanism.
To make things more tangible, here is a concrete example: say the pool holds $150 of staked SOL. $100 of that backs hyUSD, fixed at $1 a token, while the remaining $50 belongs to xSOL. If SOL rises 33%, the pool grows to $200. hyUSD still only needs its $100, so the remaining $100 becomes xSOL's new total value. That means on a 33% SOL move, xSOL's value doubled, a 100% price appreciation, three times the size of SOL's own move. On the opposite side, if SOL falls and the pool drops to $100, hyUSD still needs its $100, and xSOL is left with nothing. The ratio itself, three times the swing either way, is where "3x leverage" comes from.
Because leverage comes from the pool's composition, not borrowed money, there's nothing to force-close. xSOL holders don't owe anyone anything, they just hold a claim that can shrink toward zero in a bad enough crash, or grow substantially if the market appreciates.
The ‘no funding rate’ part comes from the underlying collateral itself. Staked SOL earns real staking rewards just by existing, roughly 7 to 8% a year. That yield flows through the system and effectively pays for the arrangement, so nobody needs to charge xSOL holders an ongoing fee.
…but proper risk management is still required
None of this holds together on its own, as the pool needs active management to stay near that target, and Hylo handles that in two layers.
The first layer is pricing. To mint hyUSD, users deposit collateral (SOL, BTC, or USDC) into the pool of their choice and receive hyUSD in return. Redemption reverses this process: hyUSD is burned, allowing users to withdraw collateral from a selected pool. Rather than applying fixed fees, Hylo adjusts pricing dynamically according to each pool’s condition. Minting is cheaper in healthier pools, while redemption is cheaper from pools experiencing greater stress. This fee structure creates economic incentives that direct user activity toward restoring balance across the system.
If the Collateral Ratio (CR) for a pool, defined as the total value of the pool divided by what hyUSD needs to stay whole, drifts outside the healthy range, roughly 136% (or 3.8x leverage) to 167% (or 2.5x leverage), a second layer kicks in. The protocol trades directly against its USDC reserve, buying collateral back when CR runs high to re-lever the pool, selling collateral into USDC when CR runs low to de-lever it. Pricing on these trades starts in the protocol's favor and shifts toward the trader as CR nears the edges of that range, which is what pulls arbitrageurs in to help push things back to center. 
This is where xSOL holders incur a real cost: selling collateral for USDC during periods of stress permanently reduces the SOL exposure backing each token and a full recovery in SOL’s price may not restore the position to its previous state.
Last but not least, in the true worst case, if a pool is still short on backing after all of that, the Earn Pool's own hyUSD gets burned to make up the difference and restore full backing. That's a direct cost to Earn Pool depositors, not to xSOL holders, and falls outside the scope of this report.
Put to the test: what happened to Hylo's first version
An important note before diving into the case study: everything below describes Hylo's first version, not the current one. V1 supported a single collateral asset, SOL, with no isolation between markets, no USDC pool, and no Earn Pool. Instead of the USDC-based rebalancing described above, the protocol relied on the Stability Pool and defended the peg through conversion of hyUSD to xSOL rather than by selling collateral. That difference matters as this mechanism created the dilution xSOL holders faced, which is the indirect cost of having no funding fee and no liquidation.
The peg held, exactly as promised…
Hylo's first version ran for about eight months on a single SOL pool before it hit a real crash. Between October 2025 and June 2026, SOL fell around 69% from its highs. Through all of that, hyUSD never lost its dollar peg and the stablecoin side of this system got exactly what was promised, at every point.
However, xSOL holders got a very different outcome. Over that same window, xSOL lost close to all of its value, down about 99% from its October high. This isn't really a surprise given the example from the last section: a 33% SOL drop is exactly the point where xSOL's claim hits zero and the pool's collateral ratio falls to exactly 100%.
But with a 69% drop in SOL price, the pool alone can no longer fully back hyUSD without help. And as hyUSD held its peg the whole time, even while the pool's own collateral was worth far less than what was needed to back it fully, the natural question that comes is “who paid for it?”.  And the answer is xSOL holders through a dilution mechanism that only experienced traders might have identified.
…but someone still had to pay for that
As Hylo’s collateral ratio declined, V1’s defense mechanism was activated to protect the hyUSD peg. This mechanism differed structurally from the USDC-based rebalancing system used in V2 and expanded xSOL’s supply through two distinct channels. The first was minting at net asset value (NAV): users could deposit fresh SOL and receive newly issued xSOL priced according to the pool’s actual per-token value at the time of minting. The second was the Stability Pool conversion mechanism, which automatically burned staked hyUSD and issued new xSOL in its place once the collateral ratio fell below a specified threshold. Together, these mechanisms caused xSOL’s supply to increase approximately 28x over the period, from around 8.4 million tokens to 235 million.
Roughly 126 million of the new tokens came from ordinary buying: someone deposits fresh SOL, the pool genuinely grows, and new xSOL mints against that deposit at the prevailing NAV. However, the depressed NAV meant that each dollar of new capital received significantly more xSOL than it would have before the crash. Although the issuance price was fair relative to the pool’s value at the time, it substantially expanded the token supply and for existing holders, this created dilution: any subsequent recovery in the pool’s value would be distributed across a much larger number of xSOL tokens.
The remaining 43% came from Stability Pool conversions. Unlike the standard minting described above, this process introduced no fresh capital into the system. Instead, the protocol burned hyUSD deposited in the Stability Pool and issued xSOL in exchange, reallocating collateral already held within the protocol.
In both cases, xSOL issuance served the same broader objective: absorbing pressure from hyUSD and helping preserve its peg. However, this protection came at a significant cost to existing xSOL holders. As the token supply grew, each existing xSOL represented a smaller share of the collateral pool and any recovery would therefore be spread across many more tokens.
What it would take to get back to even
With that much new supply in circulation, one question follows naturally: what would SOL actually need to do for xSOL to see $1 again?
The answer, based on the pool's state as of the July 2026 snapshot, is a SOL price somewhere between roughly $630 and $719 assuming xSOL supply stays in a similar range. That's a move of 8.3x to 9.5x from where SOL was actually trading at the time, and still way above SOL's previous all-time high.
That range exists because of the re-conversion: above a healthy 150% collateral ratio, tokens sitting in the Stability Pool get gradually converted back into hyUSD, shrinking xSOL's supply as things improve. So far, about 79 million xSOL, roughly a third of June's supply, has already been reconverted back into hyUSD and that's what pulled the frozen-state breakeven down from initially $1,024 in June, right after the event, to $719 today.
Either way, the conclusion is the same: SOL simply recovering isn't enough anymore. xSOL needs SOL to blow past its old all-time high before an early holder sees their money back.
Is V2 a real change in the risk?
V2 touched almost every part of the system, but does that mean the risk has changed for xSOL holders?
Multi-asset collateral
Splitting the system into independent pools — SOL, BTC, and more planned — means a crash in one no longer drags the others down with it. Look closely at what that actually protects, though, and it's hyUSD's aggregate backing, not xSOL's risk. Each pool's own health is still calculated locally, so a SOL crash puts exactly the same pressure on the SOL pool, and on xSOL holders, regardless of how healthy a BTC pool sits next to it. 
The USDC pool
The new USDC pool allows users to mint and redeem hyUSD directly against USDC. As a result, hyUSD growth no longer depends as heavily on demand for SOL, as it did under V1. It also gives arbitrageurs a permanent, liquid venue through which they can rebalance the system, rather than forcing them to wait for occasional trading opportunities. This should make the hyUSD peg more resilient.
For xSOL holders, however, the main risk appears when the protocol sells SOL for USDC during periods of stress to keep the collateral ratio within an acceptable range. Once conditions improve, the protocol may use that USDC to buy SOL back. But because the original sale took place after SOL had already declined, the proceeds may not be enough to repurchase the same amount of SOL if the market subsequently recovers. The protocol therefore rebuilds only part of the original SOL exposure, meaning that each xSOL may remain backed by less SOL than before the stress event.
The Earn Pool
hyUSD holders can deposit into the Earn Pool to earn yield, staking rewards, BTC borrow-rate revenue, and fee income, receiving eHYUSD as a receipt.
Under V1, this pool, then called the Stability Pool, doubled as Hylo's backstop: when collateral ran short, deposits got converted into freshly minted xSOL to defend the peg. That's where roughly 43% of V1's xSOL dilution came from.
V2's Earn Pool is now delta-neutral instead. In the true worst case, the protocol burns some of its hyUSD outright rather than converting it into xSOL, a bounded loss for depositors instead of a directional bet.
For xSOL holders, that closes off a real source of dilution: no new tokens get minted this way anymore.
hyUSD is the protocol's first-class citizen, xSOL pays the difference
No liquidation and no funding rate are both real and structurally true. However, they come with a hidden cost that not all participants might have understood. This one is dilution.
The case study showed it very well. In Hylo's first version, new xSOL were minted to maintain the collateral ratio and protect the peg for stablecoin holders. The minting was so aggressive that supply grew 28x, and with roughly 43% of that new supply coming from Stability Pool conversions, the recovery price now sits around $630 to $719.
V2 improves the situation, but it doesn’t fully eliminate the risk for xSOL holders. The Earn Pool (Stability Pool redesign) removes one major source of dilution: during periods of stress, stablecoin deposits are no longer converted into fresh xSOL. Instead, the protocol can sell collateral for USDC to support a stressed pool. This doesn’t increase the xSOL supply, but it reduces the amount of SOL backing each token with no guarantee of recovery due to price volatility. As for the second dilution channel, it remains unchanged: during stress events, users can still mint xSOL at NAV by depositing fresh capital. When NAV is depressed, the same amount of capital receives more xSOL, expanding the supply and reducing existing holders’ share of any future recovery, just as it did under V1.
In the end, the system protects stablecoin holders by transferring the cost of that stability to xSOL holders. No liquidation is the promise and dilution is how xSOL holders pay for it.

Hylo markets its xSOL token on two guarantees: no liquidation and no funding rate. And so far this holds true, as nobody holding xSOL has ever been forced out of a position, and nobody pays an ongoing fee to hold leveraged SOL exposure the way they would on a perpetual exchange.

Hylo xSOL: No Liquidation, No Funding - But What Are the Real Costs?

When Hyperliquid activated HIP-3 in October 2025, it made a structural bet. By allowing any qualified builder to deploy a permissionless perpetual market on HyperCore (staking 500,000 HYPE worth $3.5M at the time of writing) the protocol effectively handed listing decisions to the market itself. The context matters: centralized exchanges have spent the past two years racing to absorb RWA flow, listing tokenized equities, indices, and commodities as fast as regulation allows. Hyperliquid's answer was different, make the listing layer permissionless and let builders do it onchain, 24/7, without approval cycles.
The question that follows isn't whether new asset classes would appear but whether they'd pull in genuinely new users and, if so, whether those users would matter to the platform's revenue. 
To shed light on this topic, we used in-house data to answer two questions directly. First, does opening Hyperliquid to RWA Markets attract net new users, or does it mostly give existing traders something else to trade? Second, do those RWA-First users generate significant volume and fees, or does the revenue continue to come from the crypto-native base regardless?
RWA Markets attracted 169K new wallets
To assess whether RWA Markets are attracting new users to Hyperliquid, we identified every wallet whose first-ever trade on the platform occurred on a HIP-3 RWA Market on or after January 1, 2026, referred to as RWA-First wallets. The remaining new wallets, those who entered through Other Markets (defined as crypto perpetuals or any non-RWA Market) are referred to as Other-First wallets. Wallets with any prior trading activity on Hyperliquid, or any USDC deposit into the Arbitrum bridge before that date, were excluded. 
This leaves a cohort of 534,362 new wallets active between January and June 2026. Among them, 169,514 wallets, representing 31.7% of all new wallets, executed their first trade on an RWA Market.
RWA-First onboarding remained relatively modest at the beginning of the year before accelerating from February onwards. Daily inflows generally ranged between 300 and 700 new wallets, punctuated by several distinct onboarding waves linked to major product launches and macro-driven trading opportunities.
The largest event occurred in mid-March following TradeXYZ's launch of the S&P 500 perpetual under an official S&P Dow Jones Indices license, bringing more than 38,000 new wallets to Hyperliquid in just eight days. Earlier spikes in late February and early April reflected a different catalyst. Heightened geopolitical tensions surrounding the Iran conflict increased demand for oil and silver exposure, with Hyperliquid emerging as one of the few venues offering continuous 24/7 trading on these markets. The final major wave, in mid-June, coincided with the listing of the SpaceX pre-IPO market.
The onboarding profile of Other-First wallets follows a different pattern. Daily inflows remained consistently higher, typically between 1,500 and 2,500 new wallets, with peaks largely tracking broader crypto market activity rather than individual RWA listings. This contrast suggests that the two cohorts are responding to different demand drivers throughout the period.
All of this leads us to the first conclusion: RWA Markets are bringing new users onto the platform.
...but they don't move the revenue needle
If RWA Markets account for 31.7% of all new wallets joining Hyperliquid, a broadly similar contribution to trading activity would be expected.
On trading volume, this expectation largely holds. Between January and June 2026, the 169,514 RWA-First wallets generated $111.6 billion in trading volume, representing 31.5% of the $354.2 billion traded by all new users during the period. Their share of trading activity is therefore closely aligned with their share of new user acquisition.
However, the picture changes when looking at fee generation. Over the same period, the RWA-First cohort generated $34.1 million in fees out of the $412.6 million paid by all new users, accounting for just 8.3% of the total.
The explanation, as discussed in the following sections, lies in two factors: the trading behavior of the cohorts and the fee structure of the assets they trade.
RWA-First wallets trade RWA products…
The trading activity of the RWA-First cohort is highly concentrated in the products through which they entered the platform. Of the $111.6 billion in trading volume generated between January and June 2026, $93.2 billion (83.6%) was executed on RWA Markets, while just $18.3 billion was traded across crypto perpetuals and Other Markets.
The evidence suggests that RWA-First users remain largely focused on RWA products rather than expanding into the broader Hyperliquid ecosystem. RWA Markets therefore appear to attract users who might not otherwise have joined the platform, although cross-market participation remains limited.
…while the crypto base is trading it all
The behavior of the Other-First cohort differs significantly. Of the $242.6 billion in trading volume they generated over the period, $187.3 billion (77.2%) was traded on Other Markets, their primary entry point. The remaining $55.3 billion (22.8%) was executed on RWA Markets, with this share increasing steadily as the RWA offering expands. As of today, RWA Markets account for approximately 30-35% of the cohort's trading volume.
This pattern translates into a dominant position for the Other-First cohort across both market segments. On Other Markets, primarily crypto perpetuals, Other-First wallets generate around 90% of total trading volume. At the same time, they also account for roughly 40% of trading volume on RWA Markets, making them a major source of trading activity in that segment as well.
The contrast between the two cohorts is clear: RWA-First users remain largely specialized in RWA products, whereas Other-First users are considerably more asset agnostic, readily expanding into newly listed markets. For Hyperliquid, this means RWA listings serve two distinct purposes: they attract a dedicated group of new users while simultaneously creating additional trading opportunities for the platform's crypto user base, increasing both trading volume and fee generation.
And Fees are pretty clear on this
The fee breakdown removes any ambiguity about where Hyperliquid's revenue comes from between the two cohorts.
On RWA Markets, fee generation closely mirrors trading volume. Throughout the period, RWA-First wallets generated $11.7 million in fees (60.6%), while Other-First wallets generated $7.6 million (39.4%), broadly reflecting their respective shares of RWA trading activity.
The picture changes on Other Markets. Other-First wallets generated $370.9 million (94.3%) in fees on crypto perpetual markets, compared with just $22.4 million (5.7%) for the RWA-First cohort. This gap is substantially larger than the corresponding volume split, with RWA-First wallets still accounting for 8.3% of trading volume on Other Markets.
Looking at the effective fee rate adds another data point, though it should be interpreted with caution. By dividing total fees paid by each cohort on Other Markets by their total trading volume on those same markets, we obtain 12.2 bps for RWA-First wallets versus 19.8 bps for Other-First wallets, a roughly 1.6x difference despite both cohorts trading on the same infrastructure at the same nominal fee rates. This points to a potential behavioral difference between the two cohorts on Other Markets. Without per-trade granularity, the exact cause cannot be confirmed, but several explanations are plausible. For example, RWA-First wallets may trade more passively as makers (0.015%) rather than takers (0.045%), or the two cohorts may fall into different fee tiers due to staking or differences in their 14-day rolling trading volumes. However, investigating this further falls outside the scope of this report.
Overall, the answer to the second question is clear: RWA markets are not yet a meaningful driver of fee generation for Hyperliquid, regardless of the cohort considered. More than 80% of all fees generated by new users originate from Other-First wallets trading on Other Markets. What is equally striking is that despite a rapidly expanding RWA product offering, new equity listings, the S&P 500 license, pre-IPO markets, fee generation from RWA markets hasn't grown proportionally. Both cohorts trade more on RWA Markets over time, but the fees those markets produce remain a marginal share of the total. 
Conclusion: new users, different economics
Between January and June 2026, 169,514 verified wallets entered Hyperliquid through an RWA Market, representing 31.7% of all new users. Their trading volume followed proportionally, accounting for 31.5% of all new-user activity. The evidence is therefore clear: RWA Markets are attracting genuinely new users at meaningful scale.
Those new users, however, behave differently from Hyperliquid's crypto-native user base. RWA-First users remain concentrated in the markets through which they entered, with 83.6% of their trading volume staying within the RWA Markets. By contrast, crypto-native users are considerably more asset agnostic, already directing around 30-35% of their trading volume toward RWA Markets as the product offering expands.
As for fees, several key takeaways emerge. First, RWA Markets account for less than 10% of the platform's fee revenue among new users despite generating meaningful trading volume. Second, RWA-First users generate relatively few fees because they largely remain within RWA Markets. Third, when they do venture into crypto perpetuals, they tend to adopt a more conservative trading profile, resulting in lower fee generation. Most importantly, more than 80% of all fees generated by new users come from wallets that entered Hyperliquid through Other Markets and keep trading on these markets.
The next question is therefore no longer whether RWA Markets can attract new users but whether those users become more economically valuable over time by expanding into crypto perpetuals, increasing their activity on RWA Markets or as the RWA Markets keep evolving.
Methodology
This analysis covers the period January 1 to June 30, 2026. A wallet is classified as an RWA-First user when its first ever trade on Hyperliquid occurs on a HIP-3 RWA Market, specifically one of the following builder-deployed DEXs: vntl, xyz, flx, km, cash, para, abcd. To ensure the cohort contains only genuinely new participants, each candidate wallet was cross-checked against on-chain Arbitrum bridge deposit history. Any wallet that had deposited USDC into the Hyperliquid Arbitrum bridge before January 1, 2026 was removed. The two groups, 169,514 RWA-First wallets and 364,848 Other-First wallets, together account for 534,362 wallets active in the window.
Volume and fees are tracked across all days each wallet traded, not just their first. Both are split across a 2x2 matrix of wallet group (RWA-First vs Other-First) and market type (RWA Markets vs Other Markets). Volume is reported as single-side USD notional. Fees reflect only the main Hyperliquid trading fee, builder fees and HIP-3 deployer fees are excluded. The analysis processed 1.44 billion fill events across 582 GB of decompressed data from the public Hyperliquid raw fill archive.
Full methodology and raw data : 
https://gist.github.com/noateden/6ee849a5348c99636681164878c40694

Does opening Hyperliquid to RWA Markets attract net new users, or does it mostly give existing traders something else to trade?

Hyperliquid and the RWA onboarding question: what the data shows

Patrick Scott

0xngmi

LlamaSwap

There are hundreds of decentralized exchanges. Traders looking to swap tokens face an overwhelming number of choices.
DEX aggregators make traders’ lives a little easier, taking orders and scanning select exchanges for the best quotes. But they have their own fees, and their own methods of identifying the best trades.
Enter LlamaSwap, the self-described “aggregator of aggregators.” 
Launched by DefiLlama in 2023, LlamaSwap queries the price of trades on 1inch, CoW Swap, and several other aggregators. If those aggregators offer the cream of the crop, LlamaSwap is an attempt at offering la crème de la crème. 
Traders have taken notice. In 2025, LlamaSwap processed $50 billion in trades. In another sense, however, it has flown under the radar. Uniswap, the world’s largest decentralized exchange, has processed more than $36 billion in trades in the past 30 days alone.  
So let’s shine a spotlight on LlamaSwap, one of the premier venues for trading crypto. 
Free!
First and foremost, LlamaSwap is free to use. 
It doesn’t charge its own fee, so the price offered is the same price a trader would pay if she went directly to the chosen aggregator. 
But LlamaSwap does generate revenue. Some aggregators profit off “positive slippage” — if a trade executes at a superior price to the one quoted, the aggregator pockets the difference. And some of those aggregators share a portion of that revenue with LlamaSwap.
Lest anyone worry that LlamaSwap only routes trades to aggregators with a revenue share agreement, rest easy — in its attempt to find traders the best price, LlamaSwap also scans aggregators that don’t share their revenue. 
LlamaSwap has grown since its 2023 debut, and it’s no longer just an exchange aggregator. Its “earn” function displays yield opportunities for thousands of assets. And its “borrow” function aggregates lending paths, offering two varieties based on a user’s risk tolerance: “safe” and “degen.” That lets users easily see which lending protocols support a particular token. It also makes it easy to compare lending terms to get the best deal when borrowing crypto. 
Finally, LlamaSwap introduced a feature called “gas refuel” last year. It ensures traders never get stuck without the crypto needed to execute trades. 
Staying safe

Hacks continue to plague the DeFi ecosystem, and DefiLlama founder 0xngmi has called his approach to building LlamaSwap “extremely paranoid.”
Some users have executed nine-figure swaps, 0xngmi said on X earlier this year. It demonstrates an incredible level of trust in the product, and for that reason he personally audits updates to the LlamaSwap frontend and the contracts that users approve. 
“To this date our users have NEVER had an approval hack, despite doing almost $100 billion in volume over the years and being the most-used meta aggregator,” he wrote.
“DefiLlama is extremely cautious with which aggregators are listed,” Patrick Scott, DefiLlama’s chief revenue officer, said. 
“Swaps are executed directly against the smart contracts of each aggregator, so there's no additional smart contract risk of using LlamaSwap.” - Patrick Scott
That also means LlamaSwap users are protected from hackers that exploit aggregators’ websites, as happened early this year when the CoW Swap website was compromised. 
That isn’t the only way LlamaSwap protects users. It also prevents them from executing terribly disadvantageous trades. Sadly, there was a prime example of this back in March, when someone used Aave’s website to swap $50 million in USDT for AAVE tokens.
The trader likely expected to receive about $50 million in AAVE tokens. Instead, extreme slippage on the multi-step trade meant the trader received just $36,000 worth of AAVE. 
Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the trader had been warned they would suffer “extraordinary slippage” and moved ahead with the trade anyway. Kulechov also said Aave would attempt to return the $600,000 in fees the transaction generated. 
LlamaSwap takes a different approach. 
“We directly forbid swaps like this in the UI and you wouldn't be able to make them,” 0xngmi wrote in March. 

There was a less extreme example just this month, when a trader swapped $2 million in Ether for $14,000 in LIT using 0x, a popular aggregator.

But sometimes, users do have to protect themselves. 

Scammers have tried to swindle LlamaSwap users by creating bogus websites that look and feel like LlamaSwap but serve only to drain users’ wallets. Google has been slow to remove suspect websites, so anyone using LlamaSwap needs to be vigilant — always make sure you’re using swap.defillama.com. It can also be accessed by clicking on the “DEX aggregator” button on DefiLlama’s main page.

Traders have taken notice. In 2025, LlamaSwap processed $50 billion in trades. In another sense, however, it has flown under the radar. Uniswap, the world’s largest decentralized exchange, has processed more than $36 billion in trades in the past 30 days alone.

LlamaSwap: the ‘aggregators of aggregators’ puts safety first

Most tranche buffers remain small, with loss-absorption thresholds ranging from 8.84% to 38.64%, and most sit between 9% and 17%.
Five of the six protocols analysed would not survive a median exploit, which historically erased 34.05% of TVL.
Tranching does not remove tail risk, as 26.49% of exploits wiped out 80% or more of TVL, which would breach every buffer in the sample.
Over the past year, an increasing number of DeFi protocols have adopted tranche-based designs to attract users with different risk appetites. But how well does tranching actually work, and can it really protect capital against major losses, such as those caused by an exploit?
The data shows that senior tranches are not fully insulated from hacks, and that their exposure can still be significant when losses are large enough to breach the junior buffer.
To understand this, we examine some of the most well-known tranching protocols and compare their junior and senior tranches against potential exploit scenarios to assess how much protection they actually provide.
What Are Senior and Junior Tranches? 
Tranching is not a new concept. It has long been used in traditional finance, particularly in structured credit products, securitisations, and collateralised debt obligations. The basic idea is to divide a pool of assets or risk into separate layers, known as tranches, so that different investors can assume varying levels of risk.
The senior tranche sits at the top of the capital structure. It has first claim on repayments and is designed to absorb losses only after the junior tranche has been fully depleted. In return for this added protection, senior depositors usually receive a lower yield.
The junior tranche sits below it and acts as the first-loss buffer. Junior depositors take losses before the senior tranche is affected, but they are compensated for taking that risk through a higher potential yield.
For example, a protocol could have an 80% senior tranche and a 20% junior tranche. If the protocol suffers a 15% loss, the junior tranche absorbs the full loss and senior depositors remain protected. If the loss rises to 30%, the junior tranche is wiped out and the remaining 10% loss starts affecting the senior tranche.
Who are the major players and what are their buffers?
To understand how much protection tranching can provide in practice, we examined six major DeFi protocols that use senior and junior tranche structures. We compared the size of each protocol’s junior tranche with its senior tranche to assess how much capital is protected before senior depositors begin to take losses.
In our analysis, we use two metrics. The buffer ratio compares junior capital to senior capital, while the loss-absorption threshold measures junior capital as a share of the full pool.
The loss-absorption threshold is lower because it uses a larger denominator. Instead of comparing junior capital only to senior capital, it compares junior capital to senior and junior capital combined. As a result, the same junior tranche represents a smaller percentage of the full pool.
Project
Product
Senior tranche TVL
Junior Tranche TVL
Buffer
Loss-Absorption Threshold
Avant Protocol
avUSD
$91.66M
$15.49M (Junior tranche + reserve fund) 
16.90%
14.46%
Strata
Ethena USDe
$33.42M
$7.07M
21.15%
17.46%
Yuzu Money
YzUSD
$44.61M 
 $4.327M (Junior tranche + reserve fund) 
9.70%
8.84%
Royco
Staked Avant USD 
$4.74M
$1.4M
29.54%
22.80%
3jane
USD3
$56.8M 
$8.1M 
14.26%
12.48%
infinifi
iUSD 
$39.0$M 
$24.57M
62.97%
38.64%
Credit: DefiLlama Research · © DefiLlama
Except for infiniFi, the protocols fall within a similar protection range across both measures. Avant, Strata, Yuzu Money, and 3Jane all maintain junior or reserve buffers of roughly 10% to 17%, with slightly lower loss-absorption thresholds. Royco sits somewhat higher, with a 29.54% buffer and a 22.80% loss-absorption threshold.
infiniFi stands out clearly, with a 62.97% buffer. Its loss-absorption threshold is more modest at 38.64%, but it is still the highest in our sample.
Does the buffer protect against an exploit?
The buffer comparison in the previous section tells us how much of each protocol's capital structure is protected against a partial loss. It does not tell us how often losses are actually partial.
To answer that, we looked at 151 confirmed historical exploits where a protocol’s TVL could be measured both immediately before and immediately after the incident, and calculated the median and average share of TVL lost per event.

Across those 151 exploits, the median TVL loss was 34.05%, and the average was 43.58%. Within that same sample, 40 exploits, or 26.49% of the total, erased 80% or more of TVL in a single event, and 30 of those, or 19.87% of the total, left the protocol with less than 5% of its capital.
Ranked from most exposed to most resilient, the picture looks considerably worse than the buffer ratios alone suggest. Yuzu Money has the lowest loss-absorption threshold of the group at 8.84%, which was breached by 108 of the 151 confirmed exploits in our sample, or 71.52%.
3Jane follows close behind at 12.48%, breached by 102 exploits, or 67.55%.
Avant Protocol sits next at 14.46%, breached by 100 exploits, or 66.23%, just ahead of Strata’s 17.46% threshold, which was breached by 92 exploits, or 60.93%.
Royco sits a step above this cluster at 22.80%, but even at this higher threshold, 85 exploits, or 56.29%, still went straight through its buffer.
infiniFi is the clear outlier. Its 38.64% threshold is nearly double Royco’s and more than four times Yuzu Money’s, yet 70 exploits, or 46.36% of the sample, were still large enough to breach it.
It is also worth looking at the severe end of the sample specifically. 40 of the 151 exploits, or 26.49%, wiped out 80% or more of the protocol’s TVL in a single event. At that severity, buffer size stops being important, since even infiniFi’s 38.64% threshold would have been exceeded by a wide margin in each of those cases.

The data shows that senior tranches are not fully insulated from hacks, and that their exposure can still be significant when losses are large enough to breach the junior buffer.

Tranching in DeFi: Can the Junior Buffer actually survive an exploit?

Researchers can squeeze incredible value out of general-purpose large language models like Claude and ChatGPT. But they have their limits and often “hallucinate” or furnish outdated information.
That isn’t so bad if you’re asking for help meal-planning or making a playlist for the upcoming road trip. But it can be catastrophic when you’re trying to decide where to invest your money. 
That’s where LlamaAI comes into play. A purpose-built LLM, it launched in late 2025, allowing LlamaPro subscribers to instantly analyze DefiLlama’s comprehensive, up-to-the-minute crypto data with plain language queries. 
Less than eight months later, it’s vastly improved. 
“It has access to tons more data sources now,” Patrick Scott, DefiLlama’s chief revenue officer, said. “In addition to our data, it has access to data from X, it has access to news articles, it has access to onchain wallet data, has access to TradFi data, has access to prediction markets.”
But wait, there’s more. 
Under the hood, LlamaAI relies on well-known frontier models. As those models have improved in recent months, so has LlamaAI, according to Scott. “Architectural changes” have also improved the quality of its answers. 
“One [change] was improving the master prompt after seeing what worked and what didn't work for other people,” Scott said. “The answers are legitimately way, way better than they were when we first started.”
A new “research mode” can generate in-depth, fully sourced research reports on a given topic. Traders will appreciate the addition of candlestick charts and Monte Carlo simulations. Don’t know where to start? LlamaAI now offers suggested prompts.
Last but not least, it’s been integrated with X, the crypto industry’s online water cooler. If you see a post from an interesting project, tag @llama with a question, like “Is this project really generating as much revenue as it claims?” LlamaAI will respond in the app, just like Grok, X’s in-house LLM.
DefiLlama’s pseudonymous head, 0xngmi, decided to build LlamaAI after he found himself underwhelmed by other AI products. It took DefiLlama engineers an entire year. 
DefiLlama offers real-time data on more than 500 chains, more than 6,000 protocols, and more than 15,000 liquidity pools. Originally, LlamaAI could only scour this data, making it useful for questions like, “Which day of the week is best to buy Bitcoin?” and “Who’s winning the perp DEX wars?”
It was part of DefiLlama’s broader mission to democratize crypto data. No longer would custom analysis be limited to professional investors and their research desks. No longer would DefiLlama’s users be limited to painstakingly comparing the information housed in pre-made charts and graphs. 
Improvements in the months since LlamaAI’s launch — in particular, the integration of traditional financial data — were motivated by that same impulse. 
“Now it can generate custom charts that compare Coinbase stock to Hyperliquid,” Scott said. “I've had to do TradFi things that had nothing to do with crypto. I had to map data center supply chains, and come up with different stocks that are in that field, and pull up recent news updates about them.”
LlamaAI is available to all LlamaPro subscribers. Want to learn more? Visit defillama.com/ai.

A purpose-built LLM, it launched in late 2025, allowing LlamaPro subscribers to instantly analyze DefiLlama’s comprehensive, up-to-the-minute crypto data with plain language queries.

LlamaAI: the LLM for crypto and TradFi

Sébastien

Tether

Over the past 18 months, the tokenised equities market has grown at a pace few anticipated. Driven by demand for 24/7 access, crypto-native funding, and DeFi composability, a new generation of products has emerged across the board, from institutional protocols like Ondo and xStocks to centralised exchanges such as Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance. Every major actor is racing to capture a share of the market and carve out a position on the spectrum from traditional finance to onchain DeFi.
But when you map that spectrum closely, a clear divide appears. 

Some products sit firmly on the TradFi side, heavily regulated, custodial, built on familiar but rigid rails. Others lean into the permissionless ethos of DeFi, onchain, composable, self-custodied. Most players have optimised for one end or the other. None have managed to cover the full range.
That might be changing. With the launch of bStocks and its native integration with BNB Chain, naturally tied to Binance, the exchange is making a strategic move that goes beyond adding a new product. Together, Binance Stocks and bStocks allow users to navigate the full spectrum, from fiat entry to DeFi composability, without switching platforms, changing standards, or losing continuity. 
A market still finding its rails
On one end of the spectrum sit the traditional brokers. They offer unmatched depth with thousands of listed securities, institutional-grade liquidity, and decades of regulatory infrastructure, but their rails stop at the crypto frontier. They don’t offer self-custody, crypto features and composability between asset classes. 

Beyond that, the traditional brokerage world is itself fragmented: each broker operates under its own regulatory perimeter, offers a distinct suite of products, and serves a defined set of jurisdictions. A user in Southeast Asia or Latin America often can't access the same securities as a US-based investor. 
At the other end sit the pure-play onchain protocols. Ondo, with over $1B in TVL and more than $300M in weekly volume on its Global Markets platform is leading the sector. xStocks, developed by Backed Finance and acquired by Kraken, has established itself as a solid interoperable alternative, available across multiple CEXs and chains including TON, EVM networks, and Solana. 

Both are technically compelling but neither quite function as a platform in the fuller  sense. They depend on external distribution rails: wallets, integrations, fiat on-ramps, and regulatory frameworks that are entirely outside their control.
In between lies a growing set of exchanges moving into stocks, each trying to bridge the gap in their own way, and each running into the same structural constraints.
Many of them have chosen to plug into existing infrastructure. Bybit and Kraken offer xStocks through their trading platforms and wallets. OKX has partnered with Ondo Finance to give users access to tokenised equities. Both deliver real utility but in each case, the tokenised equity layer sits on top of third-party infrastructure. In other words, these exchanges are just distributors.
Coinbase is pursuing an ambitious vision as the "Everything Exchange" combining crypto, equities, derivatives, and prediction markets in one interface, with tokenised stocks built on Base. The product is still in early rollout, with partial equities coverage and a nascent DeFi integration via Base.
Backpack offers perhaps the clearest philosophical alignment with where the market is heading: a regulated brokerage on one side, Solana-native tokenisation on the other, with onchain IPO access as a genuine differentiator. But Backpack Securities only began its rollout recently, with nascent infrastructure and a liquidity and user base that remains a fraction of the established players.
As the table above illustrates, the pattern is consistent across the board: each player has made an architectural choice that defines both what it can offer and what it can't. Until now, no single actor has been able to cover the full spectrum but by combining Binance Stocks and bStocks, Binance is actually about to make it happen.
The Binance continuum: from fiat to DeFi without leaving the platform
The fragmentation described above has a real cost for users. Going from a stock listed on a CEX to a tokenised share usable in DeFi typically requires multiple steps: conversions, swaps, transfers, bridges, with each adding friction, cost, and counterparty exposure. Through Binance Stocks and bStocks, Binance has built two distinct products that sit at opposite ends of the spectrum and connected them into a single, uninterrupted journey.
The entry point is Binance Stocks. Accessible directly from an existing Binance account, it gives users access to 7,000+ US-listed stocks and ETFs, funded in USDT, USDC, BNB, or USD1, with zero commission and fractional investing from $5. Trading runs 24/5 and users hold beneficial ownership of the underlying shares, held in regulated custody by Nest Clearing and Custody Limited, making them eligible for dividends and corporate actions.
But Binance Stocks remains custodial and stays on the traditional side of the spectrum, bound by 24/5 trading windows and offering limited financial composability. That's where bStocks comes in.
bStocks are BEP-20 tokens on BNB Smart Chain issued by BTech Holdings Limited, each backed 1:1 by a real US-listed share held in regulated custody, verifiable at any time via Binance's Proof of Collateral page. At launch, six securities are available: TSLAB (Tesla), NVDAB (Nvidia), CRCLB (Circle Internet Group), MUB (Micron Technology), SNDKB (SanDisk), SPCXB (SpaceX) and more to come as the product scales.
Users can access bStocks in two ways: by purchasing them directly with USDT or USDC on the spot market, or by converting an existing Binance Stocks position at a 1:1 ratio with no conversion fee and no lock-up. With near-instant settlement and no market hour dependency, a user who wants to trade on the back of an earnings release at 3am on a Sunday can.
One distinction worth noting on custody: with bStocks, users hold the token itself in self-custody, meaning they control the onchain asset directly in their own wallet. The underlying share, however, remains in institutional custody by the issuer. In other words, bStocks deliver the full economic exposure to the underlying security.
Once in self-custody, the asset changes character entirely. bStocks can be held in any compatible BNB Smart Chain wallet, including Trust Wallet and Binance Web 3 Wallet. From there, the position becomes DeFi-composable: users can trade on PancakeSwap or Aster, lend on Venus or Lista DAO and deploy across the broader BNB Chain ecosystem, all while continuing to earn dividends on the underlying security. 

Those dividends require no action from the user: they're processed automatically through the Multiplier, a rebasing mechanism that adjusts bStock balances onchain proportionally and credits them ahead of the traditional pay date.
To make this clear, here's an example of a concrete journey in the Binance continuum. A user deposits fiat or crypto into their Binance account, buys NVDA shares directly with USDC on the spot market, and converts it into a bStock (NVDAB) with one click. 

They withdraw to Trust Wallet, deposit into Venus (a lending protocol) as collateral, borrow USDT against it, and redeploy that liquidity on Aster (a perp DEX) to short Bitcoin, or any other listed asset. Meanwhile, their NVDAB position keeps earning dividends automatically via the Multiplier. 

One asset, one ecosystem, two markets running in parallel.
Laying the rails
The tokenised equities race is often framed as a product competition: who has the most titles, the best UX, the lowest fees. But the deeper question is architectural: who controls the full stack from fiat entry to DeFi composability, and who is merely renting someone else's infrastructure to get there.
Most players have answered that question by choosing a lane. Traditional brokers own the TradFi end but can't speak crypto. Pure-play onchain protocols own the DeFi end but depend on external rails to reach users. The exchanges in between are building fast, but none has closed the loop on its own terms: Kraken's two products serve different geographies, Coinbase's onchain layer is still nascent, Bybit and OKX are distributing infrastructure they didn't build.
Binance is in a different position. With Binance Stocks covering the traditional equities side and bStocks extending that same position into DeFi via BNB Chain, it has assembled the only end-to-end stack in the market today. A continuum that makes the user experience seamless.
Markets have only rebuilt their basic infrastructure twice before in modern history. The first time was Amsterdam in 1602, when the world’s first stock exchange gave ordinary investors a formal way to buy into companies they didn’t personally know. The second was Nasdaq in 1971, when electronic trading replaced the trading floor and made markets faster, cheaper, and more accessible than any physical exchange before it.
What’s happening now looks like a third with centralised exchanges and specifically Binance leading the charge. Crypto exchanges, built on stablecoin rails and smartphone access, rather than brokerage accounts and banking relationships, are extending markets to people the first two inflections never reached.

With the launch of bStocks and its native integration with BNB Chain, naturally tied to Binance, the exchange is making a strategic move that goes beyond adding a new product.

Stocks onchain: how Binance Stocks and bStocks cover the full equities spectrum

NEAR Protocol

Sonic

Spark

DefiLlama has few peers in the business of gathering onchain data. It’s been cited by the US Treasury Department, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. 
Still, some organizations need more. 
“We frequently get requests where protocols or chains want, either, some custom metric added in, they want offchain information brought in, or they want things presented in a different way” 
Patrick Scott, DefiLlama’s chief revenue officer, said. 
That’s where DefiLlama’s Investor Relations Dashboard comes in.
The typical DefiLlama dashboard features standardized data, which allows users to compare protocols and chains on an apple-to-apple basis. The Investor Relations Dashboard lets crypto companies and protocol developers showcase more bespoke data, giving would-be investors a more granular, curated peek into their business. 
That means dashboards can be customized depending on the priorities, goals, and objectives of protocol developers. 
Sonic’s investor relations dashboard highlights revenue generated by FeeM, a feature that lets builders earn directly from the transaction activity they generate on the blockchain. Near’s IRD includes an investment thesis that explains NEAR tokenomics and the best way to value the token. Spark’s IRD highlights the protocol’s projected annual revenue, surplus, and operating expenses.
“It's a separate dashboard that's designed for the protocol to have one place they can send people and say, 'This is everything you need to know about us, and it's presented in the way that we feel best represents ourselves,’” Scott said. 
This has become critical as investors increasingly focus on value accrual.
Once upon a time, it was enough for a crypto project to demonstrate high volume or TVL. Those days are over. As tokens proliferate and protocols like Hyperliquid show that onchain systems can also be viable businesses, the pressure is on developers to prove their protocols can direct value to their investors. 
Crypto businesses have excellent data analysts of their own. But drawing attention to key information can be a struggle. 
“If they build their own internal dashboard, then they’re responsible for getting views there,” Scott said. “Whereas most of these protocols, the most-viewed dashboard about them is probably going to be their normal DefiLlama page.” 
And if that protocol has an Investor Relations Dashboard, its main DefiLlama page — the first stop for any would-be investor — will include a link to its IRD, letting the protocol put its best foot forward. 
There is also a centralized IRD hub at investors.defillama.com, making it easy to quickly access any protocol’s investor relations dashboard. 
Perhaps most importantly, the information is all DefiLlama-approved. 
“All the data still has to be verified by us,” Scott said. “We did have cases where a protocol wanted us to show something on the IR dashboard, and we said 'We can't really show that because we can't verify the numbers.’”
IRD clients include blue-chip protocols and chains like Spark,   Sonic , and    Near . 
Near’s IR dashboard is a case study in the value of highlighting bespoke data. It shows that Near Intents has become a key hub for trading ZCash, a cryptocurrency that took off in 2025 as interest in privacy-preserving blockchain technology surged. 
But DefiLlama’s investor relations dashboards offer more than data. They are a one-stop shop for client information. That means they’ve been integrated with DefiLlama Research, and offer quick access to all reports, deep-dives, press releases, and other key documents. 
This information is key to making sound investment decisions. After all, investors need context to make sense of data. They need to understand where a project fits into the broader crypto ecosystem, and what narratives might propel it in the coming weeks and months. 
In Spark's case, that means quarterly reports that give tokenholders a detailed look at the protocol’s business. 
“It's become more important for projects to actually show tokenholders they are mindful of the value accrual in their fundamentals,” Scott said. “It's not necessarily just enough to have, like, a good whitepaper or narrative anymore.”
Projects that want their own investor relations dashboards should reach out to sales@defillama.com.

The typical DefiLlama dashboard features standardized data, which allows users to compare protocols and chains on an apple-to-apple basis.

The Investor Relations Dashboard lets crypto companies and protocol developers showcase more bespoke data, giving would-be investors a more granular, curated peek into their business.

Investor Relations Dashboard: bespoke, DefiLlama-vetted data

Flare

Flare design starts from the challenge of giving smart contracts reliable access to information that lives outside the chain. This report looks at how that architecture works, where it is already producing results, and what would show it scaling.

How Flare uses data to expand what capital can do

Zama

Zama is DeFi's universal entry point for shielding, transferring, earning, and swapping digital assets confidentially.

A Look Into Confidential DeFi

Crecimiento

Andrés Ondarra

Simón Puebla

Santiago Cristobal

Argentina had roughly 8.6 million crypto users as of 2024, representing around 20% of the population. Of those, 12.5% are active on a monthly basis, significantly higher than any other country in Latin America. Volumes speak for themselves: more than $91 billion in value moved through Argentina over the twelve months to mid-2024, while the broader LATAM region generated $730 billion over 2025.

Argentina had roughly 8.6 million crypto users as of 2024, representing around 20% of the population. Of those, 12.5% are active on a monthly basis, significantly higher than any other country in Latam.

Argentina had roughly 8.6 million crypto users as of 2024, representing around 20% of the population. Of those, 12.5% are active on a monthly basis, significantly higher than any other country in Latin America. Volumes speak for themselves: more than $91 billion in value moved.

Report: Argentines’ financial reality and the impossible dollar access

[Chart: Aave V3 vs Lido vs Ethena] Executive summary: DeFi in 2025 In 2025, DeFi moved further away from a cycle-defined speculative arena and closer to a durab

State of DeFi 2025

From speculative cycle to durable financial system: a year-end map of the primitives that matter

Key Findings The World Crypto Rankings 2025 compares adoption across four pillars: user penetration, transactional use, institutional readiness, and cultural pe

The World Crypto Rankings: Resilience, Innovation, and Leadership

A four-pillar comparison of national crypto adoption: users, transactions, institutions, culture

As traditional assets move onchain and the boundary between crypto and traditional finance becomes less distinct, CEXs are positioned to take another step: becoming integrated access and infrastructure layers through which users and institutions can move between asset classes, settlement systems, and onchain applications.

Centralized crypto exchanges have evolved from simple marketplaces for digital assets into integrated financial platforms combining trading, payments, lending, yield products, custody, and institutional services.

CEXs are therefore evolving beyond trading venues into integrated access and infrastructure layers connecting multiple asset classes, financial products, settlement systems, and onchain applications for both retail and institutional participants.

From Exchange to Infrastructure: How CEXs Are Reshaping Global Market Access

Disclaimer: This report is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. Nothing contained herein constitutes a recommendation or solicitation to purchase, sell, or hold any token or other digital asset, or to use any protocol or service.
It is time to examine how the risk-curation and vault economy is taking shape. To understand its development, it is useful to begin where vaults first emerged: DeFi lending. The data presented in this report was collected from DeFiLlama in July 2026
DeFi lending has been one of the largest categories in crypto since the first major lending boom in 2021. After a quieter period, the sector returned strongly in 2025, with more than $35 billion now sitting across lending protocols
What is less discussed is how the structure of lending has changed. The market is no longer defined only by large pooled lending protocols, where users deposit into shared pools and rely on protocol-level risk parameters.
A growing share of lending activity now happens through curated vaults. In this model, users deposit capital into a vault, and that capital is allocated across selected lending markets according to predefined risk rules set by risk curators.
Across 55 tracked risk curators, this market has grown to $7.18 billion, up from $4.75 billion the previous year. This implies year-over-year growth of roughly 51%. What is notable is that, over the same period, lending TVL declined by 36%. This shows that while lending as a whole has lost capital, the demand for curated vaults has continued to grow, allowing this construct to gain market share over other lending products.
How we ended up with Vaultification 
The vaultification of lending came from a series of innovations.
Vaults first became widely understood through yield aggregators such as Yearn. In that model, users deposited assets into a vault, and the vault automated strategy execution across DeFi.
The next step was standardisation. ERC-4626 created a common interface for tokenised vaults, making deposits, withdrawals, share accounting, and integrations easier to standardise across DeFi. 
The final innovation was risk curation. This became more explicit with Morpho Blue and MetaMorpho, which separated the lending base layer from the vault layer. Instead of only automating yield, the vault became a capital allocation layer. 
The curators could set parameters by which the vaults would operate including eligible markets, capital allocation split, risk limits that would risk adjust exposure overtime.
The model that Morpho helped pioneer was then adopted across multiple lending protocols, including Euler, Kamino, Gearbox, and other lending markets. 
Market overview: Key players, assets, revenues, and chains 
Risk curation is already a concentrated market. The category now includes 55 tracked curators, but only 10 curate more than $100 million in TVL. The top three curators, Steakhouse Financial, Sentora, and Gauntlet, account for 75.9% of TVL. The top five account for 80.9%, while the top ten account for 89.1%.
That concentration reflects how allocator trust develops in lending markets. Capital tends to follow curators with a track record, recognised risk frameworks, strong integrations, and experience curating large pools of stablecoin and collateral exposure. 
The long tail is expanding, but the core market is still controlled by a small group of professionalised operators.
Rank
Curator
TVL
Market Share
1
Steakhouse Financial
$2.03B
28.20%
2
Sentora
$1.97B
27.40%
3
Gauntlet
$1.46B
20.30%
4
K3 Capital
$210.2M
2.90%
5
KPK
$147.8M
2.10%
6
Telos Consilium
$131.4M
1.80%
7
Clearstar
$124.8M
1.70%
8
Sky Money
$124.6M
1.70%
9
Hyperithm
$111.0M
1.50%
10
RockawayX
$101.7M
1.40%
Competition at the top of the risk-curation market is tight. Steakhouse Financial leads with $2.03 billion in TVL, followed closely by Sentora at $1.97 billion and Gauntlet at $1.46 billion. The gap between Steakhouse and Sentora is only $60.7 million, separating the two by less than one percentage point in market share. Gauntlet is also a major player, giving the market a clear top-three structure where the leading curators are competing at a much larger scale than the rest of the field.
Beyond the top three, the market drops off quickly. K3 Capital is the fourth-largest curator with $210.2 million in TVL, meaning the gap between third and fourth place is more than $1.2 billion. This makes the current market structure clear: a competitive race between three large curators at the top, followed by a much smaller long tail.`
The market’s concentration likely reflects the fact that leading vault curators have demonstrated stronger risk frameworks and conducted more thorough due diligence in asset selection. This becomes especially important amid the increase in DeFi exploits. TRM Labs recorded 207 incidents in the first half of 2026, more than double the 83 incidents recorded during the same period in 2025.
Despite these incidents, Sentora has reported zero losses across the vaults it curates by combining technical and economic due diligence before adding asset or protocol to its strategies,  adheres  to predefined risk limits, and follows up with continuous monitoring which helps explain its strong position as the second-largest risk curator.
Revenues across the top 5 risk curators 
Revenue distribution looks different from TVL distribution. The top five risk curators generated approximately $13.07 million in 30-day fees and $975.6K in 30-day revenue. Sentora leads on revenue, generating $559.2K over the past 30 days, or roughly 57.3% of the top-five total. However, there are stark differences in how effectively each risk curator converts fees into revenue. 
Curator
Fees 30d
Revenue 30d
Revenue 7d
Revenue / Fees 30d
Sentora
$4.77M
$559.2K
$137.5K
11.71%
Steakhouse Financial
$4.22M
$290.9K
$60.5K
6.90%
K3 Capital
$658.4K
$64.7K
$15.5K
9.82%
Gauntlet
$3.31M
$50.5K
$10.7K
1.53%
Hyperithm
$115.8K
$10.5K
$2.8K
9.03%
The main explanation for the difference between fees and retained revenue is the performance-fee structure used by each curator. In curated lending vaults, the underlying lending markets generate yield for depositors. The curator only captures revenue when part of that yield is retained through a performance fee, management fee, or separate revenue-sharing agreement. As a result, two curators can generate similar levels of fees or TVL  but report very different revenue if their vaults apply different take rates.
Sentora generated the most revenue among the top five, retaining $559.2K from $4.77 million in fees, equivalent to an 11.71% revenue-to-fee conversion rate. Its vaults charge performance fees ranging from 0% to 15%, while its PayPal USD Main vault also applies a 0.99% management fee which contributed substantially to its revenue. Combined with its high fee generation, this stronger effective take rate allowed Sentora to generate almost twice as much revenue as Steakhouse Financial.
Steakhouse Financial generated the second-highest revenue at $290.9K from $4.22 million in fees. Its Morpho vaults charge performance fees ranging from 0% to 25%, but its effective conversion rate was 6.90%. This suggests that a significant share of its fee generation comes from vaults with lower performance fees. 
K3 Capital ranked third, generating $64.7K in revenue from $658.4K in fees. Its 9.82% conversion rate broadly aligns with the 10% performance fee applied across its vaults. This consistent fee structure allowed K3 to generate more revenue than Gauntlet despite producing significantly fewer fees.
Gauntlet generated $50.5K in revenue from $3.31 million in fees, giving it a conversion rate of 1.53%. Although its vault-level performance fees range from 0% to 20%, the low effective conversion rate means that most of its fee generation comes from vaults with low or zero performance fees.
Hyperithm generated the least revenue among the top five, retaining $10.5K from $115.8K in fees. Its vaults charge performance fees ranging from 0% to 10%, and its effective conversion rate of 9.03% suggests that a meaningful share of its fee generation comes from vaults near the upper end of this range. However, its smaller fee base limits its absolute revenue.
Overall, the data shows that performance-fee and management-fee design plays a major role in determining whether a curator can convert usage into revenue. 
Curators such as Sentora and K3 Capital retain a significant share of the fees generated by their vaults, while others, such as Gauntlet, generate substantial activity but capture only a small portion of it as revenue. This highlights the clear differences in strategy across the market: some curators prioritise direct monetisation, while others appear more focused on distribution.
The stablecoin Anchors of the Vault Economy 
The asset mix shows what curated vaults are mainly being used for: stablecoin yield. Across the top 10 risk curators, USDC is the dominant asset, with $2.81 billion in TVL. That represents 43.8% of the analysed top 10 curator asset base, making USDC the primary asset of the vault economy.
After USDC, the market becomes more fragmented. Paypal’s stablecoin, PYUSD is the second-largest asset at $921.6 million, followed by USDT at $420.5 million, RLUSD at $298.6 million, and WBNB at $292.5 million. No other asset comes close to USDC’s level of dominance.
Asset
TVL
Share
USDC
$2.81B
43.80%
PYUSD
$921.6M
14.40%
USDT
$420.5M
6.60%
RLUSD
$298.6M
4.70%
WBNB
$292.5M
4.60%
WETH
$248.5M
3.90%
KBTC
$201.3M
3.10%
EURCV
$170.9M
2.70%
USD1
$137.6M
2.10%
USDT0
$133.2M
2.10%
This matters because the main use case is not directional exposure to volatile assets. For many allocators, curated vaults are a way to access stablecoin lending with clearer risk limits, curator oversight, and more structured withdrawal assumptions.
The market is not made up exclusively of USDC vaults. PYUSD, RLUSD, USDT, EURCV, USD1, and USDT0 point to broader stablecoin adoption, with an increasingly institutional and issuer-led component. This is visible in the competition between PayPal’s PYUSD, Ripple’s RLUSD, and World Liberty Financial’s USD1, showing that newer stablecoins issued by established names such as PayPal and Ripple have a chance to capture market share.
Sentora has implemented various vaults with PYUSD and RLUSD as the main deposit assets, with its Sentora curated RLUSD Main Vault holding $234.32M in total deposits and its PayPalUSD Main Vault holding $317.5M in total deposits, supporting the growth of these stablecoins.
Meanwhile WBNB, WETH, KBTC show that curators are also managing exposure to other types of assets which are not stablecoins.
Still, the centre of gravity is clear. Curated vaults are becoming one of DeFi’s main risk-managed stablecoin allocation layers, and while USDC remains the largest stablecoin in DeFi other players such as PYUSD are starting to gain traction. 
Chain Distribution: Ethereum and Base Dominate Curated Vault TVL
Curated vault capital remains concentrated on the most liquid DeFi venues. Ethereum is the largest by a wide margin, with approximately $3.46 billion in risk curator TVL, representing 48.2% of the category. Base follows with $1.62 billion, or 22.5% of the market. Together, Ethereum and Base account for roughly 70.7% of total risk curator TVL. 
Chain
TVL
Share
Ethereum
$3.46B
48.20%
Base
$1.62B
22.50%
Solana
$548.4M
7.60%
BSC
$509.2M
7.10%
Plasma
$144.3M
2.00%
Monad
$119.3M
1.70%
Hyperliquid L1
$62.8M
0.90%
Katana
$60.4M
0.80%
Avalanche
$43.2M
0.60%
Arbitrum
$28.9M
0.40%
Other chains
$567.6M
7.90%
Ethereum’s lead is expected. It remains the deepest venue for stablecoin liquidity, blue-chip collateral, and institutional DeFi activity. Base’s position is more notable. With more than $1.6 billion in curator TVL, Base has become the largest L2 venue for curated vault capital and now holds more than three times as much risk curator TVL as Solana.
Beyond Ethereum and Base, the market becomes more fragmented. Solana and BSC form the second tier, with $548.4 million and $509.2 million in TVL, respectively. After that, no individual chain exceeds $150 million.
What is notable is that chains that have historically been large DeFi venues, such as Arbitrum and Avalanche, are losing market share to newer chains such as Katana, Hyperliquid L1, Monad, and Plasma. This suggests that, when it comes to risk curation, curators are increasingly operating across newer DeFi ecosystems rather than sticking to the old guard.
K3 Capital’s growth on Monad provides a clear example of this trend, with its vaults on Morpho and Euler reaching $60 million in TVL across different vault strategies.
The takeaway is that vault infrastructure is becoming multi-chain, but capital is not spreading evenly. Newer chains are taking advantage of this infrastructure by working with risk curators to create competitive vaults. At the same time, well-known chains like Ethereum, Base, Solana, and BSC continue to thrive. 
A concentrated market with emerging pockets of competition
The risk-curated vault market is growing quickly, but it is not yet a broadly distributed market. From almost every angle, the sector remains relatively concentrated. Steakhouse Financial, Sentora, and Gauntlet dominate curator TVL, Ethereum and Base account for the majority of chain-level capital, and USDC remains the clear anchor asset for risk-managed vault strategies.
This concentration shows that allocator trust is still clustering around a small number of familiar curators, blockchains, and widely adopted stablecoins
At the same time, the data underneath that dominance is where the market becomes more interesting. Smaller curators can still be highly profitable relative to their size when they use higher or more consistent performance fees, as seen with K3 Capital. Newer chains such as Monad are also proving that curated vault infrastructure can help emerging ecosystems compete with, and in some cases outgrow, older DeFi venues like Arbitrum and Avalanche. 
Meanwhile, the asset mix shows that USDC dominance does not mean stablecoin uniformity. PYUSD and RLUSD are already among the largest vault assets, pointing to growing institutional and issuer-led competition inside the vault economy.
This market creates an opportunity for risk curators like Sentora to capture market share through differentiated strategies. This can come from introducing vaults for assets that compete with USDC, as well as deploying across a growing set of chains. While the market remains highly concentrated, Sentora is one of the clear winners as the second-largest risk curator, and it can further differentiate itself through unique vault strategies and new chain deployments. 
Another important trend is that major financial platforms are starting to use curated DeFi infrastructure behind familiar products. Coinbase allows users to lend USDC through Morpho vaults directly in its app, while Deel lets contractors who hold DLUSD opt into a rewards programme where funds are deployed through Morpho and curated by Sentora. Robinhood has also launched an Earn product that allows users to lend USDG through a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse Financial.
On top of that, Kraken’s DeFi Earn product is powered by Sentora’s strategies behind its vaults. Kraken has already surpassed $500 million in deposits, showing how powerful this model can be for risk curators. 
Instead of requiring users to interact with DeFi directly, these onchain earn solutions enable vault infrastructure to be embedded into familiar financial products. This may become one of the main ways the next wave of capital enters DeFi, as neobanks and other financial applications can use the expertise of risk curators to offer yield to their customers.

A growing share of lending activity now happens through curated vaults. In this model, users deposit capital into a vault, and that capital is allocated across selected lending markets according to predefined risk rules set by risk curators.

It is time to examine how the risk-curation and vault economy is taking shape. To understand its development, it is useful to begin where vaults first emerged: DeFi lending. The data presented in this report was collected from DeFiLlama in July 2026.

The Vault Economy: Scale and Composition

Bitget

With the launch of Bitget Stocks 2.0, Bitget doubled down on its investment in this growing market. To understand how it compares, we look at how Bitget’s tokenized equities function, how they differ from competing products, and what their spreads and order-book depth reveal about its standing in the tokenized-equity race.

With the launch of Bitget Stocks 2.0, Bitget introduced two products that provide users with access to equities: Bitget Stock+ and Reality rTokens, each targeting a different audience.

Bitget Stocks: Bridging Traditional Equities and Onchain Markets

Purpose and scope of the report This report examines how kpk structures and operates curated vaults, and what that implies for liquidity, risk controls, and gov

Curation as an Infrastructure Layer: kpk’s Design Philosophy

How kpk structures curated vaults, risk controls, and governance under stress

For years, the country operated under the cepo cambiario, a system of capital controls that limited individuals to purchasing a maximum of $200 per month at the official exchange rate through the so-called dólar ahorro. Not only was this amount relatively small for any meaningful savings protection, but purchases were also subject to a 30% tax advance on income and wealth taxes, collected at the point of purchase.

Anyone needing more than $200 per month, or unwilling to surrender 30% upfront to the state, had only one alternative: the dólar blue. This informal cash market operated in the gray areas of Argentine economic life, offering access to dollars at a significant premium to the official exchange rate and often requiring the right connections.

For Argentines, this came at a considerable cost. Since 2019, the dólar blue has frequently traded at premiums approaching 2x the official rate, as shown in the chart below. This premium largely reflected expectations of future peso devaluations. In other words, many preferred accepting a 2x exchange-rate penalty today rather than risking an even greater loss of purchasing power just a few months later.

About the Author: Alex T. is a cofounder at Octra Labs, a privacy-preserving blockchain and encrypted compute network. He leads product strategy, ecosystem development, and go-to-market, with a focus on turning advanced cryptography into usable market infrastructure for finance, AI, and onchain applications.
Mastercard’s definitive agreement to acquire BVNK, Visa’s expansion of stablecoin settlement across nine blockchains, and the Senate Banking Committee’s vote to advance the CLARITY Act all point in the same direction.
For years, the industry has argued that blockchains could become mainstream financial infrastructure. That vision is becoming reality in a highly practical form. Stablecoins are stepping in as reliable settlement assets. 
Payment networks are adopting blockchain infrastructure as just another rail. Banks and fintechs are successfully moving tokenised money through their familiar compliance, distribution, and customer-service channels.
This represents massive progress. Stablecoins have definitively answered the old critique that crypto is a solution in search of a problem. People want dollars that move at the speed of software. Companies demand a global settlement that bypasses outdated correspondent banking routes. Payment giants are adopting this technology simply because it works.
The compromise of mainstream adoption
There is a certain irony here. The first truly mainstream version of crypto might be the one that blends seamlessly into the existing system. Wallets are becoming accounts. Onchain payments are mirroring card programmes. Settlement networks are serving as back-office infrastructure. The prevailing language has shifted away from revolution and towards interoperability, risk controls, merchant acceptance, and regulatory clarity.
That transition is a major win for utility. When people pay an invoice, receive wages, or move money across borders, they prioritise functionality over ideology. If crypto rails make financial institutions faster, cheaper, and more reliable, we have achieved a major milestone.
Rebuilding from first principles
However, another version of crypto is developing in parallel. This path raises a more fundamental question about our digital infrastructure. It challenges whether the current internet and financial architecture has reached the limits of what it can support.
Public blockchains made the state transparent by default. That transparency proved useful for auditability, yet it made many serious applications impossible. Smart contracts gave us programmable settlement without the benefit of private computation. 
Wallets gave users custody, often at the cost of safety and usability. DeFi gave us open markets, yet much of the experience relies heavily on centralised frontends, custodians, bridges, APIs, and offchain services.
We are now reaching a point where the next phase requires rebuilding parts of this stack from first principles.
The new frontier of computation
This is where the ecosystem feels truly alive. The frontier spans private compute, encrypted state, decentralised storage, new execution environments, and autonomous agents. It also encompasses privacy-preserving identity, onchain AI, and applications that require sensitive data to remain confidential.
This second path spans multiple product categories and envisages an internet in which an encrypted, user-owned, and programmable state existed from the very beginning. Both of these parallel paths matter immensely and lead to completely different destinations.
Beyond faster plumbing
The risk today is mistaking the success of institutional integration for the ultimate success of crypto as a whole. As stablecoins embed themselves in banks and card programmes, observers will declare the industry mature. A technology certainly reaches maturity when it becomes ordinary, invisible infrastructure.
Yet crypto was designed to create entirely new institutions while also serving as faster plumbing for existing ones.
A better banking backend is highly valuable. A neutral substrate for computation, coordination, and ownership represents a total paradigm shift. The former reduces costs and expands access within the current system. The latter changes what kinds of systems are possible in the first place.
Two paths forward
In the near term, the bank-shaped version will attract the most attention. It boasts distribution, regulatory momentum, enterprise budgets, and clear revenue streams. It speaks the language of existing executives.
The frontier version will remain strange for a while longer. It will look experimental, unfinished, or overly technical until the moment its utility becomes undeniable. Primitives always look like abstractions before they become products.
Crypto does not need to choose a single path. The institutional version will significantly improve the legacy system. Meanwhile, the frontier version will continue to push the boundaries of what we can build. 
The next phase of crypto encompasses multiple stories. While one part makes banks function more efficiently, the frontier continues to build systems that fundamentally change how we interact online.

Crypto has officially entered the traditional finance building. It just might look different from what early adopters expected.

Opinion: Crypto is splitting into two parallel universes

The convergence of traditional finance and decentralised finance (DeFi) is changing the way we look at global financial systems.
Moderated by:
Interviewees:
Permissioned DeFi: A gateway to mass adoption
Permissioned DeFi is gaining traction as a bridge between the decentralised and regulated worlds.
These platforms aim to address barriers such as scalability and compliance, while retaining the innovative edge of blockchain.
“Permissioned DeFi bridges the gap between the regulated world and decentralised finance,” Topp explained.
Bitkub has grown rapidly by simplifying blockchain tools for everyday users.
“Our focus is on creating systems that anyone can use — even in regions with less financial literacy.”
CrossFi uses this technology to connect blockchain with traditional financial systems, making it easier for banks and other financial services to adopt crypto.
By partnering with platforms like LayerZero and designing flexible systems, CrossFi helps break down the technical barriers that often make these integrations difficult.
Regulation as the backbone of trust
As DeFi grows, regulatory frameworks are increasingly vital for fostering trust and security.
Lutz also emphasised the importance of security as the foundation for sustainable growth.
“Security is at the core of our operations. We have never lost a single coin in our history, thanks to cold storage practices and stringent internal protocols,” he noted.
In Thailand, regulation has also played a critical role in enabling growth.
“The SEC’s licensing framework gave us the clarity to educate users and grow responsibly,” said Topp.
By working within this regulatory structure, Bitkub has become Southeast Asia’s largest regulated digital asset exchange, with millions of users.
For CrossFi, bridging the gap between traditional finance and blockchain technology requires aligning innovation with compliance.
By creating infrastructure that meets regulatory standards, CrossFi ensures that banks and businesses can integrate crypto without sacrificing security or scalability.
This approach builds trust while encouraging adoption by lowering the barriers for institutions exploring the crypto space.
Education and accessibility: The keys to adoption
Beyond regulation and security, the broader adoption of decentralised finance hinges on making blockchain technology accessible and user-friendly.
Topp emphasised the role of education in fostering adoption, particularly in regions where financial literacy remains low.
“At Bitkub, we’ve focused on humanising blockchain technology. Our systems are designed so users don’t need to understand the complexities of blockchain to benefit from it,” he said.
Lutz highlighted how platforms like BitMEX are simplifying the entry point for institutional and retail users alike.
“We’ve introduced tools that cater to all levels of traders, from professionals to those just entering the market, with a focus on security and transparency,” he noted.
CrossFi takes a similar approach by prioritising user-centric solutions that make the integration of crypto and traditional finance seamless.
Its infrastructure includes features like real-time crypto-to-fiat conversion and tokenized banking services, enabling businesses and users to incorporate digital assets without extensive technical expertise.
This focus on usability ensures that DeFi can reach diverse demographics and foster global financial inclusion.
The road ahead: Collaboration and innovation
As blockchain adoption scales, collaboration between traditional financial institutions and decentralised platforms will be important.
These partnerships will enhance the efficiency, transparency, and scalability of financial systems, ultimately enabling broader adoption.
Lutz envisions a future where DeFi platforms take centre stage in the crypto ecosystem.
“DeFi and centralised exchanges can coexist, but the focus will increasingly be on transparency and secure trading environments,” he said.
As more users demand accountability from financial platforms, the importance of regulatory clarity and robust security measures will grow.
Topp also sees crypto playing a transformative role on a global scale.
“By 2028, I expect Bitcoin to become a strategic reserve for many nations, with a market cap reaching $100 trillion across the crypto ecosystem,” he predicted.
Real-world use cases like remittances and micropayments will continue driving adoption, solving inefficiencies in legacy financial systems.

The convergence of traditional finance and decentralised finance (DeFi) is changing the way we look at global financial systems. Moderated by: Interviewees: Per

Permissioned DeFi: Bridging Traditional Finance and Decentralised Systems

The KYC-gated layer where TradFi capital meets onchain primitives

Dr. Rasit Tavus, founder and CEO of LegalBlock argues the legal status of Lazarus swap transactions falls into two categories: decentralised finance (DeFi) transactions and centralised service transactions.
Centralised services and liability
It is simpler to assess centralised services first, including cryptocurrency exchanges and mixing services. Any entity with a central authority must comply with international anti-money laundering (AML) treaties, requiring robust AML protections to prevent stolen assets — such as those from Bybit — from entering their platforms. 
Failure to implement effective AML measures constitutes negligence and legal liability. Given that Lazarus exploited these services due to inadequate safeguards, all fees associated with deposits, swaps, or withdrawals should be returned to the victim.
Centralised blockchain services operate globally but must comply with US regulations to remain within the USD-pegged blockchain ecosystem.
For instance, Binance and former CEO Changpeng Zhao returned illicit swap fees to the US Treasury as part of a plea agreement with the Department of Justice. This precedent suggests that in future cases, centralised services should return all swap fees to either Bybit or the US authorities.
DeFi platforms and legal responsibility
Decentralised mixers, bridges, and swap exchanges differ significantly from centralised entities. Their immutable and censorship-resistant nature means they cannot be negligent in the traditional sense. 
As long as transaction outcomes remain visible and do not obstruct stolen asset recovery, these platforms do not bear direct legal responsibility.
However, the question of whether they should return swap fees is more complex. 
In Dr. Tavus’ Ph.D. thesis, it been argued the concept of limited responsibility for validators, nodes, and miners. As long as a DeFi platform operates within its design, it holds no legal responsibility for transactions.
That said, these platforms engage in professional business activities and profit from them. If an illicit transaction occurs, demanding that stakers or liquidity providers return funds sets a problematic precedent, as there is no clear standard for distinguishing liability in such scenarios.
When DeFi platforms should act
While DeFi platforms may not be legally liable, they should not profit from sustained illicit activity. If a protocol repeatedly facilitates illicit transactions without intervention, scrutiny is warranted. 
In the Bybit case, ThorChain accumulated several million dollars in swap fees from illicit transactions over multiple days without any remedial action. At this point, returning these fees is the appropriate course of action.
Validators, who uphold the network’s integrity, should not benefit from illicit transactions. If they unexpectedly earn high margins from such activity, accusations of gross negligence for profit may arise. 
This presents a dilemma: are they passively profiting from illicit transactions, or are they upholding a censorship-resistant system?

Dr. Rasit Tavus, founder and CEO of LegalBlock argues the legal status of Lazarus swap transactions falls into two categories: decentralised finance (DeFi) tran

Opinion: Legal expert recommends Defi platforms return Lazarus swap fees

Today, Sui network validators have ceased processing transaction requests from the individual responsible for stealing over $220 million worth of cryptocurrency from Cetus Protocol. Dr. Rasit Tavus, the founder and CEO of LegalBlock comments on the recent incidents on Sui.
While such large-scale losses are uncommon on blockchain networks, immediate intervention of this nature may seem unusual or even unlawful at first glance.
There has been criticism of the Sui network’s level of decentralisation. However, it is important to clarify that decentralisation does not equate to anarchy. Validators and miners are not passive observers; they hold real responsibilities in maintaining the integrity of the network.
Blockchain networks are operated and upheld by a range of participants, including validators, stakers, and miners. Each network runs on a specific consensus mechanism to coordinate its operations. 
A core principle of blockchain technology is that its management is decentralised, allowing anyone to participate freely.
Validators on the Sui network are members of the SUI network partnership. When users interact with a blockchain — by transacting, paying for services, or relying on its security — they are entering into an implicit agreement with the network and its operators.
Users inherently trust that the blockchain will protect their assets. That trust places a duty on validators and miners to maintain the network’s safety, which can be understood as a semi-custodial relationship.
When a blockchain’s partners become aware of illicit activity, their primary responsibility is to act to stop it. This obligation has long been recognised, dating back to Roman law, and does not need to be outlined in a whitepaper to be valid. 
Preventative and recovery measures must be considered immediately when urgent situations arise.
If validators choose to reject transaction requests from a wallet controlled by a malicious actor, that action is lawful, so long as it is agreed upon by the blockchain’s participating members. 
In such cases, the decision becomes part of the consensus process itself.

Today, Sui network validators have ceased processing transaction requests from the individual responsible for stealing over $220 million worth of cryptocurrency

Opinion: Decentralised networks are not anarchy networks

Interviewees:
Wiring autonomous AI
Powering autonomous agents requires collaboration between compute, data availability, and indexing layers, each playing a different role in helping agents act effectively.
“Compute, data, and indexing layers must co-evolve and interoperate to support autonomous agents,” said Aleph Cloud’s head of marketing, Clément Fermaud. “That would ensure that they can dynamically find data and compute resources without central bottlenecks, enabling them to operate securely with constant access to fresh and relevant information.”
For 0G Labs, the opportunity lies in enabling agent swarms to coordinate at scale.
“DA acts as the scalable and reliable storage foundation, compute handles verifiable inference tasks, and indexing facilitates memory and state recall,” Michael Heinrich, co-founder and CEO of 0G Labs, explained. “Together, these layers ensure agents can instantly access trusted context, perform computations locally or across GPU networks, and share results smoothly.”
The Graph, meanwhile, focuses on enabling unified workflows for agents.
“Agents need to read data, process it, and write results back seamlessly,” said Nick Hansen, team lead at The Graph Foundation. “Our role is to let agents query indexed data, act on it, and contribute insights into datasets that remain consistent across applications.”
The trust layer
As AI-native systems evolve, security and performance become equally critical for scaling agent ecosystems.
“Confidential computing is needed because protecting data, models, and logic is fundamental,” said Fermaud. “AI agents handle highly sensitive inputs, so in a decentralised network of untrusted nodes, TEEs are essential to keep those secrets during processing. Hardware enclaves isolate code and data, ensuring private inputs or proprietary logic are never exposed to the node operator.”
0G Labs has tackled the performance bottleneck.
“AI swarms generate and exchange huge traces of models, inputs, and outputs,” Heinrich explained. “Traditional blockchains can’t handle GB/s-scale streaming. Our architecture separates publishing and storage lanes, uses GPU-accelerated erasure coding, and supports multi-consensus shards for infinite horizontal scalability, letting agents fetch and confirm data with near real-time latency.”
For The Graph, trust comes from verifiable and structured data.
“AI agents need more than just raw data. They need reliable, structured, and context-rich datasets,” said Hansen. “By indexing blockchain information into deterministic Subgraphs and Substreams, we provide datasets that allow agents to make reproducible, verifiable decisions instead of relying on opaque APIs.”
Data markets, incentives, and composability
Building sustainable AI ecosystems requires aligning incentives for networks, node operators, and agents.
The Graph is expanding its infrastructure with Hypergraph, which allows agents to maintain private or shared composable data spaces.
“It’s the difference between reading from a library and writing your own encyclopedia,” Hansen explained. “Hypergraph lets agents blend public blockchain data with proprietary insights and contribute back to shared knowledge in a permissioned way.”
For 0G Labs, scaling relies on rewarding reliability. “Proof of Random Access incentivises nodes for serving data quickly and accurately,” said Heinrich. “We focus on positive reinforcement rather than punishment, rewarding bandwidth, speed, and low-latency performance.”
Aleph Cloud is making privacy-preserving compute more accessible.
“High-performance confidential computing shouldn’t be an enterprise-only capability,” said Fermaud. “Our pay-as-you-go architecture and modular resource options make secure compute affordable for startups, open-source teams, and smaller AI projects.”
The road ahead
As autonomous AI ecosystems grow, interoperability and open standards will shape their scalability.
0G Labs sees the biggest scaling pressure coming from interactions between agents rather than model size.
“A million lightweight agents coordinating in swarms creates higher data throughput demands than a single large model,” Heinrich explained. “Our focus is on enabling modular scalability through multi-consensus DA and GPU acceleration.”
The Graph is working on standards to help agents share and build knowledge collaboratively. “With GRC-20, we’ve introduced schemas that give agents native identities and composable data spaces,” said Hansen. “This enables a world where agents don’t just consume data but contribute insights, annotations, and new knowledge into shared evolving graphs.”
For Aleph Cloud, the future lies in combining different approaches to trust and privacy.
“TEEs are ideal for confidentiality and speed today, but zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption will play bigger roles over time,” said Fermaud. “We envision hybrid systems where agents run inside enclaves for efficiency, while publishing proofs externally for verifiability.”
Foundations for the future
As autonomous agents move from concept to reality, the challenge lies in balancing scale with sustainability. Each layer of the AI stack is adapting to ensure these systems can thrive in the long term.
“At Aleph Cloud, we address sustainability on both ecological and economic fronts,” said Fermaud. “Dynamic resource allocation reduces energy waste, and our pay-as-you-go model makes confidential computing accessible far beyond large enterprises.”
For Heinrich, sustainable growth comes down to incentives. “Proof of Random Access and restaking mechanisms reward nodes for speed and reliability,” he said. “By shifting from punishment to positive reinforcement, we create the conditions for a resilient, global data availability layer.”
Hansen pointed to how demand itself will evolve. “In an AI-native world, query traffic may come from thousands of small agents rather than a handful of big apps,” he said. “That means our incentive structures must adapt so indexers can continue to prioritise the most useful, high-frequency datasets.”

Interviewees: Wiring autonomous AI Powering autonomous agents requires collaboration between compute, data availability, and indexing layers, each playing a dif

Building the AI-Ready Web3 Stack: Compute, Data, and Intelligence

The infrastructure layer that makes onchain AI agents actually usable

Nexo

Andrés Ondarra is Nexo's General Manager for Argentina, leading local operations from the company's Buenos Aires hub. He brings more than 25 years of experience across traditional finance, fintech, and crypto in Latin America, including a background in Wall Street investment banking. Nexo is a leading digital assets wealth management platform designed to help clients grow, manage, and safeguard their crypto holdings. Active in more than 200 jurisdictions, with over 10 million users and more than $7 billion in assets under management (AUM), it is one of the largest crypto lenders globally. Founded in 2018, Nexo has made Buenos Aires its regional hub for Latin America, entering the market through its Buenbit acquisition, local partnerships, and savings products, with further LATAM expansion now under way.
Argentina moved $93.9 billion in crypto volume over three years and generates the highest per-capita crypto volume in Latin America. Out of every market Nexo could have picked for a LATAM hub, what made Argentina the obvious choice, and how much did the Buenbit acquisition shape the timeline versus the underlying market itself?
We chose Argentina because of how its users behave. According to Chainalysis's Global Crypto Adoption Index, Argentina leads Latin America in per-capita adoption, with close to 19.8% of the population using cryptocurrencies in some form, placing it within the global top 20 for adoption. That profile — retail, non-institutional, looking to protect against inflation and dollarize savings — is exactly the profile our value proposition is designed to serve: daily-interest savings, crypto-backed credit, and now the Nexo Card.
There's an additional point that doesn't always show up in volume statistics but was decisive for us: Buenbit already offered its more than one million users the ability to invest from very low amounts in U.S. stocks. For years, the average Argentine investor could only access fractional U.S. assets through CEDEARs, which trade in pesos and are exposed to the exchange-rate gap. Buenbit solved that friction with an account denominated directly in dollars. Finding that product already built, tested, and with real traction was a very clear signal that Argentina not only had the market best suited for us, but also the talent and infrastructure to scale it with Nexo's global platform.
On top of that, since 2024 Argentina's National Securities Commission (CNV) made registration as a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP/PSAV) mandatory to operate legally in the country. Buying a platform that was already registered and licensed — with a clean track record and an established user base — allowed us to enter much faster than if we had started the licensing process from scratch. In short: the market explains why Argentina; the acquisition explains why we were able to move at the speed we did.
Nexo entered Argentina by acquiring Buenbit rather than registering as a PSAV from scratch. Was that regulatory shortcut the deciding factor in choosing Argentina over other LATAM markets, or did the $93.9 billion in three-year volume and the $2,041 per-capita figure (highest in the region) matter more?
 One thing is why we chose Argentina, and another is why we chose to enter by acquiring rather than registering ourselves.
We were going to bet on Argentina regardless: the size of the market and, above all, the intensity of use — the enormous local habit of using stablecoins as a savings tool rather than for speculation — already justified it on their own. What determined the form of entry was purely regulatory. Registering a VASP from scratch involves meeting minimum net-worth requirements, custody policies, compliance and cybersecurity standards, and going through the CNV's approval timelines. Acquiring Buenbit, which was already registered and had a clean operating track record, saved us that time and that risk, and allowed us to start operating with the regulatory confidence already built in. But it wasn't just a licensing matter: the appeal we saw in Buenbit's platform, with a solid track record and a value proposition that resonated strongly with Argentine users, was equally decisive. That already-built product, together with the regulatory registration already obtained, helped us accelerate our expansion into a market that is so strategic and such a priority for Nexo.
Argentina has one of the most stablecoin-native user bases in the world, with the vast majority of exchange activity happening in dollar-pegged assets. How has building for Argentine users shaped the way Nexo thinks about its products globally? Is this a market that's pulling Nexo's roadmap forward rather than the other way around?
The influence runs in both directions, and that's actually the interesting part. Daily-interest digital-dollar savings and crypto-backed credit already existed on Nexo's global platform before we arrived in Argentina. What changed here was how we communicated it and what local rails we built so a user could move in and out of those products from a local bank account without friction: for example, in addition to being able to fund the account with pesos, we recently launched local dollar rails, which allow moving dollars between a local bank account and the platform instantly — something designed specifically for the logic of the Argentine saver.
But it's also true that Argentina is serving us as a testing ground. Our intention is, building on this experience, to expand into other markets with similar dynamics — high inflation, capital controls, the need for dollarization — and that includes both products and narrative. Argentina isn't rewriting our global roadmap, but it is accelerating and validating it under real conditions, with a level of usage that few markets in the world have. That learning is part of what we now want to bring to Peru and Mexico.
The digital dollar savings product is being positioned as an upgrade on the traditional plazo fijo. What was the reaction from Argentine users when Nexo introduced it, and what does that tell Nexo about how ready this market is for crypto-native savings tools compared to other countries it operates in?
We officially launched the product in March 2026, presenting it, without overstating it, as an alternative to the traditional fixed-term deposit: stablecoin savings with daily interest credited automatically and no minimum terms, with immediate availability of funds, and a yield that at the time stood around 13% annual in dollars — above the average for local fixed-term deposits and mutual funds, which were around 8% annual at the time. As part of the launch, we lowered the entry threshold for our loyalty program's welcome benefit (Platinum tier) to a deposit of US$1,000 within the first seven days, so that more users could access a benefit originally aimed at higher-capital users.
The reception was very positive and faster than in other markets where we operate: Argentine users don't need us to explain what a stablecoin is or why it makes sense to save in digital dollars — they already arrive with that habit. That makes Argentina, compared with other countries in the region, a particularly mature market for this type of product.
Nexo became the AFA's regional digital asset partner for what turned out to be a massive year for Argentine football. Looking back at the World Cup now that it's behind us, what did that partnership deliver for Nexo, and how did the AFA relationship change the way Argentines think about the brand?
In April 2026 we became the Official Regional Digital Assets Partner of the Argentine national football team for South America, a one-year agreement that included ticket giveaways for Argentina's World Cup matches, signed jerseys, and content with national-team players. We chose to partner with the Argentine national team because we share the same values: discipline, ambition, and the idea that you can always go further are the same principles we built Nexo on. Beyond the sporting result — Argentina reached the World Cup final, which remains a source of pride for the whole country — for us the value of this partnership never depended on a single result, but on something deeper: it allowed us to humanize and localize the brand, to show that Nexo understands and shares what matters to Argentine people, to show that behind the platform there's a local team, of Argentines, working every day so that other Argentines have better financial tools, and to associate ourselves with a symbol that brings together millions of people regardless of whether they already use crypto or not.
The partnership with the AFA was consistent with our local strategy: it wasn't generic advertising, but about building a long-term relationship with a country that has already chosen digital assets as part of its everyday financial life. That's why our campaign was built around that idea of continuity and progress — "always moving forward" — and the constant pursuit of the next generation of champions, both on the field and in the way we think about the future of digital finance in Argentina. We feel inspired by those who always go further.
Banks are expected to start offering crypto services in Argentina once the BCRA lifts its restriction. Does Nexo see that as validation of the market it's already built in, and what does it want its role to look like once that happens?
It would be great news for the whole ecosystem, and yes, we would read it as validation. If the Central Bank decides to lift the restrictions that currently prevent banks and payment service providers (PSPs) from offering crypto, it's because the market that platforms like ours built over years of restrictions has already shown demand solid enough for traditional banking to want to get involved. And that, ultimately, is good for the user: more access, more competition, and more opportunities for more people to benefit from what digital assets offer.
We don't see it as a threat to what we've built, but as the next stage in this market's maturation.
Buenos Aires is now Nexo's hub for expanding into Peru and Mexico. What is it about what's been built in Argentina that Nexo is most excited to bring to the rest of the region?
What excites us most is having proven, with real numbers rather than just hypotheses, that a digital-dollar savings product with a strong local narrative — positioned against traditional savings instruments people already know, like the fixed-term deposit — can drive mass adoption in a market under currency stress. That learning, together with the experience of building local rails in domestic currency to reduce onboarding friction, and a brand strategy with cultural grounding like the one we had with the AFA, is exactly the combination we want to replicate in Peru and Mexico.
These are markets with their own dynamics: Mexico, according to Chainalysis, is the region's third-largest market by volume, and Peru, though smaller, is growing strongly. In both cases the pitch is similar to Argentina's: access to better dollar rates, wealth diversification, and, over time, the ability to move money between countries in the region more simply. Buenos Aires functions as the center from which we coordinate that expansion, drawing on the team and the knowledge we've already built here.
If everything goes right for Nexo in Argentina, what does the company look like here in five years, and what role does Nexo want to have played in Argentina's crypto story by then?
 I think we're already seeing it, and that gives us a lot of confidence about where we're headed. In five years, we picture Buenos Aires consolidated not only as the hub toward Peru and Mexico, but as a relevant decision-making center for all of South America. We also picture much deeper integration between crypto and the traditional financial system, and Nexo as one of the reference players in the convergence of financial solutions that let users manage their assets through comprehensive offerings and access to more efficient products.
The challenge ahead of us is staying differentiated from other local and international exchanges competing for the same dollarized audience, and the way to achieve that is by keeping doing what got us here: listening to what the Argentine saver needs before anyone else, building products from that, and then bringing them to the rest of the region. If in five years people associate Nexo with having helped millions of Argentines preserve the value of their savings in a simpler and more transparent way, we will have fulfilled the role we set out to play.

"Argentine users don't need us to explain what a stablecoin is or why it makes sense to save in digital dollars — they already arrive with that habit. That makes Argentina, compared with other countries in the region, a particularly mature market for this type of product."

Why Nexo is betting on Argentina to lead its LATAM expansion

Shunyet Jan

Q&A format focused on the financial super app vision, inclusivity and access, 24/7 trading, and price discovery.
Shunyet Jan spent the years before crypto on Wall Street, going back to the 1990s. He joined Binance in December 2025, and now oversees everything trading-related on the exchange, from spot and perpetuals to bStocks, Binance's tokenized equities product.
This conversation, pulled from a July 22nd fireside chat between our Head of Research, Ryan Calej, and Binance’s Head of Exchange & Trading, Shunyet Jan on X, followed the release of our latest Binance report, From Exchange to Infrastructure: How CEXs Are Reshaping Global Market Access. It covers four threads from that report: Binance’s financial super app vision, and Shunyet’s thoughts on access and inclusivity, 24/7 markets, and price discovery.
Binance’s financial super app vision
Binance started as a place to trade crypto. What's changed most fundamentally about the role exchanges play for users today?
Users first came to Binance to swap one crypto for another. Stablecoins were the next big shift, turning "stable to volatile" into a routine conversion. Perpetuals came after that: a 24/7 asset class that aggregates liquidity into a single instrument tracking spot price, instead of the month-by-month contracts TradFi futures markets are built around.
From there, the pattern repeated. Users didn't just want to only trade anymore. They wanted to make payments and get access to other asset classes, and exchanges had already built the infrastructure, 24/7 trading, instant settlement, cross-margining, to support it. Competitors that started in TradFi are now moving into crypto, and Binance is moving the other way, into TradFi assets and payments. Everyone is converging on the same goal: users who used to need three or four different apps now want one.
Is growth going to come more from the sheer number of assets you list, or from integrations on the collateral and settlement side, letting people use these assets as collateral for trading?
Both. Binance has started testing letting TradFi assets be used as collateral to trade other TradFi assets or crypto derivatives, and is working with regulators to expand that carefully. But the growth driver nobody's really talking about is a different one: wealth management. US equities are a massive asset class partly because there's an entire industry of mutual funds and hedge funds managing that money for people. Crypto doesn't have that. Strip out Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and BNB, and there isn't much diversification left, and there isn't much of an industry helping users manage what they hold.
Vaults exist today, but only for crypto assets. Tokenizing an ETF is close to tokenizing a fund, but most ETFs are index products, meaning passive management. Active management, and asset managers who actually understand both crypto and TradFi, are rare. Most global managers stick to one jurisdiction or one asset class. Whether the answer ends up being vaults, or opening access to third-party asset managers, isn't settled yet. But asset management is the piece that's still missing.
Do you see the line between "crypto exchange" and "TradFi exchange" blurring, to the point where CEXs eventually do as much TradFi volume as crypto volume?
 The broader asset market, equities and fixed income, is much bigger than crypto. Nvidia alone is bigger than the entire crypto market combined. CEXs took the lead on 24/7 trading and cross-margining, and that advantage is going to pull volume toward normalization based on market cap. It's plausible that half of Binance's volume eventually comes from TradFi assets.
Right now, most of that TradFi exposure is US-centric. But demand isn't only for US assets: users in the US may want access to Korea, users in Africa may want access to Hong Kong. Getting a brokerage account outside your home jurisdiction is hard even if you live in a developed country. CEXs are positioned to be the first to open that up broadly.
Inclusivity and access, 24/7 trading, and price discovery
Tokenized stocks have been tried before. Why is this the year it's actually taking off?
Regulatory clarity is the biggest factor. Earlier attempts at tokenizing equities were a good first effort, but they missed pieces of what users actually wanted. The newer generation of products, bStocks included, fills those gaps. That coincided with a market backdrop where the hype and growth in TradFi, especially around AI and the hyperscalers, gave people an additional reason to want in.
Is that demand retail-driven, and if so, why?
 Very much so, and very inclusive. A lot of bStocks volume is in small, fractional positions starting at $5. Opening a brokerage account isn't hard if you live in a developed country. Most of the world doesn't have that option. Stablecoins already proved the model: they made the US dollar available globally, and that same rail now makes other assets easy to access too. Historically, buying Nvidia or Microsoft meant needing a US bank account, US dollars, and a brokerage account, three things that are simply not available to most of the world's population. Tokenized stocks, through CEXs and DEXs alike, open that door.
How important is round-the-clock access, versus the five-day trading week TradFi users are used to?
It shows up on both the derivatives side and the equities side. Hyperliquid's volume is now roughly 40% TradFi perps. Binance has followed the same curve: TradFi volume on its perp market was at zero in January and is around 30% today. TradFi itself hasn't caught up, because it hasn't built the rails for 24/7 trading. CEXs and DeFi both have, and the volume is the proof that the demand was always there. A meaningful share of bStocks volume happens outside US trading hours, when TradFi markets are simply closed.
Do the same users trade both bStocks and crypto, or do they stay in separate lanes?
 There's a lot of overlap. Binance's users tend to track the news closely, and this year that's meant AI, which has driven both the TradFi equity rally and a lot of crypto activity. Users interested in one tend to be interested in the other.
As Binance expands into commodities, ETFs, and equities, what needs to be true for those markets to have deep, reliable liquidity?
Binance is already the price setter for crypto spot and crypto perpetuals: in leader-laggard terms, when the market moves, it tends to start on Binance, even with roughly 50% market share. That isn't true yet for TradFi assets during normal trading hours, but it flips on weekends. When TradFi markets are closed, and something moves markets, a geopolitical event, a company announcement, Binance and a handful of competitors become the price setters, simply because they're the only venues open.
The bigger structural piece is Direct Equities, a product that sources real US liquidity directly and lets users tokenize it for free. That solves the liquidity question during regular trading hours: if size isn't available on Binance, it can be sourced through TradFi channels and tokenized on demand. On weekends, when TradFi liquidity isn't accessible at all, Binance's own order book is the liquidity, and it holds that position by default.

Shunyet Jan spent the years before crypto on Wall Street, going back to the 1990s. He joined Binance in December 2025, and now oversees everything trading-related on the exchange, from spot and perpetuals to bStocks, Binance's tokenized equities product.

This conversation, pulled from a July 22nd fireside chat between our Head of Research, Ryan Calej, and Binance’s Head of Exchange & Trading, Shunyet Jan on X, followed the release of our latest Binance report, From Exchange to Infrastructure: How CEXs Are Reshaping Global Market Access.

When markets never close: A Q&A with Binance’s Shunyet Jan

Wei Zhou

Coins.ph

Wei Zhou is the CEO of Coins.ph, the Philippines' largest regulated cryptocurrency exchange with 18M customers, and is spearheading Coins’ global expansion into Australia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Before Coins, he was CFO at Binance, guiding it to become the world’s largest exchange, and served as CFO at Zhaopin.com and Charm Communications. He also led the landmark acquisition of Grindr, where he served as Vice Chairman.
Coins.ph started as a crypto exchange, but your latest initiatives increasingly position the company as a key infrastructure player in the global payments stack. How do you describe Coins.ph’s identity and core mission today?
 We still run an exchange, but I think of Coins.ph more broadly as financial infrastructure. The exchange gives us the liquidity layer, but we are also a regulated wallet, a payments platform, and a bridge between local currencies and global digital assets.
My co-founder and I describe the goal as getting financial transactions as close as possible to T+0 plus zero. In the payments world, T+0 refers to settlement time, and the second zero is the cost. You want both as close to zero as possible.
In the Philippines, we are already quite close in certain corridors. You can move from USDC into pesos at very tight pricing, receive the pesos directly in your wallet and use them for everyday payments. The broader mission is to build that infrastructure across more markets and corridors.
Why are stablecoins rapidly becoming an essential tool for cross-border money movement right now? From a macroeconomic and technological standpoint, what has changed over the past few years to drive this institutional and retail adoption?
 Stablecoins have reached a point where they are no longer used only by crypto traders. They are becoming real financial infrastructure for consumers, businesses, fintechs and financial institutions.
If you look at USDT specifically, in emerging markets it has given anyone outside the US access to a US dollar checking account, essentially. I don’t get any interest on it, but I can use it. All I need is a wallet, and I can convert my local currency through whatever exchange I use locally and get USDT pretty easily. That gives me access to basically everything dollar-denominated.
In Asia, USDT is still the dominant stablecoin, whether it is Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, or other regions. From the US perspective, it is mainly USDC.
The macro side is also important. In markets where local currencies are depreciating, you typically see people willing to pay a premium to buy dollars, USDT or USDC. But for stablecoin usage to really take off, you need more than demand. You need regulated infrastructure, bidirectional flow, and good pricing.
On our exchange, our price is comparable every day, every hour, to the bank mid-market rate for FX, and you can do it at size. That is a key piece of infrastructure. Once that exists, you don’t just have crypto traders using it. You have real companies, financial institutions, banks, payment companies and newer fintech startups.
The Philippines is globally recognized as one of the largest and most dynamic remittance markets. What foundational lessons from building and scaling payment solutions in the Philippines can be applied to solving payment friction in other diverse regions, such as Europe and Latin America?
 The common issue is that you are going to need a license to operate. You can’t run something like LocalBitcoins with stablecoins. No regulated financial institution is going to run on a P2P model. If you are a business, you want to do things you can scale.
The model we built in the Philippines is quite unique compared to other regions because you need flow. We have a license in Thailand and have been operating there, but Thailand isn’t a major cross-border payment or remittance country. The flow just isn’t there, even if you have the infrastructure.
You need to sit in major flows in both directions. If people only want to move out of the local currency because it is depreciating, that is one-directional demand. You need bidirectional flow for it to really work.
You also need a mature banking system. If your banks don’t have APIs that you can connect to for automatic deposits, you are still stuck at the fiat leg. A lot of times, people still have to call a desk or physically go inside a branch.
The lesson is that blockchain solves part of the problem, but you still need licenses, banking access, liquidity, and real payment flows.
Many local stablecoins are being introduced to the market. Even Coins.ph mentioned plans to introduce its own stablecoin. What unique opportunities does a regulated, fiat-pegged peso stablecoin unlock for domestic everyday commerce, and how does it bridge the gap for global businesses interacting with the Philippine market?
We run an exchange, so people naturally come in to exchange pesos for peso stablecoins. As long as we provide that channel, and you can do it anytime and at any size, you can essentially get out of using banks even for pesos.
It is about providing services without friction, and the friction most people face is at the banking level, not the crypto level. You have that ease of use with US dollar stablecoins already, but not really with pesos right now. Once we add a peso stablecoin, a lot of that friction goes away.
What it unlocks is that anyone holding USDC can buy peso stablecoins anytime, on a DEX or on our platform. If you want to invest in peso-denominated financial products, you then have that option.
Once we build that liquidity layer between the peso and the dollar, it will unlock opportunities for peso holders to access the dollar world and for dollar holders to access the peso world.
That is something we have been educating regulators about. I tell them, ‘Don’t think of it as stablecoins. Think of it as dollars on a blockchain. It moves at the speed of light. Your currency still moves at the speed of water. You need your currency to move at the same speed, or everyone holding it is going to move into the faster one.’
A lot of the more progressive regulators are starting to understand that. They have given us a sandbox approach for the peso-backed stablecoin, and we are hoping to get out of the sandbox by the end of the year.
Regions like Latin America are seeing explosive growth in digital transactions. What makes these fast-evolving payment landscapes so attractive for stablecoin integration, and what role do you see them playing in the future of global money movement?
 One market we are really excited about is Latin America, mainly because you have major flows with the US in both directions.
Whether it is buyers of agricultural products, people living in the US sending money home or Chinese sellers in Latin America wanting to take money out, you see a flow that is similar to what we see in the Philippines.
As each country rolls out licensing regimes for crypto and payments, I think there is a pretty big opportunity to copy and paste what we have built in the Philippines into Latin America, namely Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. Those are the major markets down there.
The key is that the flows have to exist in both directions. Once you combine those flows with licensing, local banking access and stablecoin liquidity, you can significantly reduce the time and cost involved in moving money internationally.
You’ve spoken about building a repeatable framework for entering new markets and connecting different payment networks. What are the core pillars of this infrastructure playbook, especially regarding compliance and interoperability, and where do you see this model being applied next?
You need a license, and you need to sit in major flows both ways. You also need a corresponding payment partner or payment license holder.
In the payment world, you can do third-party collection and third-party disbursement, but as a licensed crypto exchange, you can’t necessarily do that. Under the travel rule, crypto companies can generally only send to the same name. If you try to go the other way, people will ask what the purpose of the money is.
You can’t really act as a third-party intermediary processing payment transactions without a payment license. So we would want a partner in the payments world that uses our services to do that.
From an expansion standpoint, that is the infrastructure we have realized is necessary. Once it is in place, stablecoins basically become synonymous with the US dollar. Products built on top of stablecoins, whether that is stocks, lending or cards, make much more sense because you can swap your money in and out without thinking about the cost.
But you have to build it corridor by corridor. Maybe it is the Europe-to-Philippines corridor or the Hong Kong-to-Philippines corridor. Once we have built out the Philippines corridor with many of the sending countries, we can add Brazil, Colombia or Nigeria on the receiving end, either ourselves or with local partners.
At the end of the day, it is about building a network. One of the best ways to improve pricing and liquidity is to drive as much volume through that network as possible. Initially, it is not retail. It is mostly businesses, because they move real, significant volume. A lot of the early adopters are cross-border payment and cross-border e-commerce players.
Looking ahead, as the lines between traditional banking infrastructure and digital assets continue to blur, what does success look like for Coins.ph over the next five years?
 My co-founder and I have a goal of getting financial transactions down to T+0 plus zero, as close as possible. In the payment world, T+0 refers to how long things take to settle. The second zero is the cost, and you want that as close to zero as possible.
In certain markets and countries, that is technically impossible because there are intentional barriers set up to keep money from moving as fast as you would want. But in certain corridors, we are pretty close.
Between the US and the Philippines today, if you are a normal person with a Coinbase wallet and a Coins.ph wallet, you can get close to T+0 plus zero. You deposit money, buy USDC, send it to Coins, sell the USDC into pesos at maybe five basis points, and then you have pesos in your wallet.
Because we are an e-wallet in the Philippines, you can scan and pay as you would with normal money. So that is T+0 plus five or ten basis points.
That is what we hope to achieve more broadly, but we have realized that you have to build it corridor by corridor. Once we build out the Philippines corridor with more sending countries, we can add markets such as Brazil, Colombia or Nigeria on the receiving end, either ourselves or with local partners.
Ultimately, success is building a network where money can move across borders almost instantly and at close to zero cost.

Wei Zhou is the CEO of Coins.ph, the Philippines' largest regulated cryptocurrency exchange with 18M customers, and is spearheading Coins’ global expansion into

Wei Zhou is the CEO of Coins.ph, the Philippines' largest regulated cryptocurrency exchange with 18M customers, and is spearheading Coins’ global expansion into Australia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

T+0 Plus Zero: Coins.ph CEO Wei Zhou on the Speed of Money

Alan Orwick

Quai Network

Alan Orwick is the co-founder of Dominant Strategies, the company behind Quai Network. His work focuses on energy-based money, scalable Proof-of-Work infrastructure, and the machine economy taking shape around AI agents, distributed compute, and autonomous payments. Before Dominant Strategies, Alan worked at Apple on supply-chain analytics and studied distributed-ledger scalability at UT Austin. He is based in Austin, Texas.
Alan is building toward a future where money is globally accessible, programmable, and anchored to measurable energy expenditure rather than institutional promises. Under his leadership, Dominant Strategies launched Quai Network mainnet, introduced Qi as a “hashrate-linked decentralized energy dollar,” and developed SOAP, a merge-mining protocol that lets miners from other Proof-of-Work ecosystems contribute work to Quai while external rewards fund QUAI buybacks and burns.
Much of the discussion around new blockchain launches today revolves around TVL, users, or transaction volume, whereas Quai focuses more on revenue. Why do you think the industry has been optimizing for the wrong scoreboard?
 The simple answer is that TVL, users, and volume are easy to observe and easy to grow with incentives. They aren’t useless metrics. They can tell you whether people are trying a product, whether capital is present, and whether the system is active. But the problem is they’re easy to game, and they don’t always tell you whether the network is creating durable value.
Revenue asks a more direct question. Did someone pay to use the system because it produced something valuable? That’s why we think it deserves more weight. Revenue isn’t perfect, but it’s harder to manufacture than deposits or volume, which can be inflated with subsidies or the promise of an airdrop. That kind of mercenary capital is liable to vanish once the subsidy ends.
The point is not that TVL, or users, or volume should be ignored. The point is they should support the revenue story, not replace it. If activity only exists while incentives are high, that is customer acquisition. If usage produces revenue after the incentives fade, that’s a much stronger signal of real demand.
At first glance, SOAP looks like another buyback-and-burn mechanism, but it seems to be after something bigger. How does it actually work, and what problem were you trying to solve when it was first conceptualized?
 The problem SOAP is tackling is that Proof-of-Work mining creates sell pressure, since miners have real operating costs in the form of hardware and electricity. That is normal, and the point is not that miners should hoard. The issue is that the network's token has to absorb recurring sell pressure while the protocol has no matching source of recurring buy pressure. For example, Bitcoin does roughly $30 million a day in mining rewards with greater than 80% of that typically sold into the market. 
SOAP was designed around a different question: can the network capture the benefits of Proof-of-Work while mitigating miner sell pressure? With SOAP, Quai offsets these emissions through subsidies from Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, DOGE, Ravencoin, and eventually Bitcoin itself.
These mining subsidies from other networks become protocol-funded demand for QUAI. The miner still gets paid for useful work, but part of the value created by mining is converted into buy-and-burn for QUAI holders and the long-term security budget. That was the core insight behind SOAP.
The playbook today is still very much “spend money on incentives or promise an airdrop to attract users,” but SOAP flips that by trying to make the network earn money instead. Can you walk us through that strategy, philosophically and economically?
 The key point is that a Proof-of-Work blockchain is already going to pay emissions for security. Those rewards are the cost of getting miners to do work and produce blocks. In the normal model, the chain pays that cost, miners receive the reward, and if miners sell, the network's asset absorbs the sell pressure without a matching revenue source.
Merge-mining changes the accounting. It lets the same mining infrastructure produce useful work for more than one Proof-of-Work network. SOAP uses that by routing the external merge-mining reward through Quai. The outside-chain reward is sold at market, and the proceeds are used to buy and burn QUAI. In plain terms, SOAP tries to attach revenue to emissions the chain was going to pay anyway.
Philosophically, that is different from paying users with incentives or promising an airdrop. Those programs spend the network's own asset to create activity. SOAP starts from the security budget a Proof-of-Work network already needs, then asks how much external revenue can be captured around that mining activity. Economically, the loop is external mining rewards fund buy-and-burn, buy-and-burn offsets some of the emission pressure, stronger asset economics can attract more hashrate, and more hashrate strengthens security.
With SOAP, the Quai Network captures a large chunk of the value it creates. . Why not let that value flow entirely to miners, validators, or traders?
 Miners, validators, and traders all provide useful functions. They should be paid for those functions. But if all of the value created by the network immediately flows out to service providers or short-term participants, the protocol itself does not build long-term strength.
Retained value is how the network aligns itself with long-term holders and users. In Quai's case, SOAP buy-and-burn accrues value to the asset rather than directing all of the economic benefit to miners at the moment of block production. That does not mean miners are less important. It means the network and its long-term participants also share in the value being created.
This matters for security as well. In Proof-of-Work, the value of the asset is connected to the security budget. A stronger asset can support a stronger mining ecosystem. So value retention is not only a financial design choice. It is also part of how the network supports long-term security.
Crypto has largely moved toward Proof-of-Stake over the past few years. You chose to build a scalable Proof-of-Work network instead. What assumption do you think the rest of the industry made that you simply don't agree with?
 We disagree with the assumption that Proof-of-Work and scale are fundamentally incompatible. That assumption pushed much of the industry toward Proof-of-Stake. Our view is that the right architecture can preserve the advantages of Proof-of-Work while still scaling throughput.
Proof of Entropy Minima (PoEM) and merged-mined execution shards are our answer to that. They let Quai add capacity while sharing one security pool. The goal is to avoid the tradeoff where each new chain or shard fragments security.
We also disagree with the idea that energy is only a cost to minimize. In Proof-of-Work, energy is the external input that ties the system to the physical world. That matters for Quai because the monetary design depends on a real-world cost of production. Proof-of-Stake is a valid design path for many systems, but it does not give you the same energy anchor. For energy-linked money, that anchor is essential.
The Quai team seems rooted in the belief that every form of money ultimately traces back to energy, whether that's gold, fiat, or Bitcoin. How did you arrive at that conclusion, and why does it matter enough to build a blockchain around it?
 The starting point is that durable money usually has a cost behind it. Gold has value partly because it is hard and expensive to extract. Fiat has value because states spend real resources enforcing tax systems, legal systems, borders, and monetary policy. Bitcoin made the production cost explicit through mining.
Those systems are very different, but they all connect money to work in some way. Quai takes that observation seriously and makes the link direct. Qi is designed so issuance tracks difficulty, which is the protocol's measure of the work required to secure the network.
That is why the blockchain has to be built around Proof-of-Work. If the goal is energy-linked money, the system needs a measurable energy input. Qi uses that input as the basis for a medium of exchange whose monetary policy is tied to production cost rather than a central authority.
Qi is an attempt to tie monetary policy to the cost of energy rather than to the decisions of a central authority. If that idea succeeds, what changes about how people think about money?
 It changes money from something people understand mainly as a policy decision into something closer to a production-cost measurement. Today, most currencies depend on central bank decisions, government balance sheets, and policy targets. That means people's savings are exposed to decisions they cannot control.
Qi is designed around a different reference point. Its issuance is tied to the work required to produce blocks. That does not remove every source of volatility or complexity, but it gives the currency a rule based on energy rather than discretion.
If that works, people can start thinking about money in more physical terms. A unit of money is not just a promise from an institution. It is connected to the cost of producing and securing it. That is especially important globally, because energy is a universal input. No country owns the concept of a joule.
The team intentionally spent more time building the network's infrastructure before introducing much of a DeFi ecosystem. Looking at the industry today, do you think we've been too focused on building financial products before building the economic foundations they depend on?
 Yes, in many cases. DeFi has built very sophisticated financial products, but a lot of those products depend on assets that do not have external cash flows. When the main source of yield is another incentive program, the system can become very reflexive. It grows when prices and rewards rise, and it contracts when they fade.
Our view is that sustainable DeFi needs a stronger economic base underneath it. That means money with credible monetary policy, security with a real cost behind it, protocol revenue, and assets that produce yield from activity outside the financial loop.
That is why Quai's order of operations matters. First build the monetary system. Then build a scalable Proof-of-Work system. Then build value capture through SOAP. Then build financial products around assets like liquid mining tokens and mining cash flows. DeFi is more useful when it sits on top of productive economic activity.
That said, we just introduced our first foray into DeFi and launched Quainance on July 8th. It marks an important milestone, as it has been heavily requested by our community and we’ve been putting all of the building blocks in place to ensure the perfect environment was ready for it. 
To reduce risk, the incentives we’ve provided with it are ownerless, as are the deployments to the LP factory. With SOAP revenue now in place, our long-term goal is to drive TVL of USDT for the QUAI/WQI pairs for more overall liquidity in the ecosystem.
Looking ahead five or ten years, if there's one idea behind Quai that you believe the rest of the industry will eventually adopt, what do you think it will be?
 I think the idea is that crypto's highest-value use case is still money. Not points, not governance, not abstract blockspace, but a private, digital monetary asset that can stand on its own. The industry has spent a lot of time building financial applications around tokens, but the foundation is the money itself.
For that to work, the asset needs two things. It needs privacy, because money that exposes your entire financial life is not really cash. And it needs a real cost of production, because neutral money should be anchored to something outside politics and outside its own token economy. That is why Proof-of-Work matters. It connects the monetary asset to energy, and energy is the most universal cost in the world.
So the broader idea I think the industry adopts is energy money. A monetary system where the base asset is produced through real work, secured by real energy, and usable privately as money. For Quai, QUAI is the store-of-value asset, Qi is the energy-linked medium of exchange, and Proof-of-Work is what makes both of those claims credible. SOAP fits into that by making the network economically productive, but the deeper thesis is that the next major crypto asset is money with privacy, energy, and Proof-of-Work at the core.

For Quai, QUAI is the store-of-value asset, Qi is the energy-linked medium of exchange, and Proof-of-Work is what makes both of those claims credible.

Quai Network co-founder on fixing the Proof-of-Work economy and the launch of Quainance

Ben Caselin

Valr

Ben Caselin is Chief Marketing Officer at VALR.com, Africa’s largest digital asset exchange and infrastructure provider by trade volume. He joined in 2023 after nearly four years at a prominent Hong Kong-based crypto exchange — where he rose to VP of Global Marketing — and a stint as Chief Strategy Officer at a Dubai-based exchange. That path through Asian and Middle Eastern crypto markets shapes how he thinks about emerging market adoption, and he applies the lessons learned to building VALR's brand across Africa and the world.
VALR describes itself as a digital asset infrastructure provider rather than simply a crypto exchange. When does an exchange stop being a trading venue and become part of financial infrastructure?
 An exchange stops being a simple trading venue the moment it becomes foundational to how value moves outside its own order book. We first developed within the South African market, an environment that required us to build deep, localised expertise in compliance, wallet security, and clearing mechanisms.
As we mastered those complexities at a local level, we realised that the real challenge on the African continent isn’t just matching buyers and sellers, but rather bridging the fragmented systems that separate regional economies from each other and from global liquidity. As an infrastructure provider, we now power the back-end architecture that allows pan-African enterprises, banks, and remittance providers to capitalise on the benefits digital assets have to offer, and to upgrade their offering to their own customers. 
VALR was born in South Africa, which has a more developed financial system than most of the continent but shares the same currency pressures and exclusion gaps. Does South Africa feel more like a launchpad or a blueprint for what comes next?
 South Africa is a powerful launchpad, but it cannot be a copy-and-paste blueprint. Every jurisdiction has its own unique regulatory reality, banking system, and cultural relationship with money.
As we expand into markets like Kenya, our approach is built on active, collaborative engagement with local regulatory bodies, banks, and corporate partners. We do not enter a new country with the intention to disrupt for the sake of disruption. True progress happens when technology works in harmony with local institutions to solve genuine economic friction. Our strength lies in reading these local realities deeply and entering as a long-term partner dedicated to contributing to the maturity and upward trajectory of each specific economy.
VALR has grown from around 500,000 to 2 million registered users over the past 2.5 years. As CMO, what's the metric you care about more than that one?
 User registration is only the front door. As CMO, the metrics I care about most are institutional reputation, global brand awareness, and genuine capital velocity.
A massive user registration number means very little if those accounts sit dormant. We assess and optimise for the entire user journey, tracking the funnel from sign-up and verification straight through to active funding and trade volume. While VALR may not have the highest number of raw registrations compared to some retail-heavy platforms on the continent, we consistently record the highest trade volume, particularly across stablecoins. High-volume liquidity and institutional trust are the metrics that prove your platform is actually being used as a primary engine for financial activity.
Your academic work was on grassroots community formation and post-colonial identity. Do those experiences change how you see and approach what VALR is building?
 My personal focus has shifted away from classical post-colonial theory and toward a more forward-looking perspective: the idea of humanity transitioning from collective adolescence to conscious maturity.
VALR is fundamentally a values-driven company. We view our work not just as a commercial enterprise, but as an active contribution to social progress. This means advancing financial practice and discourse with a clear set of principles. When we look at economic development, we believe that material progress must be anchored to ethical responsibility, virtue, and purpose. By applying these foundational principles to financial technology, we can help build a system that moves past old divisions and fosters a more unified, equitable framework for human prosperity.
You're serving first-time users and sophisticated traders on the same platform. How do you educate someone who has never held a digital asset about digital finance?
 Education is about elevating the conversation and expanding consciousness. To that end, we maintain an active blog that avoids retail hype and instead provides thoughtful, objective insights into market mechanics. In our daily content and social output, we focus on delivering alternative perspectives on macroeconomics and articulating high-minded aspirations so that newcomers can enter the space with clarity.
Through The VALR Podcast, hosted by VALR’s CEO, Farzam Ehsani, we bring our audience into conversations with today’s architects of global finance. We feature leaders like Tether’s Paolo Ardoino, Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, and Hyperliquid’s Jeff Yan. This is one of the ways in which we seek to demystify the industry and explore how digital assets might help to change finance for the better.
Crypto is often held up as a financial inclusion tool, but in much of Africa the real barriers are fiat rails, ID infrastructure, and connectivity. Are there any initiatives at VALR to move the needle on inclusion?
 Financial inclusion cannot occur in a vacuum. It requires a structural foundation. At VALR, we look at this problem through a dual lens, operating as both a consumer platform and a foundational infrastructure provider. While the public knows us as an exchange, the reality is that we build the behind-the-scenes architecture that makes local financial systems work better. We serve some of the continent's most relevant institutions and have established strategic agreements with major African banks to bridge the gap between legacy fiat systems and modern networks. By upgrading the underlying plumbing of finance, we are working towards lowering the cost of moving value for millions of people, even those who may never directly open a VALR account.
True inclusion also means expanding what people can do with their capital once they have access. For our audience in South Africa, we introduced tokenised fractionalised equities, enabling users to gain exposure to global markets with small amounts of capital that would otherwise be locked out by traditional brokerage fees. Furthermore, our recent integration of Hyperliquid natively anchors our derivatives setup to a high-performance blockchain network. This brings deep liquidity directly to our users without sacrificing the regulatory oversight and security they expect from a trusted venue. Beyond mere access, we are building a secure gateway to global economic opportunity.
Our global crypto rankings index found that adoption across Africa looks completely different depending on where you are. Sub-Saharan markets like Nigeria and Kenya are driven by necessity and P2P networks, while North African markets like Egypt and Morocco show strong stablecoin demand despite tighter restrictions. Is there a continent-wide story here, or is Africa simply too diverse to generalise?
 Africa is far too diverse to treat as a single market, but there is a singular truth that unites these regional behaviours: people will always gravitate toward the path of least economic friction.
In Sub-Saharan markets like Nigeria, a lack of deep domestic liquidity and banking access drove the population to adopt peer-to-peer setups. In North Africa, where traditional financial structures are more established but capital controls restrict movement, the demand manifests as a search for store-of-value alternatives like stablecoins.
Cross-border payments in Africa are still expensive and inaccessible for most people. Where has crypto actually closed that gap in practice, and where are the bottlenecks?
 Crypto has closed the gap where traditional rails fail fundamentally: in speed and cost for intra-African corporate and retail payments. In practice, we see this in the adoption of stablecoins. Businesses and individuals in Africa are able to bypass the traditional multi-day, multi-intermediary banking system to settle transactions in minutes at a fraction of the cost.
The bottlenecks, however, are rarely technical; they are structural and regulatory. Capital controls, fragmented regional regulations, and the steep cost of fiat-to-crypto on-and-off ramps create friction. When the law restricts the free movement of value, activity doesn't stop, it simply goes underground into peer-to-peer setups. There are countless examples of that across the continent. The challenge now is building compliant, transparent bridges that prove to regulators that digital assets protect local economies rather than threaten them.
VALR partnered with Onafriq to support mobile money transfers, something millions of Africans have used long before crypto. How do you see digital assets fitting into Africa's existing financial ecosystem?
 We don’t suffer from the illusion that crypto needs to replace everything that came before it. Mobile money is one of the greatest financial success stories on the continent. For millions, it is their primary relationship with money.
We don't want to force users to abandon interfaces they already trust. Our strategy is to preserve the user-facing interfaces while upgrading the underlying rails. By partnering with networks like Onafriq, we are plugging digital asset infrastructure directly into the existing ecosystem. It’s an acknowledgment that the future of finance in emerging markets isn't about choosing between crypto or mobile money. It's about a seamless convergence that makes the movement of value faster and cheaper for the end user.
You've spoken about wanting VALR to become synonymous with digital assets in Africa the way Coinbase is with the US. What’s the strategy to get there?
 The strategy rests on two pillars: absolute regulatory compliance and institutional-grade infrastructure. To become the definitive gateway for a continent, you must be a trusted, predictable entity. We have spent years building a regulatory fortress, securing our licences, and taking zero shortcuts with counterparty risk. That is how you win the trust of large-scale institutions and global partners.
But validation is only half the battle; the other half is utility. We are expanding our architecture to offer products that matter globally, like our recent launch of over 200 cross-asset perpetual markets. We are positioning VALR as the primary bridge connecting African capital to global markets, and global liquidity to the African continent. When people look for safety, depth, and structural integrity in this region, VALR is the partner of choice.

VALR is fundamentally a values-driven company. We view our work not just as a commercial enterprise, but as an active contribution to social progress.

Africa's gateway: How VALR is turning an exchange into financial infrastructure

Marcin Kazmierczak is the co-founder and chief operating officer of RedStone, an oracle and data infrastructure provider that has expanded well beyond price feeds. Today, the company offers products spanning credit risk, liquidation infrastructure, and tokenized asset settlement, serving more than 200 DeFi clients across public and permissioned blockchains.
Tokenized assets have grown to a $28 billion onchain market cap, and the infrastructure supporting them plays a critical part in growing that number further. Our Head of Research Ryan Celaj sat down with Kazmierczak during RedStone’s TokenizeThis conference in NYC to discuss RedStone's expansion beyond oracles, the infrastructure needed to support real-world assets in DeFi, and how institutions are shaping the next phase of onchain finance.
Ryan: RedStone started as an oracle provider. Today you span pricing, risk ratings, liquidation infrastructure, and now RedStone Settle. At what point did the vision shift from data delivery to something broader, and what drove it?
Marcin Kazmierczak: From the very beginning, we took a traditional early-stage company-building approach of listening to what the market actually needs. I believe one of the core reasons so many early crypto companies failed was an obsession with delivering the product they thought would disrupt the space, without continuously asking potential clients about what was actually needed.
A practical example: we started with oracles because we couldn't find what we needed from Chainlink in 2020 and 2021. From there, our product roadmap was always driven by client demand. The first product-market fit we hit, in 2022 and 2023, was with Mento on Celo. They needed accurate stablecoin price feeds. Then Pendle needed price feeds across L2s for yield-bearing assets. Then we were the first oracle to support EtherFi and Ethena expansion. We scaled from there to over 200 clients.
Credora followed the same logic. We acquired it because risk curators were dealing with a proliferation of assets and strategies and needed a better way to assess risk. RedStone Settle came from seeing that people wanted to use tokenized RWAs as collateral in lending markets, but on-chain liquidity wasn't there to support liquidations.
Today I'd describe RedStone not just as an oracle, but as the full-suite orchestration layer for tokenized and crypto assets used across DeFi. Price feeds, NAV delivery, risk assessment, on-chain liquidity monitoring, liquidation infrastructure. The goal is that when an institution wants to go onchain with a vault or tokenized asset, they don't need to source a handful of providers. They come to us.
Ryan: You mentioned early bets on Celo and Pendle that proved instrumental to their growth. You've also been working with Canton. As more institutions come onchain, do you see public and permissioned chains as parallel tracks or converging ones?
Marcin: I think it's going to be two worlds that occasionally intersect. Retail and mass adoption will happen on public blockchains because they're accessible, and that's what mainstream users expect. Large transactions and B2B interactions will likely happen on both, but predominantly on private chains. Institutions don't want to disclose their strategies, their repo market activity, any of that.
Canton is a good example of this. Financial institutions love it because of its privacy layer. But if you ask at a conference like Tokenize This who's actually using Canton, almost nobody raises their hand. It's a chain built for institutions, not retail. Different product-market fit, different audience.
As an oracle and orchestration layer, we want to support both ecosystems. They have different needs. But the one requirement that's consistent across both is reliability. RedStone is the only oracle provider that has never had a single mispricing or downtime event. Six years of clean data delivery.
Ryan: We're here at TokenizeThis. Is this mainly a brand exercise, deal flow, or something else?
 Marcin: All three. When we first spoke with the TokenizeThis team, the quality of the team behind the conference and attendees coming to the event were clear, and we wanted all of that in our ecosystem. That’s why we acquired STM and TokenizeThis.
Moreover, our DNA is technical excellence. We've never invested heavily in marketing because we believed you need absolutely solid fundamentals before you scale distribution. We have those fundamentals now. So this is the distribution phase, particularly in the US, where most financial innovation is happening.
I'll also say I'm genuinely proud of this event. The feedback from everyone I've met has been very positive. The quality of attendees, the venue. We can already announce that TokenizeThis 2027 is happening, and we're likely adding a satellite event around Token 2049 in Singapore.
Ryan: Can you walk through the problem RedStone Settle is solving?
Marcin: Tokenizing an asset is just the first step. The real value comes from actually using that asset within DeFi: lending, borrowing, liquidity provision. The constraint in lending specifically is onchain liquidity.
Imagine you're using ten million dollars of private credit as collateral. If there's a drawdown and the position needs to be liquidated, there's essentially zero onchain liquidity to execute against. You can't just sell into a thin market.
Settle addresses this through whitelisted solvers who are willing to close positions with their own capital. They take custody of the tokenized asset, wait out the redemption period, which might be one to two months, and redeem at maturity with a bonus for providing that service. It runs as an RFQ product. Multiple solvers quote the bonus they require, and the one willing to take the smallest spread wins.
The broader concept here is duration risk, and I think 2026 and 2027 are going to be the years DeFi is forced to actually learn it. Everything in crypto has historically been near-instantaneous. The moment you bring tokenized RWAs into the system, you're dealing with assets that don't settle at T+0. The whole architecture has to account for that lag and that mismatch.
Ryan: As tokenized assets proliferate and vault products get built around them, where does the real competitive moat come from?
Marcin: Three things. First, reputation and credibility. If an asset is delivered by BitGo or operated by Apollo, that brand transfers to the strategy. That matters a lot to allocators.
Second, rates. When we're talking about tokenized RWAs at scale, we're eventually talking about trillions in AUM. At that size, basis points on spreads are meaningful. Any structure that shaves cost off the final strategy has an edge.
Third, distribution. Tokenized assets are accessible globally, around the clock, which creates opportunities in markets that traditional finance doesn't reach well. Tron and USDT in Africa is the clearest example. It grew not because the technology was superior to Solana or Ethereum, but because it got there first and built real product-market fit in those geographies. First-mover distribution in underserved markets is a durable moat.
Ryan: You announced EtherFi's A+ rating from Credora today. How important are ratings like that for a space that hasn't historically had anything equivalent?
Marcin: Very important, especially given the pace of hacks. Credora evaluates a range of risk factors, including operational security: multisig structure, time locks, execution controls on critical transactions.
One element people don't fully appreciate is the feedback loop. When we issue a rating, we also return information about where the entity scored lowest. EtherFi is a good example. They received the rating, understood where to improve their documentation and methodology, and made those changes. The product got better for users. So Credora creates positive pressure to raise the baseline across the ecosystem.
Ryan: Who's driving demand for Credora? Retail or institutions?
Marcin: Both, but currently more from retail. Institutions often have internal risk departments or existing models. Retail users have nothing, so Credora fills that gap directly.
That said, institutional interest is growing. We've seen large funds, including a16z and Galaxy, interacting with the ratings for use in their internal risk modeling and allocation decisions. Going forward, we want to lean further into the institutional side because six years of onchain data translates into practical recommendations that are hard to replicate.
Ryan: Settle just launched. What else is on the horizon?
Marcin: We're actively looking at the market for further expansion and acquisition opportunities as we build out the orchestration suite. Nothing to announce yet, but we're not ruling anything out.
What we are announcing is RedStone Navigate, an advisory program that supports institutions with their onchain rollout. We walk them through vault structures, risk curator selection, security considerations, and what actually happened in recent hacks like Drift and Kelp. It's a step-by-step framework for institutions entering DeFi.

I believe one of the core reasons so many early crypto companies failed was an obsession with delivering the product they thought would disrupt the space, without continuously asking potential clients about what was actually needed.

RedStone Today: a TokenizeThis interview with Marcin Kazmierczak

Michael Steuer

Casper Network

Michael Steuer, President & CTO of Casper Network
Michael is a co-founder of the Casper Network, and was originally responsible for laying out the product vision for the protocol back in 2018. After stepping back from this operational role in 2019, Michael and his team at MAKE have been providing much of the core infrastructure that exists in the Casper ecosystem. In 2024, Michael rejoined the Casper project in the roles of President and CTO of the Casper Association, overseeing the growth of the Casper technology and network.
Prior to Casper, Michael has been a founder and technology executive across multiple industries for over 25 years. In the late 1990s, he oversaw the establishment of an interoperable Premium SMS network across Europe and North America, connecting over 100 mobile network operators. In the early 2000s, he served as CTO for Mobile at THQ, a top-3 video game publisher, where he oversaw the creation of the first downloadable mobile games. He has been active in the blockchain industry since 2013. 
Sixteen years into crypto, total adoption has stalled at a few hundred million users out of 8 billion, and total asset value has largely moved sideways for years, mostly tracking the price of Bitcoin. The industry has not lacked for vision, but for construction. That is the framing behind the Casper Network’s Manifest, announced last month at the Digital Finance Forum in Bermuda: a concrete build plan targeting the two forces Casper believes will drive the next wave of real-world adoption, institutional RWA tokenization and agentic commerce.
In this interview, we chat with Michael Steuer to find out what it takes today to build for institutions, and how Casper is uniquely positioned to do it.
The Casper Manifest covers a lot of ground: EVM compatibility, post-quantum cryptography, AI micropayments, and more. What are the problems in blockchain and DeFi that Casper is built to solve?
 When we founded Casper in 2018, we identified two core problems. First, the industry was too slow to move away from proof-of-work. Casper's consensus mechanism originated in the Ethereum Foundation's research back in 2015, but we estimated it would take another five years before Ethereum completed the merge. That felt too long, both from a cost and environmental standpoint. Today, Casper Network ranks among the top three most environmentally friendly proof-of-stake blockchains in the world and one of the cheapest for operators to participate in.
Second, in 2018 and beyond, most of blockchain was "crypto for crypto's sake." ICOs, memecoins, NFTs -- very little of it solved real-world problems or was designed for non-crypto-native users and enterprises. We set out to build a blockchain that would change that, offering enterprises and institutions what they actually needed to adopt blockchain as part of their technology stack: a familiar developer experience, upgradable contracts, access rights management, and predictable costs.

The Casper Manifest, which we announced during the Digital Finance Forum in Bermuda last month, is a continuation of that philosophy. We believe the next phase of adoption will be driven by two forces: institutional RWA tokenization and agentic commerce. Both come with specific requirements around account configurability, privacy, enterprise-grade security, and regulatory compliance. That is what the Casper Manifest is built to provide.
Three protocol versions in under a year is a fast cadence for a Layer 1. What were some of the tough technical decisions you had to make to get there?
 Casper 2.0 was the real big release. Many of the protocol's core subsystems were rewritten from the ground up: a new consensus protocol in "Zug" for instant finality at scale, protocol-native liquid staking, and the groundwork for multi-VM execution. To avoid overwhelming the ecosystem, we rolled out the remaining functionality in phases. Casper 2.1 halved block time and introduced deflationary tokenomics. Now, as part of the Casper Manifest, we are leveraging those multi-VM capabilities to add EVM execution to the layer one, alongside protocol-native account abstraction to power AI-friendly smart accounts and gasless transactions.
You recently took the stage in Bermuda to present Casper's new Manifest. Can you walk us through the headlines and what it means?
 The room in Bermuda was filled with TradFi investors and asset allocators all looking at the same two verticals: RWA tokenization and AI. But no L1 protocol today can claim a holistic framework to power both for the next decade. The solutions we have seen are partial at best.
Take finality. About half of the world's RWAs live on Ethereum, but Ethereum will not have single-block finality until the end of the decade. When a hedge fund moves a billion-dollar asset, they don't want to wait for 64 confirmations. Casper has had instant finality since day one. Take quantum safety. A CISO committing to a decade-long blockchain deployment wants to know the quantum threat has been answered today, not earmarked for future research. Take privacy. Funds don't want competitors seeing their trades, but existing privacy protocols are all-or-nothing and largely shunned by institutional participants for it. Casper's Manifest provides compliant privacy with selective disclosure and Proof-of-Innocence.
The same logic applies to AI agents. Giving agents the ability to transact is only half the equation. They also need accounts with owner-defined limits: how much they can spend, how long they have access, and what assets they can touch. Casper's smart accounts provide that infrastructure for the machine economy.
Casper is adding EVM as a second execution environment on top of its existing multi-VM architecture. What does running multiple execution environments on the same chain open up for users and developers day to day?
 Casper's addition of EVM brings clear benefits to both users and developers. For users, especially crypto-native ones, it brings familiarity. You can use your MetaMask wallet and do all the things you're used to from other EVM chains. For developers, it's particularly interesting. The same familiarity benefit applies: you can bring your EVM developer tooling, port over existing contracts from other networks, and use audited libraries from OpenZeppelin. But you also get an EVM running on a blockchain with instant finality and an existing ecosystem of primitives more advanced than many EVMs out there. We are tremendously excited to see what developers will cook up with this.
X402 micropayments are first to ship. For those who have not come across it before, what is X402, and why does it matter for Casper and the machine economy?
 X402 targets AI agents. We all want our agents to have a level of autonomy, which means transacting without a human intermediary. But AI agents do not fill out credit card forms, sign up for premium API plans, or use Apple Pay.
That is where X402 comes in. It is a 30-year-old HTTP standard that has finally found its product-market fit. Most people are familiar with 404 errors, which tell a browser that a page was not found. The 402 response code works similarly, telling the visitor that payment is required to access a resource. For decades, nobody did anything with it. Now it is being used to charge AI agents a small micropayment for access to online resources on a pay-per-use basis, settled in crypto. Casper launched X402 in early June and became the first WASM-native blockchain to do so.
Post-quantum cryptography is on the 2027 timeline. How do you explain that risk to an institution evaluating a blockchain platform today, before quantum hardware is anywhere near mainstream?
 Interestingly, institutions don't need this explained. Their CISOs read the same reports your readers do. Just last month, both Google and Nvidia confirmed they expect quantum safety to become a real concern before the end of the decade. No CISO will commit to a decade-long blockchain deployment if that question hasn't been properly answered.
For many chains, it remains a theoretical research question. Casper designed for this eventuality from day one in 2018, and leads the industry in bringing quantum-safe cryptography to mainnet. The protocol already supports two cryptographic key algorithms side by side. Adding a third or fourth is a maintenance task, not open-heart surgery as it will be for many other chains.
Privacy infrastructure has become a major focus across the industry lately. What is Casper's angle on it and how does it fit with the compliance requirements your target clients have?
 Privacy is critical for institutional adoption. A fund doesn't want competitors seeing its trades. An enterprise doesn't want vendors' pricing exposed. Onchain privacy has been partially solved, but not compliantly. Most solutions today are all-or-nothing: transactions are either fully private or fully visible, which means authorities can't see them either. That invites illicit usage and makes existing privacy protocols difficult to bring to regulated markets.
At Casper, we believe that privacy can be done in a compliant way. Transactions that are fully confidential to the public, but selectively disclosed to authorities, regulators, and auditors. Counterparties that are completely anonymous to the public, but with Proof-of-Innocence to attest they are not blacklisted. Combined with our native implementation of ERC-3642, the compliant security token standard powering the vast majority of RWA tokens today, and native compliance hooks built directly into the protocol, we provide a compliance infrastructure that is unique in the industry.
You described the Manifest as a construction plan and not a vision document. What does success look like for Casper in three years by following this plan?
 Take an honest look at our industry: the adoption after 16 years has stalled at a few hundred million users worldwide, out of 8 billion. And for the last several years, the total asset value for all of crypto fluctuates between $1.5T and $3T, mostly tied to the price of Bitcoin. This means no new investment flows into this space, and that we’re basically just moving value around from project to project, from chain to chain, based on where the current crypto-native hype resides. We believe that the solution to break out of this crypto silo, to truly achieve adoption in the real world, is no longer about dreaming up what needs to be built - it is about actually building it. And that construction plan is the Casper Manifest.

Success for Casper in three years means success for the blockchain industry as a whole. We don’t believe in zero-sum games. We believe in growing the proverbial pie. After we announced the Casper Manifest, we’ve seen several projects announce specific elements of our roadmap as well. For us, this means not just peer validation, but also that as an industry we are getting serious about meeting the real world where it is. Casper is already going there. Success would be seeing the rest of the industry joining us on this journey.

We believe the next phase of adoption will be driven by two forces: institutional RWA tokenization and agentic commerce.

The Casper Manifest: Why the next wave of crypto adoption needs a construction plan

Raees Chowdhury is the Chief Investment Officer at Tok-Edge, where he leads the launch of the firm’s $100 million crypto fund focused on bridging institutional capital and on-chain markets through a novel “Redemption Token” structure. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2021), he is an Oxford-trained economist with published research and multiple awards in game theory, and has been investing in crypto and DeFi since 2017. He previously served as Managing Partner at Revolt Ventures, the venture arm of a $10bn platform, and began his career at BCG and Bain. He is also the co-author of the Redemption Token whitepaper.
Institutional interest in crypto has clearly arrived. Institutional access to DeFi largely has not. ETFs and treasury companies validate demand, but they keep investors inside traditional financial rails, touching none of the programmable capital markets, on-chain yield, and composable liquidity that make DeFi structurally different from anything that came before it. 
Tok-Edge was built around closing that gap, with a novel Redemption Token model and a $100 million crypto fund as its first proof of concept. We sat down with Raees Chowdhury to find out how he plans to get institutions there.
Tok-Edge just emerged from stealth with a pretty clear conviction: institutions want DeFi exposure, but the products don't exist yet. Walk us through the founding thesis; what specifically did you see that others weren't building?
 The starting point was noticing that institutional interest in crypto had clearly arrived, but institutional access to DeFi really hadn’t. Most of the products available today are still wrappers around crypto rather than actual exposure to on-chain capital markets. ETFs, treasury companies, structured products - they all validate demand, but they largely keep investors inside traditional financial rails. What we felt was missing was a bridge between institutional standards and genuinely crypto native strategies.
On one side, you had products institutions were comfortable with operationally, but they didn’t really capture the innovation happening in DeFi. On the other side, you had highly sophisticated on-chain ecosystems that most institutions simply couldn’t engage with from a governance or compliance perspective. Tok Edge was built around closing that gap.
We think the next phase of crypto is less about passive exposure to large-cap tokens like Bitcoin and more about participation in DeFi as programmable capital markets. Things like permissionless trading venues, on-chain yield generation, liquidity provision - these are fundamentally new financial primitives.
That was the conviction behind the business from day one.
Your background runs through BCG, Bain, Revolt Ventures, and an Oxford MPhil in Economics. At what point did you decide DeFi was where the real capital markets innovation was happening, and what finally convinced you?
 I think the turning point was realizing that DeFi wasn’t just creating new assets; it was creating entirely new market infrastructure.
Coming from a traditional finance background, my initial instinct was skepticism. There was obviously a lot of speculation and noise in the early market. But underneath that, there was genuine innovation happening at an incredible pace.
What really convinced me was seeing financial coordination happen natively on-chain without relying on the traditional layers of intermediaries we’ve accepted for decades.
You suddenly had markets operating globally, 24/7, with transparent settlement and programmable logic built directly into the system. That’s a pretty profound shift once you spend enough time understanding it.
And the speed of iteration was unlike anything I’d seen before. Entire financial models were being tested and rebuilt in months instead of years – take Uniswap, Aave, Morpho or more recently Hyperliquid. At a certain point, it became hard to ignore that some of the most important capital markets experimentation was happening inside DeFi.
You've argued that BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF and Strategy's digital asset treasury validate institutional demand, but that they're "single asset products restricted to traditional finance rails." What does an institution actually miss out on when its crypto exposure is purely ETF-based?
 The simplest way to think about it is that ETFs provide exposure to the asset class, but not really to the underlying financial ecosystem being built around it.  It’s also very limited; ETFs are restricted by geography and, to date, are exclusively for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
If you own a Bitcoin ETF, you’re still participating through traditional infrastructure. You’re not interacting with on-chain trading liquidity or the DeFi composability that makes crypto investment returns structurally different from previous asset classes, such as validating networks, staking or yield farming.
And a lot of the most interesting economics in crypto actually happen there.
One of the big shifts with DeFi is that assets become programmable. Capital can move, generate yield, provide liquidity, or interact with other protocols in real time. That’s a very different framework from simply holding a static exposure through an ETF wrapper.
So I think ETFs are incredibly important because they validate institutional demand, but they’re still an early-stage bridge product rather than the final form of institutional crypto exposure.
You just published the Redemption Token whitepaper. What problem in token design were you trying to solve, and why did existing models fall short?
 A lot of token models struggle with the same issue, which is that there’s often a disconnect between the token itself and a durable economic purpose.  The industry has gone in the wrong direction with governance tokens and memecoins in the latest market cycle.
Some tokens have utility but limited value accrual. Others become highly speculative without a clear long-term reason to exist beyond trading activity. We wanted to approach token design from a more functional perspective.
The Redemption Token model creates a relationship between the token and the ability for authorised participants to redeem their underlying fund exposure at net asset value. That gives the token a real role rather than purely narrative-driven demand, while remaining transferable and composable within DeFi infrastructure – which means it can still integrate into broader on-chain markets.
The whitepaper estimates the opportunity for this token model at over $1 trillion, larger than the entire stablecoin market. Where does that number come from, and what has to be true for it to materialize?
 The estimate comes from looking at the size of global alternative assets and then asking what happens if even a relatively small portion of that capital becomes interoperable on-chain, applying our Redemption Token model.
When you look across hedge funds, private credit, structured products, real estate, private equity, you’re talking about tens of trillions of dollars globally. So even modest penetration creates a very large potential market.
But for that opportunity to materialize, new token models have to provide real utility or function rather than just acting as a branding or speculative exercise.
Stablecoins succeeded because they solved an actual problem. They made digital dollars efficient, transferable, and globally accessible in what is now a $300bn category. I think on-chain financial products have to do something similar around how they use token models for distribution – for liquidity, transferability, composability, or investor access.
The infrastructure also has to develop and reach a certain level of maturity. Regulation, custody, governance, secondary liquidity - all of those pieces matter if institutions are going to participate meaningfully.
You are launching $HF as the first Redemption Token. What specifically about a crypto fund made it the right vehicle to prove out the model, versus other asset types?
 Crypto funds were a natural starting point because institutional capital is only interested in two things right now: artificial intelligence or financial innovation.  In our crypto case, the underlying assets already exist natively on-chain. That makes the operational side much cleaner compared to trying to apply our Redemption Token model to more illiquid or off-chain assets from day one.
There’s also already a strong cultural understanding within crypto that functionality can exist through tokens and programmed by code, so the market is more receptive to new structures.
From an investment perspective, crypto markets are also relatively liquid compared to many alternative asset classes, which makes redemption mechanics and net asset value as a reference value much more practical to manage.
We saw it as the right environment to prove our model before eventually expanding into broader liquid asset categories over time under the Tok-Edge brand.
Most crypto funds lock up capital for years, whereas Tok-Edge is modelling its fund around scheduled redemption intervals, closer to traditional hedge fund liquidity. How do you balance offering that liquidity with deploying into DeFi strategies that may need time to mature?
 A big part of it comes down to strategy selection and portfolio construction. We’re deliberately focused on liquid digital assets and liquid DeFi opportunities rather than highly illiquid venture-style exposure. That creates much more flexibility around redemption management.
At the same time, we also think there’s a middle ground between fully locked capital and fully instant liquidity. Traditional hedge funds have operated with structured redemption windows for decades because it creates a healthier balance between investor flexibility and protecting the integrity of the strategy itself.
We’re trying to take a similar approach while adapting it to crypto native markets.
Tok-Edge is London-based. The UK is in the middle of shaping its stablecoin and cryptoasset frameworks. How much does the regulatory environment factor into how you've structured the fund, and is London actually a competitive jurisdiction for what you're building?
 Regulation is extremely important if your goal is institutional adoption. Institutions need clarity around governance, compliance, and operational structure before they allocate serious capital. So from the beginning, we’ve approached the business with that in mind.
I actually think London still has significant advantages. The city has deep institutional capital markets expertise, sophisticated legal infrastructure, and a strong talent base across finance and technology.
At the same time, crypto is naturally global, so we think about distribution in a permissionless way rather than anchoring everything to a single market. The broader objective is building products institutions can engage with confidently while still preserving the advantages that make DeFi interesting in the first place.
If the fund is the first product, what will Tok-Edge look like in three years as it expands?
 I see the fund as the first implementation of a much broader thesis around what I call “DeFi 3.0”, which is creating functional tokens that bring capital markets onto public blockchains. Long term, the opportunity is bigger than simply managing crypto assets. We think there’s an opportunity for us to build entirely new financial primitives around the Redemption Token model.  We don’t just want to design the model, but also to own the category, just like how MicroStrategy dominates the digital asset treasury market.
So ideally, over the next few years, Tok Edge evolves into a brand and a platform spanning multiple products and different Redemption Token implementations. We still think we’re very early in the transition from traditional financial infrastructure toward on-chain capital markets.
In a lot of ways, it feels similar to the early internet, which transformed the way we shared and consumed information. Now crypto is transforming capital markets and the financial system.

The next phase of crypto is less about passive exposure to large-cap tokens like Bitcoin and more about participation in DeFi as programmable capital markets.

Going after $1 trillion: How Tok-Edge’s token model unlocks institutional DeFi

Felix Fan is the new CEO of Trust Wallet. He brings a trading vision for wallets and is focused on improving the UI/UX experience for Trust Wallet users.
Prior to Trust Wallet, he served as Product Director at OKX, and earlier in his career, he co-founded Adventurist App Limited and Alphastark Limited, spearheading product development and scaling consumer products globally. Felix holds a Bachelor of Engineering from City University of Hong Kong.
For a long time, self-custodial wallets were built for “hold token, swap token.” Today’s Web3 demands more.
With 220 million users, Trust Wallet is already one of the most widely used self-custody products in crypto. But Felix Fan didn’t join as CEO to maintain the status quo. His vision is a wallet that trades perps, runs AI agents, and eventually makes it unnecessary to open any other crypto app.
We spoke with Felix to find out how he plans to get there.
You joined Trust Wallet as CEO in February 2026 with a clear trading vision for wallets. What are some core problems you came in to solve?
 Most self-custody wallets were initially built as storage products; somewhere you hold tokens and swap them from. But over the past few years, that's changed significantly and wallets are no longer treating trading as an afterthought. Trading is becoming the primary activity for most crypto-native users. Swaps, perps, prediction markets — that's what people actually do every day. And yet doing those things inside of a wallet has been fragmented: multiple screens, confusing routing, no fiat reference point, no access to the markets people want.
I came in to close that gap. Trust Wallet already had the strongest self-custody foundation in the industry. What it needed was a product layer that matched the speed and depth traders expect, without asking them to leave the wallet or give up custody.
Building trading experiences that match the speed and depth traders expect, inside a self-custody environment. That's the core problem.
You come from a product background at OKX, and two companies you co-founded. How does that shape the way you think about leading Trust Wallet differently?
 Building companies from scratch teaches you to prioritise ruthlessly, and stay close to what users actually do. Working at scale at OKX taught me what execution looks like when millions of dollars flow through your product every hour; you develop a deep respect for performance and the cost of getting details wrong.
At Trust Wallet, I try to combine both. We may not appear as a startup because we have real scale, but I want us to move with startup speed on the decisions that matter most. Fewer features shipped better, not more features shipped faster. The swap flow, the trading experience, the on-chain infrastructure — those get disproportionate attention because they're what users interact with every session.
This forces better product thinking. You have to make the experience so good that users never feel the complexity underneath.
Trust Wallet has 220 million global users. At that scale, what does it take to meaningfully improve UX, and where do you start?
You start with the flows people will use most:  swaps and trading. If someone opens Trust Wallet five times a day, four of those are probably to check a price or make a trade. So the swap experience has to be best-in-class. Not just functional, but fast, clear, and confidence-building.
At our scale, you also can't assume a single user profile. We have DeFi power users running complex strategies across multiple chains, and we have people in emerging markets buying their first crypto. The UX has to work for both; i.e. simple by default, powerful when you need it.
The other thing that changes at scale is that small friction compounds. A swap flow that takes one extra tap costs millions of unnecessary taps per day. So we obsess over removing steps and reducing cognitive load. The recent swap redesign came directly from watching where users paused, dropped off, or made errors in the old flow.
You recently overhauled the swap experience with one screen, fiat input, and real-time popular tokens. What did the old flow tell you about where crypto wallets have been getting UX wrong?
 Wallets have been designed around how blockchains work, not how people think. The typical swap screen shows two token selectors, an amount in the token you're selling, a slippage setting, and a gas estimate in a native token you might not hold. That's five concepts a user has to hold simultaneously! And none of them map to how people actually think about money.
Additionally, people want to know what's moving right now, so we surface real-time popular tokens. And people don't want to navigate away from what they're doing, so we collapsed the entire flow into one screen.
The broader lesson: crypto wallets have been shipping for extremely crypto-literate users and then wondering why mainstream adoption stalls. Users don't care about chains, gas, and routing. They care about: what am I buying, how much does it cost, and does it work?
Hyperliquid is now live inside Trust Wallet, giving users access to 200+ perp markets without leaving the app. Why is bringing perps natively into a self-custody wallet the right move, and why now?
Perps are where the volume is and the perps market dwarfs spot; it's the primary instrument for active traders. But the experience has been split: trade perps on a CEX and accept custodial risk, or use a DEX perp platform disconnected from the rest of your portfolio.
Trust Wallet now gives users access to Hyperliquid's 200+ perp markets with deep liquidity, without leaving the wallet and without giving up custody.
And we've gone further; users can now also access Hyperliquid's HIP-4 outcome contracts (prediction markets) through Trust Wallet as well. These are contracts priced between $0 and $1 that settle based on real-world outcomes — binary yes/no markets and multi-outcome markets like daily BTC price ranges. No separate account, no separate funding, everything is managed from your existing wallet.
Users can also access Aster alongside Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid for RWAs, U.S. and Korean market exposure, and deeper liquidity; Aster for Hong Kong markets, Chinese meme markets, and higher leverage. One wallet, best of both worlds.
Of course, perpetual contracts are leveraged instruments and carry significant risk — that's why we ensure users have clear disclosures and controls before they trade. And availability varies by jurisdiction; we work within local regulatory frameworks.
Another recent release, the Trust Wallet AgentKit, lets AI agents execute real transactions across 25+ chains within rules users define. What does agentic crypto actually look like for an everyday user in practice?
 Think of it like giving a very capable assistant a company card. You set the rules upfront — a daily spending limit, recurring buys on a schedule, or orders that only fire when a price hits your target — and the agent runs those automatically, exactly as you set them, no clicking required. Anything outside those preset rules comes back to you to approve first. You stay in control the whole time.
The real difference between this and a traditional bot comes down to judgment. A bot follows a fixed instruction and breaks the moment reality gets messier than the rule. An agent reasons about context: it reads changing conditions and decides what to do within the boundaries you've set.
The piece that matters most is that Trust Wallet AgentKit is non-custodial. You never hand your keys to a platform. The agent acts with your permission, but the keys stay on your device the entire time — your funds don't move until a transaction actually settles on-chain. Your keys, your agent.
The first wave of use cases will come from developers and power users, but the infrastructure we're building now — non-custodial agent wallets, policy-based controls, open standards compatibility — is what eventually turns agentic crypto from a developer tool into something an everyday user just switches on, as simple as toggling a setting.
What does Trust Wallet look like in three years? Is it still a wallet, or will it become something else entirely?
It's still a wallet, but the definition of "wallet" will have expanded. Today, people think of a crypto wallet as the place you store and swap tokens. In three years, a wallet will be the primary interface for how people interact with the on-chain economy — trading, earning, paying, lending, and delegating to AI agents that act on their behalf.
We're already moving there. Perps, prediction markets, agent wallets, none of these fit the old definition of "wallet," but they all belong here because they're all things a user wants to do with their assets, from one place, without giving up custody.
To get there, Trust Wallet has to be the app that makes it unnecessary to use anything else in crypto. Because the experience is so complete there's no reason to. Best-in-class trading. Seamless DeFi. AI agents handling the complexity you don't want to navigate. All secured by the same self-custody foundation we've built for millions of users.
The word "wallet" might undersell it. But the best products don't need a new category name, they just redefine the one they're in.

The word "wallet" might undersell it. But the best products don't need a new category name, they just redefine the one they're in.

Beyond storage: How Trust Wallet’s new CEO is redefining the wallet around trading

Lucas is the co-founder and CEO of Variational. Lucas began attending the University of Oklahoma to study mathematics at age 12, before moving to study computer science at Columbia. While in school, Lucas worked at Goldman Sachs and Google X, and founded the hedge fund Qu Capital with Edward Yu.
After Qu Capital was acquired by Digital Currency Group in 2019, Lucas became the VP of Engineering at Genesis, tasked with building out their OTC desk infrastructure. In 2021, he and Edward left Genesis to start Variational, which initially operated as a market maker active on virtually all major CEXs and DEXs.
Now, Lucas uses his background in scaling high-stakes trading infrastructure to oversee the development of Variational’s liquidity aggregation and settlement architecture.
The onchain perps scene is one of DeFi’s busiest markets today, but many are still solving the same problem: how do you get liquidity before you have traders, and how do you get traders before you have liquidity?
Variational’s answer is to cut out the middleman entirely. With a vertically integrated liquidity provider tapping directly into CEX, DEX, and TradFi rails, the protocol lists markets without negotiating with a single market maker and passes the captured spread revenue back to users in the form of zero-fee trading.
Fresh off a $50M Series A led by Dragonfly, we sat down with co-founder and CEO Lucas Schuermann to find out what that model unlocks and where Variational takes it next.
You and co-founder Edward Yu spent years at the centre of crypto market structure, first at Genesis, then running your own prop trading firm. What did you see from that vantage point that made you want to build a protocol?
We usually cite three main learnings from our time at Genesis and Variational’s prop days: bootstrapping order books is slow, exchanges leak a ton of value to market makers, and trading derivatives OTC (i.e. off exchanges) is a huge hassle.
Order books have a cold start problem: takers need liquidity and tight spreads before they’re willing to trade, and makers need significant trading activity from takers. The industry-standard workaround for this is simply to pay makers to provide deep liquidity, in the hopes that takers eventually show up and exchange-level subsidization is no longer necessary. This is an expensive and slow process that requires negotiations and deals with market makers for each new listing. We solved this by vertically integrating our own liquidity provider that taps directly into existing liquidity sources like CEXs, DEXs, and OTC desks to completely bypass this negotiation and bootstrapping process. This model is also perfectly suited for RWAs, as the platform’s native liquidity provider can plug into TradFi desks as opposed to relying exclusively on liquidity from crypto-native market makers and exchanges.
Second, market makers extract a ton of value from exchanges. They generate just as much, if not more revenue than the exchanges they’re active on. That revenue is then completely removed from the exchange ecosystem. This is why we decided to exclude all third party market makers from Omni, the first trading platform on the protocol; by cutting out these external market makers, the vertically integrated liquidity provider is able to retain all of the spread revenue that is usually extracted from the protocol. Since the platform is able to generate consistent revenue solely from capturing the spreads, it’s also able to offer zero-fee trading to all users. 
Finally, OTC derivatives trading in crypto was (and still is) extremely inefficient. Even before our time at Genesis, when Ed and I were running our own hedge fund, doing an OTC trade required lawyers, tons of back and forth, bank wires, ops hires, etc – and even after all of that, had manual margining and liquidations. Once we were doing these OTC deals full-time at Genesis, this problem was even more obvious. The original purpose of the Variational protocol was to be a simple, automated, and decentralized mechanism to settle and clear derivatives trades against an arbitrary counterparty. That vision still exists today as the second product we’re building after Omni, called Pro. While our team is fully focused on going to market with Omni right now, releasing Pro to modernize OTC derivatives trading and bring it on-chain is still on our roadmap.
Variational bootstrapped initial development from trading profits before raising external capital. How did that shape the way you thought about product design, and what changed once Bain Capital Crypto, Dragonfly, and the other backers came in?
 It caused us to always have revenue as our north star. When you don’t have a war chest of VC capital, you don’t have the luxury of planning to lose money for years while acquiring users. From day 1 of our private beta launch, we’ve prioritized generating revenue to put in the treasury for runway, growth, and future token buybacks. 
Once Bain Capital Crypto, Dragonfly, etc. came in, it allowed us to scale up the internal liquidity provider to support more growth and hire a larger dev team to build faster. VC capital didn’t change our prioritization of revenue, but rather just allowed us to invest more and move faster in attacking new verticals we were already exploring, like RWAs.
Variational uses an RFQ model, a deliberate departure from the order book designs that dominate both CEX and DEX perps. What does RFQ unlock that an order book structurally cannot?
 The RFQ model solves the cold start problem of bootstrapping liquidity that limits order books. Order books require subsidizing external market makers to build depth for each new asset. Variational’s RFQ model, combined with a single vertically integrated liquidity provider, bypasses this requirement entirely. Variational’s use of RFQ results in more listings across both crypto and RWAs, and the ability to tap into existing CEX, DEX, and TradFi liquidity.
Part of our core thesis building Variational was that RWAs and off-chain markets will see increased demand for on-chain trading. RFQ is the only way to bridge that gap without decades of bootstrapping and millions in subsidies to market makers.
You've raised $50M led by Dragonfly to go all in on RWAs. How does that capital get deployed across Phase 1 and Phase 2, and what does success look like before you bring 100+ TradFi markets on-chain this summer?
 We've been significantly expanding our development team to ship new markets & features faster. Dragonfly is also a very trusted and well-connected organization, which has helped us kick off and progress certain partnership and integration conversations. Success over the next few months means achieving our public goal of listing over 100 RWA markets with TradFi liquidity, and seeing genuine activity on these markets from our users.
The Series A positions Variational as building towards a crypto-native Robinhood-esque experience. Would that be a fair take? And if so, what do you find are the essential UX features that make for a top-tier platform for competitive, onchain trading apps?
 Yes, we see ourselves as the first platform with the design necessary to achieve the "trade everything in one place" thesis that retail trading apps have been progressing towards for decades. However, there are some obvious UI requirements to progress from onboarding crypto traders to onboarding traders in general: removing the need for a wallet (via account abstraction), allowing for easy deposits and withdraws through non-crypto channels, and improving the onboarding experience for first-time perps traders.
Omni has listed over 500 pairs, including long-tail and pre-listing assets, without requiring order book depth for each. How does the automated listing engine work, and where do you see the ceiling on market coverage?
 The automated listing engine has evolved a lot since our launch. At its core, it’s just an aggregation of APIs and risk checks meant to determine what markets are safe and liquid enough for listing. We monitor and adjust its risk checks and data sources regularly. 
We believe we’re pretty much at the ceiling of crypto market coverage these days, and are now expanding into RWAs. We believe RWAs have a huge ceiling for coverage that existing on-chain platforms are nowhere near. We also plan to explore other exotic markets like predictions in the future. 
Variational Pro is targeting a derivatives market where deals are still getting done over Telegram and settled manually off-chain. What frictions exist for bringing institutions onchain, and how are you removing it?
 There’s two different problems to solve: one is bringing institutions on-chain in general, and the other is streamlining the process for institutions that are already on-chain. 
Bringing institutions on-chain means giving them a significantly better product than they’re currently using. In that sense, Pro would be competing with existing OTC solutions on transparency, verifiability, usability, and capital efficiency.
Streamlining the process for institutions who are already trading crypto derivatives OTC has a much lower bar, since those are the deals currently being settled manually off-chain. For these institutions, being reliable, easier/cheaper than the manual processes, and having a large network of dealers onboarded is the focus. This is the initial market for Pro, giving the platform time to mature and be refined before moving to onboard new institutions.
Variational’s Oracle is described as modular enough to support commodities, prediction markets, and in-game assets. Are these hot markets something that the team is focused on in the near future?
 Yes. Having the liquidity provider vertically integrated to the trading platform means we are not reliant on any external parties for new listings. Our current priority is fully on RWAs (equities, commodities, indices, currencies), since this is what we see is most demanded by the market right now. As our RWA markets mature, we can begin to dedicate effort to other exotics. 
For traders or liquidity providers who haven't used Variational yet, what's your pitch for why they should try it this week?
 Variational already offers cross margin across hundreds of crypto & RWA markets with industry-leading execution costs (tight spreads + zero fees). Over the summer, we’re planning to list hundreds more RWA markets via direct connections to TradFi liquidity providers. 
If you trade crypto, Variational is the cheapest and most liquid place to do it. If you trade RWAs, you can trade the current listings with cross margin now, and hundreds of them with TradFi liquidity this summer.
What does your vision of Variational look like in the next five years, and how would you define ‘success’ for the protocol?
 In five years, my vision is for Omni to be the leading on-chain trading platform, offering thousands of 24/7 crypto & RWA markets with cross margin and TradFi liquidity depth. At scale, the Omni Liquidity Provider will become the largest market maker in crypto, with its revenue shared between community depositors, Omni traders, and the protocol treasury.
I’d also envision Pro becoming the industry standard for OTC derivatives trades, with every crypto market maker, liquid fund, and foundation onboarded. At this point, we’d be optimizing Pro for non-crypto institutions and OTC TradFi derivatives.

Bringing institutions on-chain means giving them a significantly better product than they’re currently using. In that sense, Pro would be competing with existing OTC solutions on transparency, verifiability, usability, and capital efficiency.

Bringing institutions on-chain means giving them a significantly better product than they’re currently using.

Trade everything: How Variational is bringing 100+ TradFi markets onchain

Sofia Bobrik is the founder of TechWaves PR and has over 9 years of experience in external communications. She works with crypto infrastructure, DeFi, and cybersecurity companies — sectors where the technology is complex, the buyers are institutional, and the trust bar is high.
Her focus is the translation problem: how to make technically serious products understandable to investors, partners, risk teams, compliance teams, and enterprise buyers without oversimplifying the substance. Through public relations services, Sofia helps founders build positioning, narrative architecture, and institutional credibility around complex technologies.
You work with crypto and infrastructure companies where the technology is complex. In institutional DeFi, most conversations focus on regulation, liquidity, and infrastructure, but you argue there is another bottleneck. What is it?
A lot of DeFi founders assume that if the product is technically strong, the market will eventually understand it. But that’s not how institutional adoption works. A fund, market maker, custodian, fintech, exchange, or enterprise partner does not make a decision because one person “gets it.” The decision usually has to survive several internal conversations with risk, compliance, legal, finance, product, and sometimes the investment committee.
So the real communication challenge goes beyond explaining what the protocol does. Different people inside the same organization also need to understand why it matters, why it matters now, and why it is safe enough to evaluate it.
This is especially important in DeFi because the categories are still difficult for traditional finance teams to map. Is the product an infrastructure layer or a trading platform? A settlement rail or a liquidity protocol? A yield strategy or a tokenized asset platform? When every stakeholder answers that question differently, the opportunity stalls.
That is why I see communication as part of the adoption infrastructure. Institutional DeFi needs both better products and clearer translation between technical architecture and institutional decision-making.
You draw a line between visibility and understanding. Why is this distinction so critical for technical founders?
Visibility in deep tech is a vanity metric. It tells you how many people saw something not how many understood it well enough to repeat it to a colleague without getting it wrong. For institutional deals, only the second one moves the needle.
In consumer crypto, visibility still converts into liquidity. But that loop is broken in B2B tech. A buyer rarely onboards a vendor because they saw a viral thread. The decision usually happens when three different people on their team — security, compliance, and procurement — independently arrive at the same understanding of the product. If those three read the same materials and arrive at three different interpretations, the deal dies at the committee level. Quietly. Without feedback to the founder.
That's why I look at communications not as reach but as consistency of interpretation.
From a communications perspective, why do technically strong DeFi companies still struggle to move institutional conversations beyond initial interest?
From my perspective, the challenge often comes down to translation. Institutional teams may be curious about DeFi, but curiosity does not automatically become internal confidence, budget, or approval.
This is where many DeFi companies underestimate PR. They think media coverage is just awareness. But in institutional markets, credible public materials become part of the background layer around the company. The founder’s public profile on LinkedIn and serious media coverage also matter because institutional audiences often look at the company and also at the people behind it.
It does not replace audits, legal review, due diligence, or risk assessment. Instead, it adds a layer of credibility that makes the company easier to take seriously.
What does institutional credibility look like in DeFi compared with general market awareness?
 General market awareness is broad. Institutional credibility is specific.
For DeFi companies, institutional credibility is built through repeated, consistent explanations across serious channels.
That means the founder interviews need to do more than describe the product as innovative. They should also explain the market problem clearly. Company commentary should also go beyond celebrating growth and show how the team thinks about risk, liquidity, security, regulation, and market structure. And media strategy must move past chasing announcements. Its job is to make the company easier to understand for the exact people who influence adoption.
In DeFi, credibility comes from making complexity legible without hiding the risk — not from sounding bigger than you are.
That is what institutional audiences respect.
How should DeFi founders communicate risk without weakening their own positioning?
 They should stop treating risk as something to avoid in public communication.
Institutional audiences know DeFi has risk. They know there are smart contract risks, oracle risks, liquidity risks, governance risks, regulatory risks, custody risks, and market structure risks. If a founder pretends those risks do not exist, they immediately lose credibility.
The stronger approach is to explain how the company thinks about risk.
For example: What assumptions does the protocol make? What is minimized on-chain and what is handled off-chain? How are counterparties protected? What happens during volatility? How does the team approach audits, monitoring, liquidity, governance, and integrations? What still needs to mature across the category?
You might think this makes the company look weaker, but it actually does the opposite: it makes the company look institutionally literate.
The founders who win trust are not the ones who say, “There is no risk.” Trust comes from a clear explanation of the risk, evidence of what has been done to reduce it, and honesty about what the market still needs to solve.
That kind of communication is much more powerful than hype because it mirrors how institutional buyers actually think.
What role does founder communication play in institutional DeFi? Is this just personal branding?
 No. In institutional DeFi, founder communication is part of company trust, not personal branding for its own sake.
When a founder explains the category clearly, talks honestly about technical trade-offs, and answers hard questions without becoming defensive, the whole company feels more credible. If the founder hides behind buzzwords, avoids risk, or only speaks in hype cycles, institutional buyers assume that same behavior may appear later in difficult situations.
That is why founders in DeFi need to be visible, but not performative.
This can happen through the founder’s public speaking, participation in relevant industry conversations, and consistent communication on LinkedIn. Many founders still overlook LinkedIn, but I think that is a mistake. Today, it is one of the most important B2B platforms where a founder can build thought leadership in their category, explain how they see the market, shape the conversation, and create trust before the first call with an investor, partner, or client even takes place.
But the founder does not need to become a full-time content creator. The best model is usually collaborative. The founder provides the substance: the product logic, the market view, and the technical reasoning. The communications team turns that into formats the market can actually use.
What actually changes for a DeFi company when communication is built this way?
 The starting point of every serious conversation changes.
Instead of spending the first call explaining the basics, the team can start from a more advanced place. The investor, partner, or institutional buyer has already seen the founder’s thinking. So they already understand the market problem, and they already have a basic sense of how the product fits into the category.
While it does not close the deal by itself, it makes the conversation more productive.
For DeFi infrastructure companies, public relations matters because visibility alone is not the goal. What really matters is becoming legible to the institutions, partners, and capital allocators that can actually move the category forward.

"In DeFi, credibility comes from making complexity legible without hiding the risk, not from sounding bigger than you are. That is what institutional audiences respect."

"In DeFi, credibility comes from making complexity legible without hiding the risk, not from sounding bigger than you are.  That is what institutional audiences respect."

TechWaves PR founder on why institutional DeFi has a communication problem

Vitali Dervoed is the founder and CEO of Ekiden, an institutional-grade trading platform for onchain derivatives. A tech entrepreneur with over a decade of experience across banking, fintech, and crypto infrastructure, he has worked in capital markets and in roles linked to Neon EVM, RockawayX, and Mango Markets. 
He previously co-founded Composability Labs and held senior product roles at Raiffeisen Bank International and CIB before moving full-time into crypto.
What was the primary motivation for starting the company? Was it driven by a personal experience or a recognised market need?
For me, it started with both curiosity and a clear market gap. Serum was one of the products that shaped my thinking early on, as it showed how strong an onchain trading ecosystem could be when the infrastructure is well built.
But it also made one thing clear to me: trading infrastructure cannot grow in isolation. In DeFi, liquidity, order flow, and value need to move across different projects and ecosystems. That composability is what creates better yields, stronger markets, and a better risk profile for everyone involved.
I wanted to build something that could take that idea further, beyond a single ecosystem, and in a way that could support higher volumes, greater reliability, and a more professional trading experience. If infrastructure is built in a siloed market, it will always struggle to compete with larger players. The only way to win is to create value across multiple projects simultaneously. To me, that is a core principle of DeFi.
Your background spans Neon EVM, RockawayX, and Mango Markets. How has that experience shaped the way Ekiden is built? 
Ekiden is the pinnacle of my career. The project is built on the experience I gained at Neon, RockawayX, and Mango. Thanks to Neon, I am tightly connected to both the Ethereum and Solana networks. I have built close ties with the founders of major Ethereum blue-chips and made great friends throughout the Solana community. This cross-chain experience gives me a clear, practical understanding of how these two distinct communities function.  
On the technical side, I understand how the EVM works much better than the SVM. Neon gave me deep insights into both technologies, including their specific strengths and engineering trade-offs. I am incredibly grateful for that experience.
Mango gave me a thorough understanding of perp traders and allowed me to engage directly with the Solana trading community. The Mango team was fantastic, full of talented and hard-working people, and I really admire everything they build.
RockawayX gave me the ability to take a high-level helicopter view of any sector and then dive straight into the technical weeds. That said, I actually learned my core execution skills many years before any of those experiences.
Could you elaborate on your technology and what sets it apart from other solutions on the market?
 We are building Ekiden to support serious trading use cases alongside institutional and advanced retail activity. Our focus centres on speed, reliability, and usability for professional participants. What sets us apart is our approach to the product: designing it with execution quality and real trading workflows in mind while fully preserving the benefits of on-chain transparency and user control.
We are launching on Canton, enabling us to deliver immediate value to existing players in the ecosystem rather than building in isolation. For example, we are integrating BitSafe’s cBTC as collateral, embedding TradeCraft’s swaps within the deposit flow, and leveraging Temple’s Vaults to enhance the overall trading experience.
The idea is simple. Ekiden is designed to be far more than a standalone trading venue. It operates within a deeply interconnected trading ecosystem where various infrastructure providers, liquidity sources, and user-facing products collaborate to deliver a superior experience for traders.
You just closed a $2M seed round with backers spanning market makers, infrastructure providers, and DeFi founders. What does this round signal about institutional appetite for onchain derivatives infrastructure?
Institutional appetite is starting to wake up. It is a little scary because once it kicks in, institutions can eat the entire industry alive, and their appetite will only grow stronger from there.
Now the real work begins. We are launching and starting to grow from here, but a lot has already been done behind the scenes.
To be frank, the crypto narrative has not changed much since 2018. What has changed is momentum. The market is finally ready, and external factors are aligned: regulations are clearer, companies have figured out how to allocate, and the timing is right.
Perps are no longer exotic primitives; many people understand them now. They went through the "test in the trenches" and proved viable, so institutions will take it from here and start actively adding them to their portfolios.
46% of institutions say improved infrastructure would be the key driver of increased on-chain exposure. Does that validate what you're building and what still needs to happen?
Institutions are avoiding onchain markets because the infrastructure has not consistently met the standards they uphold in traditional markets. Execution speed, reliability, liquidity depth, and predictable settlement are not optional for these participants. They are the baseline.
So yes, that number reflects exactly what we are building towards. But infrastructure is only one part of the answer. A few other things still need to happen before that 46 per cent can move onchain at scale. First, collateral needs to become more flexible and capital-efficient. Institutions are not going to fragment their balance sheets across every venue. They need to use the assets they already hold, including BTC and real-world assets, as productive collateral.
Second, liquidity, hedging, and yield should move across protocols without forcing users into isolated silos. This is where onchain should actually outperform traditional infrastructure and where most current designs still fall short.
Third, the user experience for professional participants needs to align with what they are used to.
If those pieces come together, the 46 per cent ceases to be a survey response and becomes a flow of capital. Our job is to ensure the infrastructure layer is ready.
Keyrock joined as a strategic partner in the raise. What does that relationship mean in practice for traders on the platform?
Every serious exchange has a small group of strategic liquidity partners, and for Ekiden, Keyrock is one of them.
In practice, this should translate into deeper liquidity, tighter spreads, and a more reliable trading experience from day one. Keyrock’s engineering team has worked closely with us on the exchange, covering infrastructure, API requirements, and execution quality.
Their BD team has also been highly engaged, which matters because an exchange is not just technology. It is the combination of liquidity, distribution, and market structure.
What are the key plans and objectives for the next three to five years?
Over the next few years, my goal is to expand Ekiden from a single product into a broader onchain trading ecosystem. In the near term, we are focused on the launch, liquidity growth, team expansion, and strategic partnerships.
In the longer term, I believe more real markets will move onchain, giving people more direct access to the assets they want to own, whether those are commodities such as oil, electricity, and water, or a broader portfolio of financial and real-world assets.
We want to help make these markets more usable, transparent, and accessible onchain. Ultimately, our goal is not only to build better trading infrastructure but also to make trading more inclusive and to increase financial literacy for as many people as possible.

Trading infrastructure cannot grow in isolation. In DeFi, liquidity, order flow, and value need to move across different projects and ecosystems. That composability is what creates better yields, stronger markets, and a better risk profile for everyone involved.

Ekiden’s Founder on how they plan to make onchain derivatives institution-ready

Sota Watanabe is the CEO of Startale Group, a global crypto infrastructure company building the onchain stack for finance, entertainment, and consumer applications. A prominent figure in Japan's crypto ecosystem, he has worked closely with the Japanese government on the national Web3 strategy. He was named to Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in 2022 and to Newsweek's 100 Most Respected Japanese in the World in 2023.

As the digital asset industry matures, the friction of managing fragmented wallets, multiple gas tokens, and disconnected blockchains is becoming a massive barrier to mainstream adoption.
We recently sat down with Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group, to discuss how his team is solving this exact problem by building a fully integrated, compliant onchain stack for global finance.
In this interview, he explains the absolute necessity of vertical integration, the strategic importance of the JPYSC stablecoin, and how Japan’s strict regulatory discipline is shaping the future of enterprise blockchain infrastructure. Read more below.
What was the Web3 ecosystem in Japan like in 2019, and what gap were you trying to fill when you founded Astar?
In 2019, crypto in Japan was still living in the shadow of Mt. Gox and the Coincheck hack. The Financial Services Agency had sharply tightened custody and listing rules. Most people still viewed crypto as highly risky and speculative. Developers could deploy on Ethereum, yet there was absolutely no Japan-originated chain designed around local use cases and compliance.
That presented a massive gap. Japan possesses real structural advantages, including intellectual property, gaming, anime, and iconic brands. However, the rails to bring that culture onchain securely for Japanese institutions simply did not exist. The consensus at the time suggested that Japanese regulation made a public blockchain project unworkable. I took that as a clear signal to start building.
Astar became Japan's first major public blockchain. Today, it anchors a multichain Astar Collective spanning Polkadot and Soneium. That successful outcome convinced me the original thesis was absolutely correct.

Astar became Japan's first major public blockchain. What did building within the Polkadot ecosystem teach you about where the real infrastructure battles would be fought?
I often think of Polkadot as a blockchain university. Working alongside Gavin Wood and the Parity team taught me that the real battle is about interoperability. An isolated chain inevitably starves. Users, liquidity, and developers flow exactly where connections are densest.
That lesson explains why Astar operates today as a Collective spanning Polkadot via Astar Network and Ethereum via Soneium, with ASTR moving seamlessly between them via Chainlink CCIP. It also served as the seed for Startale.
Interoperability requires owning the stack end-to-end. Tesla built cars alongside batteries, software, and the Supercharger network because those tight integrations define the true product. Startale applies the same playbook to Web3.
We align the chain, stablecoins, wallet, and app into a single vertically integrated system. The chains that survive the next five years will be those that make themselves highly useful and connected to other networks.

You've worked closely with the Japanese government on the national Web3 strategy. Where has that engagement most directly shaped what Startale is building?
My focus is entirely on seamless integration and practical application. Japanese brands need to trust that systems work flawlessly and that residents are adequately educated and protected. That requirement led directly to our focus on building compliant infrastructure.
Japan’s stablecoin regulations are among the clearest and most favourable globally because I and others had the privilege of contributing to the regulatory conversation alongside policymakers. That clarity directly influenced our decision to build enterprise-ready financial infrastructure for the long term.

At what point did you become convinced that Startale had to own the full stack?
It was a slow realisation, born of the severe friction in the crypto user journey. The hassle of managing private keys, bridging tokens across multiple blockchains, and paying gas fees in various assets creates a broken experience for mainstream users.
I have always drawn inspiration from Apple. They built the iPhone hardware alongside the software, the App Store, and the broader ecosystem required for massive success. We own the full stack in a similar way. Soneium and Strium provide the network, the Startale app provides the user interface, and the JPYSC and USDSC stablecoins handle transactions.
Owning the stack allows us to remove friction entirely. We abstract away complexity, simplify onboarding, and optimise the flow of value without relying on fragmented external dependencies.

JPYSC is the first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin. Why was the yen the right currency to tackle first for the Asian market, and how does that complement USDSC?
Japan is our home market, and naturally, we see the strongest enterprise demand there today. Japanese corporations and international firms operating in Japan want to move settlements, treasury operations, and supply chain flows onchain, using a currency they fully trust. They require stability and regulatory clarity from day one, making the yen the ideal starting point.
JPYSC is designed for domestic enterprises and global financial institutions engaged with Japan’s economy. We are already seeing strong interest from major banks exploring use cases such as FX optimisation, yen liquidity management, carry strategies, and time-zone-based currency efficiency across global markets.
In parallel, USDSC serves as the global settlement layer for dollar-denominated activity and international trade. Together, they form a regulated yen-dollar stablecoin pair that operates across multiple jurisdictions and market cycles. The key idea involves the creation of programmable liquidity that moves seamlessly across time zones, markets, and institutional needs.

Coinbase, Circle, and Stripe are all converging on the same vertically integrated model. Is this inevitable for any company seeking to be a long-term infrastructure?
Yes, I believe this convergence is inevitable. If you look at previous technology cycles, such as internet infrastructure and telecommunications, they all start highly fragmented. Over time, they consolidate into vertically integrated systems because global-scale infrastructure requires tight coordination.
We are seeing the same pattern repeat in crypto. Payments, custody, compliance, distribution, and application layers must be tightly integrated to achieve mainstream adoption. The moment you reach institutional scale, fragmentation becomes friction, and friction becomes cost.
Vertical integration acts as an architectural necessity. Companies that fail to own or coordinate their infrastructure ultimately become tenants in someone else’s system. We are building the stack itself to support the next generation of global onchain finance and applications.

Startale has added Mini Apps across gaming, finance, and entertainment. How do you decide what stays native to Startale's stack versus what you bring in from outside, and who controls curation?
We determine this by evaluating what is essential to the core user experience. Components such as the wallet and basic stablecoin features are critical to our ecosystem and required for everything to function smoothly. For everything else, we maintain complete flexibility.
Our role is to provide the strongest possible foundation for builders. The ecosystem thrives best when developers have freedom. Our job is simply to ensure that the underlying infrastructure never becomes a bottleneck to innovation.

You relocated to the US to drive Startale's global expansion. What does the US market require that Asia doesn't, and what does Asia understand about onchain infrastructure that the West is still catching up to?
The world has seen the emergence of many blockchain hubs across Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UAE. The US remains a vital market because it holds the most capital, is the world’s largest economy, and serves as a hotbed of developer talent. Succeeding in the US requires a highly aggressive mentality focused on completely dominating the market.
Japan and broader Asia possess a distinct, equally important strength. They demonstrate exceptional discipline in building real-world systems. In Japan specifically, there is a strong emphasis on trust, compliance, and long-term reliability. Technology is evaluated on its ability to integrate safely with existing financial, corporate, and regulatory structures.
That discipline has shaped a highly mature approach to crypto. While early Western narratives focused heavily on speculative cycles and memecoins, Japan consistently pushed towards institutional-grade use cases. These focus on payments, enterprise settlement, IP monetisation, and supply chain infrastructure that plugs directly into the real economy.
The US brings speed, capital formation, and global ambition. Japan brings precision, regulatory clarity, and a deep understanding of how to embed new technology within real institutional systems.

As the digital asset industry matures, the friction of managing fragmented wallets, multiple gas tokens, and disconnected blockchains is becoming a massive barr

Startale Group CEO on vertically integrated Web3 infrastructure

Erald brings over 20 years of experience in financial services and crypto-native markets to his role. Belgian-born and Malta-based, he previously held senior roles at Crypto.com, Binance, and Paysafe. He joined OKX as General Manager of OKcoin Europe, overseeing the successful rebrand to OKX Europe, before taking the helm as CEO.

European crypto traders have long faced a difficult dilemma. They could use regulated platforms with low liquidity, or risk their capital on unregulated offshore exchanges. Today, the landscape is shifting dramatically.
We caught up with Erald Ghoos, CEO of OKX Europe, at Paris Blockchain Week to discuss how his team is solving this exact liquidity problem while setting a new standard for consumer protection.
Speaking on the morning of April 15th, Erald unveiled X-Perps, a MiFID-regulated derivatives product designed to capture massive market share.
Read more about OKX's ambitious roadmap, their newly launched Agentic Wallet, and the future of European financial services below.
At Paris Blockchain Week, OKX Europe is launching X-Perps. What are your main priorities for Europe right now, and how does this launch align with the broader strategy?
My main priorities for Europe in 2026 revolve entirely around building the right foundation and infrastructure. Consumers globally have only three financial needs throughout their lives. First, they need to pay and get paid. Second, they need to accrue wealth by investing in assets such as bonds, stocks, or Bitcoin. Third, they need the ability to borrow or lend.
At OKX Europe, our focus is on building the utility required to solve these financial needs. We want to become the ultimate money app. Historically, our bread and butter have revolved around trading. We are now expanding our product offering to include more solutions, such as OKX Cards and OKX Pay.
X-Perps addresses a major gap we identified in the market. Users in Europe were forced to choose between regulated exchanges with poor liquidity and offshore exchanges with no consumer protection.
With X-Perps, we bridge that divide. Under our fully regulated MiFID licence, we harness the power of a global exchange to offer a regulated expiry future with up to 10x leverage.
Our unified account means your spot wallet collateral can still be used for OKX Perps. Right now, roughly 95% of crypto derivatives volume in Europe is traded offshore. We intend to bring that volume back onshore into a regulated environment.

What was the journey to build something like this? It must have been complex on the technical and regulatory fronts. And what's the most valuable impact for European users?
The journey began with a focus on a major economic leak. Too much capital was flowing toward offshore exchanges, harming the European economy and putting users' assets at significant risk on unregulated platforms. Europe has a strong track record in consumer protection, and we saw an opportunity to bring that standard to this sector.
Derivatives trading with leverage is undoubtedly a high-risk, niche product. The clear demand for it is precisely why so many traders head offshore. We wanted to bring that demand back onshore into a fully regulated environment. To ensure this works safely, we implemented a rigorous assessment of suitability and appropriateness.
Before accessing the product, users must complete a thorough knowledge test and an educational background assessment. This ensures they fully understand the specific risks involved before placing any trade. The most valuable benefit for the user is the peace of mind that comes from trading in a protected, transparent environment.

You mentioned Europe's strong reputation for user protection, and you have these assessments in place. How do you balance offering a product like this, which is inherently high-risk, with meeting those standards?
We have established strict guardrails to meet those exact standards. Our regulator granted the licence with very clear conditions. We restrict extreme leverage levels, such as 100x. We also implement mandatory margin call warnings and defined operational procedures.
We have implemented all of these requirements in accordance with the regulation. This ensures full compliance with both the regulatory framework and Europe's consumer protection laws.
The regulator gave us the green light, marking a major win for everyone involved. Regulators are satisfied that we are bringing a high-liquidity product back onshore. By offering this product, we are actively improving consumer protection. We are transitioning users away from unregulated offshore exchanges and into a highly secure, regulated environment.

OKX was the first global exchange to obtain a MiCA licence and expand quickly. What has helped you succeed in Europe while others are still struggling to enter this market?
OKX Europe has operated under a different brand since 2013. Our founder, Star Xu, has always focused heavily on doing the right thing. That philosophy serves as his core ethos.
From the moment regulatory frameworks began to develop, we understood that the future of crypto would be fully regulated. We immediately committed to full compliance and proactive regulatory engagement. We set up local teams and applied for crypto licences across seven global jurisdictions.
Europe presents a unique challenge because the EEA comprises 30 countries. Five years ago, each country had its own fragmented approach to crypto regulation. The European Union achieved something great by harmonising these approaches under the MiCA framework.
OKX has been based in Malta since 2018. We obtained our local crypto registration there in 2021. That registration was already built to an exceptionally high standard, grounded in PSD2 and EMI interpretations of the law. Upgrading to MiCA was relatively straightforward because of that strong foundation. We received our MiCA licence in January of last year and have been live across Europe ever since.

We're seeing a lot of new initiatives and activity in the market right now, including in AI. Can you speak to where OKX fits in that picture, and looking ahead, what role do you want OKX to play in Europe?
We are aggressively branching out into several new financial services. AI is dominating the conversation right now. Everyone wants to know our timeline and plans for artificial intelligence.
The most visible recent launch is our Agent Wallet. This tool allows users to interact with their wallets directly via prompt messaging. We have also been using AI in our back-end processes for nearly two years. We leverage it for transaction monitoring, compliance improvements, and protection against sophisticated scams.
More broadly, we continue to build solutions for those three core financial needs I mentioned earlier. We launched OKX Card and OKX Pay and plan to expand these offerings significantly. The ultimate goal is for users to manage all their financial services through a single app. People want a trusted brand to manage their entire financial life seamlessly.
With our MiCA and PI licences, we have the right building blocks firmly in place. Our key message for 2026 is to build the foundational infrastructure needed to address real financial needs for both retail and institutional users.

European crypto traders have long faced a difficult dilemma. They could use regulated platforms with low liquidity, or risk their capital on unregulated offshor

OKX Europe CEO on MiCA, X-Perps, and the future of regulated trading

Pierre brings a highly unique perspective to the decentralised finance space. As a former Member of the French National Assembly, he spent years shaping digital asset frameworks and technology policy.
Today, he merges that deep legislative expertise with hands-on product strategy to build EUR0, a MiCA-compliant stablecoin backed by real-world assets.

As traditional stablecoin issuers generate billions in revenue, everyday users who take on the risk of holding those assets see virtually no return. Pierre Person is on a mission to completely overhaul that broken model.
We sat down with Pierre Person, CEO and Co-Founder of Usual Money, at Paris Blockchain Week to discuss how his team is bringing true value distribution back to the community.
In this interview, Pierre explains why traditional stablecoin issuers operate exactly like legacy banks, the urgent need for direct fiat integrations, and how Europe must embrace a culture of risk to remain globally competitive.
Read more about his ambitious roadmap for the future of onchain finance below.
You worked at the French National Assembly on crypto regulations, and now you have co-founded your own protocol. What did you learn from politics about what DeFi really needs?
I served in the National Assembly during the 2017 bull market and the ICO boom. Regulation was entirely different back then. We evolved alongside the market and avoided over-regulation. Predicting long-term technological evolution is extremely difficult.
When I left politics in 2022 to create Usual, I saw massive potential in the stablecoin market. The European market lacked strong issuers. Meeting with various stakeholders in the Assembly helped me fully understand market needs. I combined these perspectives to ensure our go-to-market strategy remained free from regulatory gridlock.
Europe has stringent regulations that challenge innovation. My political background helped slightly, though investors generally prefer standard profiles from business schools to those of former politicians.

Usual believes that stablecoin issuers retain most of the value, giving back nearly nothing to their users or communities. For example, Tether and Circle made over $7 billion in 2025 and shared nearly none of it. Why did it take so long to see a real alternative to this?
The stablecoin business relies heavily on distribution. Tether and Circle arrived first and secured listings everywhere. People grew accustomed to their services. During the early crypto cycles, avoiding volatility was far more valuable than earning a small percentage yield.
Today, stablecoins are highly democratised. Use cases have multiplied, and many users remain in stablecoins permanently. A yield tied to the Fed or T-Bill rate is now highly meaningful to investors. In 2022, we realised that a decentralised entity serving a community must distribute cash flows back to its users. This became a core bet for Usual.
Incentivising users is our most powerful distribution lever. Tether and Circle avoid this because they are already deeply embedded across the board. The US Congress is already debating the redistribution of stablecoin economics, and competition will increasingly shift to this level.
Users who take the risk of holding a stablecoin absolutely deserve a share of the returns. Otherwise, the system mirrors a traditional bank, where you deposit funds and receive zero benefits. Tether and Circle currently operate exactly like banks. We are changing that model.

You recently launched a direct EUR bank account to EUR0 rail, powered by Monerium, with no exchange required. What does this unlock for European users?
This service currently targets European customers, with USD support coming soon. Accessibility remains the primary pain point in crypto. Everyone knows someone who wants crypto exposure but lacks the knowledge to get started. The current onboarding process requires registering with a centralised exchange just to convert fiat and enter DeFi. Friction points block users from accessing lending, borrowing, and yield products.
Our ambition for the next phase is to build a TradFi fintech solution with genuinely simple onboarding ramps. Thanks to Monerium, users can now deposit directly from their bank accounts. They can send fiat to Usual to receive stablecoins, or send stablecoins directly to their IBAN account.
We charge zero fees and settle transactions in under 24 hours. Simplicity is our absolute focus. A smooth user experience is essential to democratise crypto.

Usual ran one of the largest pre-deposit campaigns we have seen recently, and you activated revenue sharing shortly after the token launch. How does this approach change the relationship between Usual and its users compared with other stablecoin projects?
We were among the first DeFi protocols to implement meaningful revenue sharing. Our model is centred on a fully decentralised treasury. We built this ecosystem to provide a stablecoin paired with a governance token that carries real financial rights. Staking our token grants users direct access to most of the protocol's benefits, ensuring a fair and transparent experience for everyone involved.
This launch provided valuable insights into crypto market behaviour. While traditional finance valuations focus heavily on cash flows, the crypto space often prioritises speculative potential. We initially believed that activating revenue sharing would offset pressure on farming. We found that many participants still seek short-term exposure to dynamic assets, alongside their interest in sustainable yield.
We chose a long-term path for Usual. Trading above our perceived fair value indicates that the market is maturing. Legitimate, transparent promises attract sophisticated capital. Founders who make firm, long-term decisions build lasting value. Being the first to redistribute revenue is a major step towards attracting serious, dedicated investors.

The V2 roadmap points towards a full financial platform, complete with multi-currency accounts, IBAN integration, and clearFX for onchain EUR/USD conversion. Is this a full transition to a Neobank/NeoFi platform?
We started with the stablecoin business, which mirrors the core activity of a traditional bank. We now offer a much broader range of services. We handle fiat ramps, currency exchange, and sophisticated investment products. Users want exposure to basis trades, T-Bill rates, and strategies yielding between five and ten per cent. We also launched a fixed-rate lending and borrowing mechanism.
To summarise, we offer a payments layer, an investment layer, and a credit layer. We will encapsulate all of this in a highly accessible mobile app. Users will onboard directly from the app store without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure.
Each year, our tooling and user experience see significant improvements, allowing us to provide advanced financial tools via a straightforward and clean interface.

In the “Setting the Path” blog, Usual clearly explained how the Labs is connected to the DAO, how compensation works, and which parts of the project are transferred to the community. Why did you decide to share this level of detail publicly?
We released that information during a period of heavy speculation around governance structures. We wanted absolute clarity. The Labs initially bootstrapped and built the protocol. However, the Labs and the DAO are completely separate entities. The DAO uses the governance token to decide on treasury deployments and cash flow distributions.
Governance token holders deserve full transparency regarding treasury ownership. The Labs must remain distinct from the DAO. Some projects dissolve their DAOs or Labs to manage regulatory optics. We reject that approach at Usual. We believe in a strict separation, with the Labs functioning as a business entity working for the DAO.
In the long run, I would be thrilled to see other independent Labs build on Usual's infrastructure. That would prove the protocol can survive without the founding team. A clear separation between cash flows and treasury ownership is vital. The Labs exists strictly to secure the protocol, manage the mandate, and ship updates validated by token holders.

Paris Blockchain Week feels like a kind of homecoming for a French founder like you. What does it mean to you to build your project here, and how do you see Europe’s current moment in crypto from your perspective?
I feel very fortunate to be here. France is an excellent place for development. The bigger question is how Europe can prevent falling behind on the global stage.
The United States is advancing quickly under its new administration, with institutions like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock responding swiftly and actively building on existing infrastructure. Europe has some momentum, yet we are lagging. I want to see Europe accelerate to match this pace. We have strong client bases in Asia and the US, and we want to see similar institutional engagement here in Europe.
We were slightly ahead on regulation initially. We sometimes over-regulate early, targeting businesses that barely exist here yet. We must avoid that trend in crypto. Mindset matters just as much as regulation. We are seeing highly knowledgeable financial professionals entering crypto in the US to help the industry grow. We need to foster that same energy in Europe.

How do you see the stablecoin space evolving over the next five years, and what are the main risks that people might be underestimating?
We must differentiate between the various assets labelled as stablecoins. For fiat-backed stablecoins with real-world asset collateral, fractional reserve exposure poses a major risk. We saw this with Silicon Valley Bank, where the backing carries counterparty risk beyond the sovereign issuing the T-Bill. That systemic risk is very real.
Debt-backed stablecoins carry the risk of the underlying instrument at maturity. Fortunately, industry standards are improving. Auditors provide high transparency, and issuers such as Circle are now fully backed by T-Bills rather than bank deposits. This is a major improvement.
The US Congress presents another major factor. Banks are lobbying heavily to prevent stablecoins from sharing any revenue. Despite this, I am certain that stablecoins will become the primary asset for value exchange and payments. Relying exclusively on centralised traditional rails makes no sense today. In the future, when people hold money, they will hold stablecoins.

Drawing on your experience in politics, what is the key priority for governments when it comes to crypto and DeFi?
The challenge remains the same across all technology sectors. Regulating blindly, without understanding the long-term use case, leads to terrible decisions.
Governments must remain humble and accept the unpredictable nature of technological evolution. They need to protect consumers while allowing innovation to thrive. Protecting traditional incumbents, such as banks, stifles progress.
Proportionate AML and investor protection rules are vital. Risk is a natural element of developing new technology and undertaking ventures. While the US has a strong risk-taking culture, Europe needs to understand and adopt this approach.
Economic growth relies solely on innovation, which generates global value and wealth. We should fully embrace technology and consider it the cornerstone of our future.

As traditional stablecoin issuers generate billions in revenue, everyday users who take on the risk of holding those assets see virtually no return. Pierre Pers

Breaking the bank: Pierre Person’s mission to redistribute stablecoin revenue

We recently spoke with Iana Dimitrova, CEO of [OpenPayd](https://www.openpayd.com/), at Paris Blockchain Week to discuss how her team is solving this massive pain point by building an infrastructure that connects fiat and digital assets seamlessly. Iana leads OpenPayd’s global operations across six offices, setting the strategic direction for one of the leading Banking-as-a-Service platforms. She joined the company in 2017 as General Counsel and later became CEO. With deep expertise across fintech and payments, she previously helped scale operations globally at Paysafe. In this interview, she explains why digital asset businesses should never build their own payment infrastructure, the reality of Europe's MiCA regulation, and why the convergence of fiat and stablecoins is driving a major structural shift in global finance.

For years, digital asset businesses have struggled with a major bottleneck: connecting securely and efficiently to traditional banking infrastructure. Without reliable fiat on- and off-ramps, scaling globally is nearly impossible.
In 2017, you joined as General Counsel and became CEO. Since then, the company has changed a lot. What is the thing about OpenPayd today that would surprise the version of you from 2017?
Our founder started the business in late 2016 in the payments space, and we have been on a transformation journey ever since. We laid the foundations of OpenPayd in 2019 and have been building towards becoming the global infrastructure provider we are today.
What would surprise me the most is the incredible depth and quality of the team we have built. OpenPayd is successful today because we have great people. We built an incredibly strong, diverse, and complementary team with a real sense of camaraderie. That teamwork enabled us to weather the storms, face challenges, and emerge stronger.
We always say there are three pillars to our business. The first is our global licensing infrastructure, which supports payments and digital assets across jurisdictions. The second is our proprietary technology, which enables us to move quickly. The third, and most fundamental, is our team.

OpenPayd is often described as rail-agnostic infrastructure. What does that mean for a digital asset business that is choosing between building its own partnerships or using a platform like yours?
I would never recommend that a digital asset business try to build its own payments infrastructure. What we have built is genuinely hard to replicate. Building the licensing infrastructure and connecting to various payment rails and banking providers requires significant time, investment, and expertise.
Digital asset businesses should focus entirely on building their product and solving consumer problems. They should partner with infrastructure providers such as OpenPayd to take the heavy lifting of payments completely off their plate.
Being rail-agnostic means businesses using OpenPayd can move and manage money globally across any rail they choose. That could be a local payment rail, such as SEPA in Europe, an international rail, such as SWIFT, or a major blockchain network using stablecoins and digital assets.
As a business, you do not need to worry about how the money moves behind the scenes. You simply instruct us on the currency and settlement location, and we handle the plumbing.

OpenPayd is now handling fiat settlement for the FDUSD ecosystem and multi-currency settlement for LMAX. Both deals were secured within a few months. What do these partnerships tell us about the sources of demand today?
For more than 24 months, we have seen steadily increasing demand for stablecoins in treasury management and cross-border payments. That demand is exactly why OpenPayd invested in obtaining digital asset-related licences. We want to offer an equivalent level of service across both fiat and digital assets.
Companies are increasingly using stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure to improve payment speed and reduce costs. This trend is not driven solely by digital asset-native businesses. We now see massive adoption across payroll, cross-border trade, and retail.

You said in the First Digital announcement that digital asset businesses need strong, reliable infrastructure to scale globally. How close are we to on- and off-ramping becoming standard, and what happens to those businesses when we actually get there?
Smooth on- and off-ramping across multiple jurisdictions is simply not there yet. We face significant jurisdictional complexity in regulations and technical standards. That complexity directly affects settlement timelines and transaction costs. Global harmonisation remains quite far off.
This is precisely why providers like OpenPayd are building rail-agnostic infrastructure. We connect to a broad network of banks, payment rails, liquidity providers, and stablecoin issuers. When a business instructs us to make a payment, we orchestrate the process behind the scenes to select the most efficient channel.
When that infrastructure is fully in place globally, it will remove a major barrier to economic growth. Ultimately, what matters is the sustainability and security of financial services infrastructure. In the current geopolitical environment, that resilience is critical to both economic growth and national security.

MiCA has created a clear category for EMT tokens in Europe, which should make it easier to build compliant stablecoins in the EEA. How has that worked in practice, and has MiCA changed what your clients are asking for?
MiCA demonstrated excellent regulatory leadership from a European perspective. It established an early regulatory framework for the development of various digital asset products.
However, practical adoption has not been fully harmonised across the European Union. Some countries have not yet transposed the legislation into national law. This creates a barrier to growth for businesses in those jurisdictions and adds friction for payment providers like us who serve clients in countries such as Hungary or Poland.
Our clients remain consistently focused on stable fiat on- and off-ramps and interoperability. They want a single API, seamless transactions across fiat and blockchain, real-time settlement, and operational reliability. MiCA has not fundamentally changed that core demand. However, we do see a higher level of maturity among clients regarding operational resilience, redundancy, and compliance.

You started in legal, moved into operations, and are now CEO. How does a legal background shape the way you think about running the company? How do you maintain operations amid near-constant regulatory uncertainty?
Most people assume a legal background makes you more conservative. In fact, a deep understanding of the legal and regulatory landscape is a genuine advantage. It enables you to assess risk more effectively, take well-calculated risks, and innovate faster. It gives you the confidence to move decisively.
We navigate overlapping regulatory frameworks by building deep in-house expertise. Our experts cover payment services regulation, AML, and digital assets. We draw on that expertise whenever we encounter a new framework.
For us, a traditional fiat-regulated provider moving into the digital asset world, the lift was fairly small. Companies attempting the opposite transition face a much steeper learning curve.

Euro-denominated stablecoin volumes are roughly 200 times smaller than those in USD. Is that a structural problem or a timing issue that MiCA and similar frameworks will eventually resolve?
I think it is both. The US has heavily led the way in innovation, and most significant stablecoin issuers are US-based or pegged to the dollar, as it remains the global trading currency.
We need a combination of factors, including regulation that does not stifle innovation. MiCA provided useful clarity, but it may also have discouraged some projects that might otherwise have emerged. This conversation now extends far beyond our industry. Regulators and governments are actively discussing this, given growing interest in alternatives to the dollar as the dominant global trade currency.

OpenPayd processes 225 billion annually for over a thousand institutional clients. At that volume, you have a uniquely useful view of where the friction lies. Where is it right now between fiat and digital?
For digital asset-native customers, gaining access to fiat rails has traditionally been very difficult. Over the past five years, reliable fiat on- and off-ramps have remained a major barrier to growth. The situation is improving, but challenges remain.
The second major friction point is the lack of providers that seamlessly integrate access to both fiat rails and blockchain rails. Providers with the licensing infrastructure and technology for true interoperability are the ones genuinely solving the problem.
Businesses do not care about the “how”. They just want to move money efficiently from one jurisdiction to another. They do not care which stablecoin or payment rail we use. They care exclusively about speed, efficiency, and cost.

How do you see the world evolving between fiat, crypto, and DeFi over the longer term?
It is a fantastic time to be in this space. Stablecoins and programmable money movement are reshaping the market. We are witnessing a massive structural shift that is redefining expectations around speed and accessibility.
We are seeing multiple technologies converge to create a new foundational infrastructure layer. This layer enables accessible, seamless experiences across fiat and blockchain, supporting near-instant two-way payment flows. It represents a structural shift in payments infrastructure, the likes of which we have not seen in many years.

For years, digital asset businesses have struggled with a major bottleneck: connecting securely and efficiently to traditional banking infrastructure. Without r

OpenPayd CEO on connecting fiat and digital assets at a global scale

We caught up with Ronghui Gu, CEO and Co-Founder of [CertiK](https://www.certik.com/), at Paris Blockchain Week to discuss how his team is actively solving this exact problem.
Ronghui brings a rare combination of academic precision and industry expertise to the front lines of Web3 security. Holding a PhD from Yale and a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua, he is the primary designer of the hacker-resistant CertiKOS kernel.
Today, he leads a unicorn security firm while actively advising the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Hong Kong’s Web3 Task Force on critical compliance frameworks.

As global finance rapidly migrates onchain, institutional investors face a terrifying reality where a single line of compromised code can vaporise hundreds of millions of dollars in seconds. Traditional security testing is no longer sufficient to build unshakeable trust.
In this interview, Ronghui explains how mathematical formal verification delivers the absolute certainty that financial institutions demand. He also outlines the hidden dangers of autonomous AI agents and reveals why operational security is now the most critical battleground in crypto.
Read more about his vision for a mathematically secure financial future below.
CertiK was founded in 2017 by professors from Yale and Columbia. What was the original idea, and how different is the company today from what you first wanted to build?
The name came from CertiKOS, a research breakthrough that Professor Zhong Shao and I made in 2016 at Yale and Columbia. We used formal verification to verify an OS kernel. It was supported by DARPA and used in a machine called LandShark. It was the first fully verified multiprocessor kernel designed to be hacker-resistant and bug-free.
In 2016, the DAO attack caused massive financial losses across the ecosystem. People quickly realised that this new blockchain stack required advanced security technology. The Ethereum Foundation provided a grant, and Binance became our first investor in 2017.
We grew incredibly fast, gained massive market share during DeFi Summer, and became a unicorn in 2021. Looking back, our academic background and research results gave us strong early technical advantages.
Backing from Binance, Coinbase, and major VCs such as Sequoia also helped us build critical trust and brand credibility in those early days.
During DeFi Summer, CertiK quickly utilised our technology to build a service that could scale to meet the massive demand for auditing. There were so many projects waiting months for audits, and that rapid pace also left us with some legacy issues.
When projects got hacked, people would often blame the auditors. That was never how things worked in any other industry, but the market was very immature at the time, and retail investors had unrealistic expectations.

CertiK has built relationships with regulators in the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Abu Dhabi, and Korea. How have these discussions regarding blockchain security and regulation changed over time?
I would broaden this beyond cybersecurity to address the regulatory landscape as a whole. CertiK grew rapidly in 2021 and 2022, and I felt a profound responsibility to make a meaningful contribution to the industry. The most important step was advancing compliance and regulatory frameworks.
Starting in 2023, I began meeting regulators frequently. I served on the Hong Kong Web3 Task Force and as a technical advisor to the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Much of that early engagement took place in Asia and the UAE, as the US was not particularly crypto-friendly at the time.
One notable example is the recent issuance of Hong Kong's first two stablecoin licences. From the outside, it may look like a sudden development. In reality, we began pushing those initiatives three years ago. I flew back and forth between Columbia University and Hong Kong voluntarily to quietly help build those frameworks.
Many companies did similar unglamorous work behind the scenes to advance the industry. Now, the US environment has shifted considerably, and we are actively re-engaging with American regulators. We have submitted and had comments accepted, and we hope to keep pushing things forward globally.

At Paris Blockchain Week, you discuss how formal verification is becoming important for institutional trust. What do financial institutions need today before putting money into digital asset systems? And how much of that depends on a security audit versus a mathematical proof?
Institutional clients require an entirely different standard for code auditing. Professor Shao and I have spent decades in the field of formal verification. When we started CertiK, the industry was hesitant to pay for formal verification because it costs more than manual auditing.
That hesitation vanished late last year. People now fully accept that formal verification uses mathematics to prove properties of code. Testing can only prove that bugs exist, whereas formal verification is the only way to guarantee a system is truly bug-free.
Furthermore, a massive portion of today's code is generated by AI. You can use AI to review it, but nobody fully understands what happens inside those models. Projects are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in opaque code. Formal verification is the only credible way to provide guarantees for AI-generated smart contracts.
We are releasing a tool called Sparkle that uses AI to make formal verification highly cost-efficient and scalable for institutional clients. It is built on our research results called SPOCK and SPARK, which recently won the Best Paper Honourable Mention at SP.

In your PBW session, you also explain how Web3 security is evolving to meet the needs of global finance. Where is it already strong and reliable, and where is it still weak in a way that could worry large investors?
We see risks across many different layers. For years, the industry has focused heavily on smart contract security and allocated massive budgets to it. If you look at financial losses today, smart contract vulnerabilities are no longer the leading cause. Smart contracts have become highly secure.
The new critical weakness lies in operational security, specifically in private key management and the security of the entire operational stack. We saw this in recent high-profile hacks, where multisignature wallets were used, yet a key developer's device was somehow compromised.
Institutions find this terrifying. A traditional bank understands how to protect keys, yet they often lack awareness of the specific risks in Web3 environments. I know of a financial company that lost $50 million because a key developer left a backdoor in their system. In traditional finance, a scenario like that is almost unimaginable.
We must work with institutions to help them understand these risks, promptly recognise incidents, and build robust mitigation frameworks.

Your AI Auditor is constantly updated with real-world attacks rather than relying on fixed training data. How do you keep it up to date in an environment that moves as fast as AI and Web3?
AI models are developing incredibly fast. Each new version shows a massive leap in cybersecurity capabilities. I believe we are very close to the day when a language model can function independently as a senior security researcher.
However, all AI models are trained on data with a strict knowledge cutoff. To address this, we built an internal system called AirFlow, which powers our external AI Auditor.
We encode a vast amount of security research expertise, real-time vulnerability data, and bug databases into structured skills. This continuous context enhancement keeps the underlying model perfectly up to date.
Another major challenge involves balancing sensitivity and noise. If you configure a model to detect deep vulnerabilities, it generates false positives. If you reduce the noise too much, it misses useful findings. We spent a lot of time perfecting that balance by using multiple layers of detectors and validators to preserve the real findings while filtering out noise.

AI Auditor achieved an 88.6% detection rate across 35 real-world security cases. You said the real question is no longer whether AI can find issues, but which ones matter most. So where does the remaining 11.4% come from?
Achieving the perfect balance requires trade-offs. If we let the model run for ten hours instead of one, the results will change significantly. When we optimise for usefulness and efficiency, some findings will inevitably slip through.
Additionally, the AI models we use today are still catching up to the best human security researchers. Some vulnerabilities cannot yet be detected, or are only caught when the model is trained on a nearly identical case. If the underlying logic matches but the implementation looks different, the model might miss them entirely.
The goal of the AI Auditor is to be deeply integrated into the development cycle. It provides clients and institutions with immediate, low-cost feedback on their code before a formal audit even begins.

CertiK’s Open Cloud report showed that a trust model built for small environments failed when deployed at scale. Do you see the same problem across the wider AI agent ecosystem?
Yes. Most AI agent systems today share a very similar set of pain points. The prevailing design philosophy gives the AI agent access to everything it needs to assist you. Open Cloud became popular precisely because it had extensive access and could act autonomously.
That level of access creates significant vulnerability. Your system likely contains zero-day vulnerabilities in software like Slack or your email client. An attacker can use a zero-day exploit to compromise the AI agent and instantly take over your entire system. It is an extremely dangerous setup.
AI agents must be designed to operate in strictly sandboxed environments where all interactions are actively monitored. We also need dedicated security software running alongside the AI agent to detect and prevent malicious behaviour instantly.

Open Cloud introduced new types of risks, such as prompt injection, malicious tools, and privilege escalation. How different is auditing an autonomous AI agent from auditing a smart contract?
I divide this into three distinct categories: auditing smart contracts, auditing skills, and auditing AI agents. Auditing skills is actually easier than auditing smart contracts. Skills are written in plain text. While there are tricks for embedding malicious binaries in plain-text files, the process remains highly tractable. We are releasing a skill scanner very soon to address this.
Smart contract auditing is complicated because the vulnerabilities are deeply counterintuitive. However, the code is completely static. It never changes after deployment, and we have built excellent tooling for it over the years.
Auditing AI agents is genuinely difficult. Their behaviour is highly dynamic and completely non-deterministic. If you ask a model the same question twice, you will likely get different answers. Auditing for malicious behaviour that only emerges under specific conditions is a major challenge.
Furthermore, the attack surface is enormous. A smart contract manages specific assets within a defined scope, whereas an AI agent might have access to your entire workflow, emails, and files. Any weak point can compromise the entire protection layer. We contribute to AI agent security, but we do not yet have full confidence in it.

As AI is now used both to attack and to defend Web3 systems, how is CertiK’s role evolving? And what does a strong, mature security layer look like for a global Web3 financial system?
Attackers will absolutely use powerful AI models to their advantage. A hacker can let a model run for a hundred hours against a single target because the potential financial gain is enormous. Web3 security firms serving hundreds of clients simply cannot match that level of token spend on every single piece of code.
The playing field is somewhat uneven at present. We address this by encouraging clients to use formal verification for their smart contracts, where high stakes demand mathematical guarantees. We also strongly encourage all clients to continuously integrate the AI Auditor into their development cycles.
Using it throughout the entire lifecycle gradually accumulates AI-checking time, which helps level the playing field. Finally, attackers use AI for broad penetration testing, operational targeting, and social engineering. Companies absolutely must expand their security budgets beyond smart contracts to cover operational security holistically.

As global finance rapidly migrates onchain, institutional investors face a terrifying reality where a single line of compromised code can vaporise hundreds of m

CertiK CEO on securing Web3, the AI Agent threat, and why formal verification is the future of finance

Ethereum

Bitcoin

USDC

On September 24, attackers drained $387.5M from Bitget’s hot wallets. Within a day, part of the funds were already being bridged and swapped across numerous assets, including XRP, ETH, BTC, USDT and USDC, through venues such as  THORChain,  Uniswap, Chainflip, NEAR Intents, 1inch  and LayerZero.
Following the hack, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen published the attacker addresses and formally asked THORChain to refuse them service. THORChain declined. Its position is that the protocol is open to anyone by design and doesn’t filter who uses it, and the emergency halts that protect the protocol can’t be used to freeze particular funds. It added that the attackers behind its own May exploit, which took $10.7M from its pools, were never blacklisted either and kept swapping freely.
The refusal reignited the debate around DeFi, neutrality, decentralization, and what protocols should or shouldn’t do in these situations. What stands out is that no side is clearly right or wrong, it’s more of a stance.
That makes this a good moment to revisit the values behind decentralized finance, starting with Satoshi’s whitepaper, and show why they now operate more as a spectrum. Protocols sit at different points along it, and each point carries a cost. We then look at how the venues involved in the Bitget hack acted relative to their stated ethos and promises. MistTrack’s tracking of the funds lets us draw a clear picture of the situation as it stands two weeks later.
For protocols built on a decentralized ethos, neutrality is credible only if no single party holds the power to change the rules. For those that retain discretionary control, having the power to act doesn’t guarantee effective enforcement: responses remain slow, coverage incomplete, and alternative routes accessible.
The four principles behind DeFi must be seen as a spectrum
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Its ambition was to let people send value directly to one another without relying on a financial institution to process the payment, replacing trust in an intermediary with a network that validates transactions according to shared rules. That proposition laid the foundation for four concepts that have since become central to crypto: decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, and neutrality.
The four are often used interchangeably, but three describe what users can expect from a system and one describes how it’s built.
Permissionlessness concerns access, meaning anyone can use the system without approval. The whitepaper’s abstract describes exactly that: online payments that move straight between two parties, with no financial institution in the middle.
Censorship resistance concerns execution, the ability of a valid transaction to go through despite attempts to block it. In the whitepaper, every new transaction is shared with all the nodes on the network, so no single participant decides whether it gets through.
Neutrality concerns rules, and whether they apply consistently regardless of who the user is or what interests are at stake. The whitepaper identifies participants only by public keys that don’t need to reveal who is behind them, so the rules can’t depend on identity.
Decentralization is architecture: it concerns how control is distributed across the parties that run the system. The whitepaper describes nodes that need no identification, coordinate only loosely, and can join or drop out whenever they like. The more decentralized a system is, the more censorship-resistant it tends to be, and the better positioned it is to stay permissionless and neutral. The degree of decentralization varies from one protocol to another
These properties reinforce one another, but they don’t necessarily coexist. A system can deliver one without the others, which is why the distinction matters when judging how a protocol behaves under pressure.
Decentralization, for example, can make a system resistant to unilateral change while keeping it fully permissioned. Canton Network is one case: it’s operated by multiple independent institutions but restricts who can take part. Conversely, a centralized entity can offer permissionless access to its products while keeping the power to censor, as Circle does with USDC: anyone can hold and send it, but Circle can freeze an address. At the far end, a system can be decentralized, neutral, censorship-resistant, and permissionless all at once, like THORChain.
What does that mean in practice? That these properties don’t fit a binary description. Protocols and entities position themselves freely on a spectrum with four dimensions, one per principle, with plenty of nuance in between.
Brand
Permissionless
Censorship resistance
Neutrality
Decentralization
THORChain
Full
Full
Full
Full
Chainflip
Strong
Partial
Partial
Strong
NEAR Intents
Partial
 Limited
Limited
Partial
Circle
High
Minimal
Limited
Minimal
Tether
Strong
Minimal
Minimal
Minimal
Uniswap
Full - Partial
Full - Strong
Full - Limited
Full - Minimal
1inch
Full - Limited
Full - Partial
Full - Limited
Strong - Minimal
In practice, the Bitget funds crossed every point on the spectrum
The Bitget hack put that spectrum to the test. According to MistTrack, the attacker moved the $387.5M through cross-chain swap protocols, bridges, and DEXs, and two weeks later 86.2% of the stolen value sits in BTC. Along the way, the funds met venues at every point described above, from those that can’t refuse a transaction to those that can freeze it at the token level.
THORChain followed its ethos
THORChain was the attacker’s main route, processing approximately $280M in swaps. This represented roughly 36% of the $780M in cumulative volume recorded across all venues used by the attacker.
That lead follows directly from its design. THORChain has no mechanism to refuse an address: swaps are executed by its node operators according to the protocol’s rules, and none can single out a user. Its only emergency tool is a halt, which stops an entire chain for every user. A halt can be triggered automatically, as it was during THORChain’s own exploit in May 2026, or manually by node operators (a single operator can pause the chain, but any other operator can lift that pause, so a halt only holds if the operators collectively let it stand).
Critics, including OKX founder Star Xu, argue that a network able to stop when its own funds are at risk can’t claim to be like Bitcoin when it refuses to stop for anyone else’s. But halts of this kind have precedents on major chains. In 2010, Bitcoin’s developers and miners coordinated to discard the blocks created by a bug that minted 184 billion BTC. In 2022, BNB Chain’s validators halted the chain after an exploit minted roughly $570M of BNB, though its validator set is far from the most decentralized. In each case, the goal was to protect the chain's integrity, not blacklist a user.
That’s also why THORChain halted in May: had the exploit continued, the protocol could have been drained to the point of having nothing left to serve its users. The halt only prevented more funds from being stolen and did nothing to recover the funds that had already been taken. THORChain also applied the same permissionless principle to itself, since the attackers behind that exploit were never blacklisted and remained free to swap on the protocol.
THORChain’s response, both to Bitget and to its own exploit, therefore matched its architecture and its stated principles, whether one likes it or not. The cost of that consistency shows in the numbers: sitting at the far end of the spectrum meant carrying most of the stolen funds. 
Freezing powers stopped 0.3% of the stolen funds
Across every venue, $1.26M has been frozen so far, 0.3% of the stolen funds. The power to freeze exists at several points along the funds' path, from stablecoin issuers to protocols and exchanges, yet each caught only a fraction.
Stablecoin issuers have the most direct lever with the ability to freeze at the address level. About a fifth of what was stolen, $75.47M, was in USDT, USDC and USDT0, and the attacker kept using them. $55.21M moved through Circle’s CCTP and $59.27M through USDT0 on LayerZero. Circle froze $568K and Tether $239K, about 1% of the stablecoins stolen. 
Most of the remaining funds, $298M in XRP, ETH, ZEC, BNB, AVAX, and TRX, were in assets no issuer can freeze. NEAR Intents, which screens swap requests against AML databases and can hold funds during execution, froze $266K. Unit, which issues the BTC traded on Hyperliquid, froze $170K. Exchanges such as KuCoin and Bybit stopped small amounts sent to their deposit addresses, about $14K in total.
This gap can further be explained by three constraints. The first is speed: an asset can only be frozen while someone still holds it, and the attacker swapped out faster than the freezes arrived. The second is selectivity: the funds were split across more than 1,000 addresses, each of which had to be identified. The third is coordination: Circle’s policy on freezing is tied mainly to legal obligations, threats to the stablecoin’s security, and urgent requests from authorities. All of which take time to set in motion. None of this means the issuers or protocols failed, but highlights the limitations of today’s means.
Chainflip rejected the funds, then processed them through CoW Protocol
Chainflip sits closer to THORChain on the spectrum, with one difference that matters here: the brokers who open deposit channels can reject a deposit before it’s swapped. MistTrack reported that Chainflip did exactly that with one deposit tied to the hack, which was refunded to the sender rather than frozen.
Attacker-linked funds still went through Chainflip by another door. SlowMist found an automated script creating CoW Protocol orders whose receiving address was a pre-prepared Chainflip deposit address, so once CoW settled an order, Chainflip swapped the assets into BTC. MistTrack counts around  $31M transiting through Chainflip in total.
Why the CoW-routed deposits got through isn’t documented. One hypothesis is that Chainflip saw CoW’s settlement contract as the depositor rather than a flagged wallet. Another is that the channels were opened through a broker that doesn’t screen, since any account can become one. SlowMist’s founder described the broader pattern: by splitting the funds and retrying across different bridges, the scripts could switch routes whenever a transfer was rejected, and in his view, AML checks are falling behind this kind of automation.
The problem therefore runs deeper than one broker’s filter. The real question is whether protocols that choose to intervene can build tools that follow funds across several hops or whether entry-point screening will always be one door behind.
Screening rules change with the product, and the funds went through anyway
After THORChain, DEXs carried the largest share of activity, with $273.98M in attacker-linked swaps. Uniswap accounts for $114.92M, CoW Swap for $65.48M, MetaMask Swaps for $56.85M, 1inch for $20M and SunSwap for $15.07M.
Several of these brands advertise screening, but the rules can change significantly depending on the product a user uses. Uniswap Labs blocks flagged wallets on its app, wallet and extension, while the contracts underneath stay open to any other interface. 1inch screens wallets through TRM Labs on its dApp and requires KYC for its Business API and Aqua product, but there’s no restriction on the classic router. In other words, the same brand can turn a wallet away on one product and still serve it on another.
That raises two questions: if a brand presents itself as protective but leaves gaps across its product suite, where does it actually sit on the spectrum, and what is it accountable for? And if screening covers only part of the product suite, does it really protect its users?
Every position on the spectrum comes at a price
Most of the debate around Bitget has been framed as a binary choice. Still, the more useful lens is the spectrum: DeFi offers a range of products and positions, and every type of user can find the one that fits how they want to transact.
However, each position on that spectrum carries its own price. For the most open protocols, those closest to the ethos of Bitcoin’s whitepaper, it means illicit funds can pass through. It also means legitimate users can’t be subjectively judged on their identity, country of residence or wealth. For the protocols that keep control, the trade-offs run the other way. Legitimate funds can be frozen by mistake, causing stress or financial loss, and users can be cut off because of where they live or because of shifting political and regulatory pressure. More importantly, their controls are also limited by what’s technically feasible, as the Bitget case showed.
In the end, with or without the power to block, freeze or screen, almost all of the stolen funds went through. The questions worth debating are therefore far more numerous than the one put to THORChain.
Issuers. How can those able to freeze funds react as fast as attackers? That means better tools and more efficient cooperation with law enforcement, but probably also stricter freezing policies, which can degrade the experience of legitimate users.
Screening protocols. How can a protocol screen effectively when it’s reached through aggregators, solvers and multiple hops? One option could be to screen the origin of funds rather than the last sender. Another could be to make screening a condition of integration.
Brands. Many teams screen the apps and APIs they operate while the contracts underneath stay permissionless. When funds move through those open products under a brand’s name, how much responsibility should sit with the team behind it?
Neutral protocols. What level of decentralization is enough for a protocol to defend its neutrality and keep the legitimacy to withstand pressure? The number of independent operators, how evenly stake is spread among them and how many of them are needed to change the rules all play a part, and the bar is likely to rise as the pressure grows.
In the end, on a spectrum where every position comes at a price, the real choice for each protocol is which price it’s willing to pay, and whether it pays it consistently.

On September 24, attackers drained $387.5M from Bitget’s hot wallets. Within a day, part of the funds were already being bridged and swapped across numerous assets, including XRP, ETH, BTC, USDT and USDC, through venues such as THORChain, Uniswap, Chainflip, NEAR Intents, 1inch and LayerZero.

Decentralization, Permissionlessness, Neutrality and Censorship Resistance: DeFi’s Founding Principles Put to the Test

Gate's biggest repositioning since its 2013 founding: what Gate Money offers, the exchange behind it, and how it compares with peers.
For most of crypto's history, an exchange had one job: match buyers and sellers. Gate is now betting that a trading venue is no longer enough. On October 7, founder and CEO Dr. Han took the main stage at TOKEN2049 Singapore to launch Gate Money, a single account for holding, moving and spending money across crypto, fiat and stocks.
Gate Money is the centerpiece of Gate's "all-in-one platform" brand upgrade, under the theme "One Gate, Everything Money." Traditional finance splits everyday money tasks across separate accounts, apps and systems. Gate Money brings them into one, built on a principle Dr. Han set out on stage: "Accounts should not be the boundary of funds."
This report covers what Gate Money offers, the scale of the exchange behind it, how the market reacted, and how it compares with similar moves by OKX and others.
Key takeaways
One account for everything. Gate Money combines crypto, fiat, stocks, a bank account in the user's own name and a payment card. It is live now for eligible users.
Built on a top-tier derivatives venue. Gate now ranks 3rd by derivatives volume, behind only Binance and OKX, at $12.77B a day. Its share of derivatives volume across five major exchanges rose from 9.3% to 11.2% month-on-month.
GT rallied before the launch. GT rose about 70% from its August low to around $11, and has held near that level since the keynote.
Gate leading the race. Others like OKX are building similar products. Gate leads with a live bank account.
Latest Proof of Reserves. Gate's latest Proof of Reserves report shows total reserves of $8.68B and an overall reserve ratio of 118%.
What Gate Money is
Gate Money is a single account that connects:
Digital assets and fiat currencies: Users hold multiple fiat currencies and digital assets in one account system, with a consolidated view of balances and fund movements. Fiat accounts can be managed separately by currency. Fiat and on-chain deposits, withdrawals and transfers are supported.
Stocks: Access to stocks and other traditional financial assets, now organized in a clearer account structure.
A bank account in the user's own name: Eligible users can upgrade to one, to receive funds and make withdrawals with their personal account details.
Payments: Gate Card works online and in stores with fiat currencies or digital assets and can be linked to Apple Pay and Google Pay. In certain countries and regions, users can also access ATM withdrawals and local QR-code payments.
Convert and Earn: Convert swaps between assets. Earn offers earning products, with eligible balances such as USDT earning up to 3.6% and no lock-up.
Why now: money has stopped fitting in boxes
Stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets and blockchain payment rails now give more kinds of assets digital liquidity and instant settlement. If a stock, a gold position and a stablecoin can all settle quickly, there is less reason to keep them in different apps. 
Holding, growing and spending an asset used to be three separate steps. Gate Money is designed to make them one.
Gate Money is backed by licenses across several jurisdictions:
a MiCA crypto-asset service provider license and a PSD2 payment institution license in Malta
a full virtual asset service provider license from VARA in Dubai
a registration with AUSTRAC in Australia as a digital currency exchange
a money services business registration with FinCEN and 37 state-level money transmitter licenses in the US, held through Gate US and covering 47 US jurisdictions
local entities in markets such as Japan, covering 81 regulated jurisdictions in total
These are supported by partnerships with payment institutions, banks, custody providers and clearing institutions.
Gate serves more than 61 million users and offers 5,300+ digital assets and 12,800+ stock assets, plus metals, forex, indices and commodities.
The foundation: a derivatives-heavy exchange
Gate Money is built on an exchange that is already large. Of the 88 centralized exchanges tracked by DefiLlama, Gate sits in the top tier on derivatives and reserves.
Metric
Gate
Rank
Derivatives volume, 24h
$12.77B
3rd
Spot volume, 24h
$1.60B
2nd
Reserves excluding its own token
$6.19B
6th
Total tracked reserves (including its own token)
$7.49B
n/a
24h volume figures as of October 20, 2026. The spot rank excludes Bitrue, whose spot volume carries a data-quality warning.
By derivatives volume, Gate is now third, behind Binance and OKX. Binance leads by a wide margin, at $50.24B a day against OKX's $18.85B.
Gate's derivatives volume is about 8 times its spot volume ($12.77B against $1.60B). That is the same shape as most large exchanges, where perpetuals dominate. It also shows why Gate Money matters strategically. Trading volume is cyclical and cheap to switch away from. An account that holds incoming funds, stocks and a card is stickier.
How Gate's derivatives volume has moved
The chart shows the average daily derivatives volume by week for Gate against OKX, Bybit and Bitget since mid-June. Binance is left off because its volume is several times larger and would flatten the other lines.
Monthly averages of daily derivatives volume, from the same data:
Month
Gate
OKX
Bybit
Bitget
Binance
June (from the 14th)
$10.99B
$21.49B
$12.20B
$8.28B
$46.25B
July
$9.51B
$19.34B
$10.01B
$6.66B
$45.38B
August
$8.87B
$20.05B
$11.88B
$7.36B
$50.67B
September
$13.15B
$23.27B
$14.42B
$7.62B
$59.69B
October (1st to 11th)
$11.23B
$19.19B
$12.24B
$7.08B
$51.63B
Gate's September average was its strongest of the period. August 19 is excluded, as Gate's volume is recorded as zero that day, a likely data gap.
Among these five exchanges, Gate's share of derivatives volume rose from 9.3% in the 30 days to September 11 to 11.2% in the 30 days to October 11. This is share of the five-exchange set, not of the whole market. Gate's average daily volume over the same two windows rose from $10.97B to $12.7B.
The launch has not lifted volume so far. In the five days from October 7 to 11, Gate averaged $11.1B a day, against $11.9B in the week from September 30 to October 6. That is a short window, but the September rise came before the announcement, so it should not be credited to Gate Money.
What Gate holds
Gate's latest Proof of Reserves report, released on 21 October, shows total reserves of $8.68B and an overall reserve ratio of 118%.
The two sources in this section measure different things. Gate's Proof of Reserves is its own report, comparing the assets it holds with what it owes users. DefiLlama's figures, used for the rest of this section, only count on-chain assets in wallets DefiLlama tracks for Gate, priced at market, and can leave out assets held elsewhere. They do not include what Gate owes users, so they show what Gate holds on-chain, not how fully user balances are covered.
On Gate’s latest PoR data, its tracked reserves are diversified, led by Bitcoin.
BTC is the largest tracked holding at $2.12B.
GT, Gate's own token, comes second at $1.17B. This is the main reason Gate's total tracked reserves ($7.49B) are higher than its reserves excluding its own token ($6.19B).
ETH and ETH-linked assets follow, with ETH at $1.08B.
Stablecoins and yield-bearing dollars appear healthy, including USD1, USDT, USDC, GUSD and more, at an aggregated value of $1.9B.
Gate's tracked clean assets in reserves come to $6.2B, fifth among exchanges.
Exchange
Tracked clean assets in reserves
Binance
$146.5B
OKX
$29.6B
Bybit
$15.5B
Robinhood 
$15.0B
 Gate
$6.2B
 Bitget
$5.5B
 Gemini
$5.49B
Gate's on-chain footprint is small
Gate Money is a centralized-finance product, and that is where Gate's weight lies. Its Gate Layer network holds $3.36M of TVL, up 8.8% over 30 days, and generated about $120K of app fees over 30 days. That is tiny next to the exchange's $6.19B of reserves, so the on-chain side is not what this launch rests on.
Strategy: three business lines
At a press Q&A on October 8, Dr. Han said "the core of growth is still user demand." As users' needs extend from trading to investing, payments, transfers and fund management, Gate plans to widen its services to match.
He set out three business lines for the next three years:
Digital asset trading. Still the core business, with continued investment across spot, derivatives and on-chain markets.
Gate Money. Fund management, payments, transfers and multi-currency accounts.
Stocks and other asset services. More ways to access and manage different asset types on one platform.
Beyond these, Gate will keep watching opportunities in AI and the on-chain ecosystem.
Gate Money against its peers
Gate is not the only exchange trying to turn itself into an everyday finance app. In recent months, the biggest exchanges have all announced versions of the same idea. The differences are in which pieces they lead with: bank accounts, payments, real stocks or tokenized stocks.
The peer set, product by product
Gate
OKX
Coinbase
Branding
"One Gate, Everything Money"
OKX Money app (select markets)
"Everything Exchange"
Bank-style account
Bank account in the user's name for eligible users, live now (Oct 7)
Fund with local currencies and hold USDG, USDC or USDT (Oct 6)
None identified
Card and payments
Gate Card; Apple Pay and Google Pay; ATM and QR in some regions
Card in the OKX Money app
Coinbase One Card
Stocks
Access to stocks in the account
Tokenized US stocks via partners such as Ondo and xStocks
Tokenized stocks and options announced as coming
Standout feature
One account for banking, payments and stocks
Digital-dollar balances with a card
Borrowing against staked Solana
Source: company announcements, press releases and media coverage, as of October 12, 2026.
How Gate's approach differs
Gate's account is live; Bybit's is still being built. Gate's bank account is available now for eligible users. As of September, Bybit held an electronic money institution license in Austria, expected a MiFID license, and planned a banking-style app with its own accounts and IBANs.
The "use assets without selling" idea is not unique to Gate.
Bitget lets 100 stock tokens serve as margin or collateral inside its unified account.
Coinbase has announced borrowing against staked Solana.
At the keynote, Dr. Han said stocks held in Gate Money can be used for daily spending without selling them first.
Gate has not yet published the details. Limits, haircuts and collateral rules will decide how useful it is.
Timing is crowded. OKX launched its OKX Money app on October 6, the day before Gate's keynote. Bybit began offering US stocks and ETFs on October 12. Gate's launch sits in a cluster of similar announcements, but it is the only one of these with a bank account already live.
The scale comparison
Product breadth only matters if there is trading and balance-sheet scale behind it. Here is where the closest peers stand in DefiLlama's data.
Exchange
Spot volume (24h)
Derivatives volume (24h)
Reserves excl. own token
Binance
$8.16B
$40.55B
$148.0B
OKX
$1.55B
$15.54B
$30.1B
Bybit
$1.33B
$9.71B
$15.7B
Gate
$1.30B
$8.82B
$6.19B
Bitget
$0.60B
$5.24B
$5.70B
All figures from DefiLlama, October 12, 2026, 08:01 UTC.
On October 12, Gate ranked fourth of these five on combined volume. Its spot plus derivatives volume was $10.1B, against $11.0B for Bybit, $17.1B for OKX and $48.7B for Binance. Gate was well ahead of Bitget at $5.8B.
Gate maintains a substantial reserve base of $6.19B excluding its own token, placing it above Bitget and supporting the platform as it expands beyond trading into account-based financial services. As users keep more balances on-platform, reserve transparency becomes increasingly important.
Derivatives dominate everywhere. Derivatives volume is between 5 and 10 times spot volume across all five exchanges, and 6.8 times at Gate. The all-in-one pitch is partly an attempt to broaden revenue away from that dependence.
Coinbase and Kraken are excluded, as comparable current data is not available for either.
The wider picture
Large exchanges are pushing past trading into payments, stocks and wealth products. What stands out about Gate Money is that it is built as one account with a bank-style front end, not as a set of separate products inside an exchange app.
That framing has real strengths. Gate already operates in derivatives, spot, a card and stocks, so Gate Money is mostly about connecting existing pieces. It also targets a real gap, because most crypto users still move between exchange, bank and broker accounts to do everyday things.
For Gate, Gate Money is the bid to turn a place users trade into a place they live financially. The launch is early, and the numbers that will say whether it worked, such as activations, card spend and balances held, are not yet public.
Data as of October 12, 2026, unless stated otherwise. Sources: DefiLlama for exchange, reserve and price data; Gate for product, license, company and Proof of Reserves figures; company announcements, press releases and media coverage for peer details.

Gate Money is the centerpiece of Gate's "all-in-one platform" brand upgrade, under the theme "One Gate, Everything Money." This report covers what Gate Money offers, the scale of the exchange behind it, how the market reacted, and how it compares with similar moves by OKX and others.

Gate Money: From Crypto Exchange to All-in-One Financial Account

The Tokenized Stock Market
In just over a year, tokenized stocks have gone from a niche experiment to a real market. DefiLlama's tracked tokenized-stock market cap grew from about $63M in August 2025 to $1.66B as of 14 October, a 26x increase over 14 months. As of that date, DefiLlama tracks 1,284 instruments across 18 chains. Instrument counts need care. In August 2026 the tracked count rose from 574 to 1,235 (+115%), but much of that reflects DefiLlama widening its coverage, not 661 new products launching. Market cap is the cleaner growth signal, though it is also affected by which instruments were tracked at each date.
Our first Spotlight showed that Bitget  has become one of the main venues for trading tokenized stocks, with strong retail demand and growing volume. But volume only tells you how much people are trading. It doesn't tell you how well the market handles that activity: how tight prices remain, how easily large orders can be filled, or how much  liquidity is available outside regular e US trading hours.
This piece asks the next question: now that the market has real size, how good is the liquidity behind it? To find out, we took a live snapshot of four names (AAPL, TSLA, GOOGL and SPY) across perps on Bitget, Binance, OKX and Bybit, and spot on Bitget, Binance, OKX, Bybit and Hyperliquid. The snapshot was taken on September 29, 2026 at 04:47 UTC, outside US market hours. 
Here's what we found. All findings come from this single snapshot, so they describe that moment rather than a standing ranking:
Bitget recorded the deepest perpetual order books on all four instruments tested (AAPL, TSLA, GOOGL and SPY), despite never leading on 24-hour volume. By displayed order-book depth within 1% of the price, Bitget ranked first among the four perp venues on every name. By 24-hour volume it ranked second or third.
Onchain books aren't comparable yet. Hyperliquid's spot books had almost no orders near the price, with spreads in the thousands of basis points. We report on-chain and centralized books separately.
Large-order execution revealed significant differences between venues. Bitget and Binance were the only spot venues with sufficient displayed liquidity to fill a simulated $100,000 buy order across all four instruments, although execution costs varied by assets. 
Every ranking and figure below is a single reading from September 29, 2026 at 04:47 UTC and should not be read as an average or a standing ranking.
Where Tokenized Stocks Trade
Before comparing execution quality, it's worth being clear about what's actually being traded, because "tokenized AAPL" isn't one product. Perps on Bitget, Binance, OKX and Bybit are cash-settled derivatives that track the stock price. They're created by each exchange, so there's no underlying share or issuer behind them. Spot tokenized equity products provide exposure to underlying equities through different issuance and custody structures. Depending on the product, tokens may represent claims on underlying shares or other forms of economic exposure, with investor rights varying by issuer. 
Venue
Product
Symbol convention
Issuer / brand
Bitget
Spot
r-prefix (rAAPL, rGOOGL, rSPY)
Reality, a Bitget subsidiary — branded "Reality Tokenized"
Binance
Spot
B-suffix (AAPLB, TSLAB,
GOOGLB, SPYB)
B-Tech Holdings Limited (confirmed for TSLA, GOOGL, SPY; not found for AAPL)
OKX
Spot
X-prefix (XAAPL, XTSLA,
GOOGL, XSPY)
Not identified
Bybit
Spot
X-suffix (AAPLX, TSLAX,
GOOGLX)
Not identified (tickers match other venues' products, so not confirmed as Bybit's own)
Hyperliquid
Spot (on-chain)
Ticker as-is (AAPL, TSLA, GOOGL)
Not identified
For spot products, the issuer is shown where it could be identified. "Not identified" means we could not confirm one.
We chose AAPL, TSLA, GOOGL and SPY because they're the most widely listed tokenized stocks across the venues we tested. Every venue offers at least one of them, and three of the four are available on spot at all five venues. SPY is the only index product in the set, which lets us check whether liquidity looks different for a broad-market ETF than for single stocks.
The venues match those covered in our first Spotlight: Bitget, Binance, OKX and Bybit for perps, with Hyperliquid added on spot as the on-chain comparison. Using the same list across both markets keeps the comparison like-for-like.
How we measured
All figures in this piece come from one live order-book snapshot, taken on September 29, 2026 at 04:47 UTC, outside US market hours. We covered four instruments (AAPL, TSLA, GOOGL and SPY) across the venues listed above. Spreads are the gap between the best bid and best ask at that moment, in basis points. They are a single-moment reading, not an average over a trading day, so they can look wider or tighter than the typical spread at other times, especially on individual names. Depth is the dollar value of resting orders within a set distance of the price. Slippage is simulated: we walked each order through the book as displayed, so it shows the cost the book implied at that moment, not an actual executed trade.
The Busiest Venue Isn’t The Deepest
Most trackers rank venues by trading volume. But volume only shows how much is being traded, not how much liquidity is sitting in the book. To test whether the two line up, we ranked each venue by 24-hour perp volume and then, separately, by order-book depth within 1% of the price.
Ticker
Venue
Volume rank (of 4 venues; OKX not shown)
Depth rank (of 4 venues; OKX not shown)
Pattem
AAPL
Binance
1
2
Aligned
AAPL
Bybit
2
3
High volume, thin book
AAPL
Bitget
3
1
Low volume, deep book
TSLA
Binance
1
2
Aligned
TSLA
Bitget
2
1
Aligned
TSLA
Bybit
3
4
Aligned
GOOGL
Binance
1
2
Aligned
GOOGL
Bybit
2
3
High volume, thin book
GOOGL
Bitget
3
1
Low volume, deep book
SPY
Binance
1
2
Aligned
SPY
Bitget
2
1
Aligned
SPY
Bybit
3
4
Aligned
The clearest pattern is Bitget. It never ranks first by volume, yet it has the deepest order book on all four names. On AAPL and GOOGL the gap is widest: Bitget ranks third of four venues by volume but carries the most resting liquidity.
This matters because volume and depth measure different things. Volume shows how much has already traded over the past 24 hours. Depth shows how much the book can absorb right now without moving the price. A trader placing a large order cares far more about the second number, and on that measure Bitget had the deepest book on every name, despite trailing on volume each time.
That's easy to miss on a volume leaderboard, which is how most tokenized-stock trackers rank venues today. This snapshot shows the difference in displayed depth, but it doesn't establish what drives it.
Bybit shows the opposite. On AAPL and GOOGL, it ranks second by volume but third by depth, so heavy trading sits on a thinner book. These are the same two names where Bitget looks quiet but deep, while Bybit looks busy but shallow. On TSLA and SPY, Bybit ranks low on both, so the mismatch doesn't apply there.
Binance sits between the two. It leads on volume for every name and ranks second on depth each time, just behind Bitget. It shows a venue can be strong on both measures, but even the most active venue here didn't have the deepest book.
What It Actually Costs To Trade
Rankings help compare venues at a glance, but they don't say what a trade actually costs. This section puts numbers on it in three ways: spreads, depth at different distances from the price, and slippage at different order sizes.
Hyperliquid is included in the spot data but shown separately. Its spreads run in the thousands of basis points, compared with single digits on centralized venues, so averaging it in would produce a "typical" figure that no real venue matches.
Spreads
These are single-moment readings from the September 29 snapshot, taken outside US hours.
The 0.83 bps reported in our earlier research was calculated across a different dataset and sampling period. The figures below reflect a single order-book snapshot taken on September 29, 2026, outside US market hours, and are therefore not directly comparable. . A median across many readings smooths out moments when a book is thin or wide. A single reading does not, so the two numbers measure different things and shouldn't be compared directly. Perp spreads in this snapshot ranged from about 0.13 to 1.75 bps. 
On perps, Bitget isn't the tightest venue. Its spreads are wider than Binance and OKX on TSLA (1.4 bps vs 0.28 bps) and GOOGL (1.75 bps vs 0.29 bps), and roughly in line with the field on AAPL and SPY.
On spot, Bitget's spreads are wider than Binance's on every name. On GOOGL, for example, Bitget quoted 9.06 bps against Binance's 0.88 bps. But the spread only shows the price of the very first order. For larger trades, what matters is how much size sits behind it.
Depth
Spot books are shaped differently from venue to venue. Bitget's book keeps adding size the further you go from the price. On AAPL, its depth grew from $42.7k within 0.5% of the price to $122.1k within 1% and $208.6k within 2%, with a similar build-up on GOOGL and SPY. Binance and OKX, by contrast, concentrate more of their size close to the price, with less added further out. On AAPL spot, Binance's book was deeper than Bitget's at every distance shown; Bitget's depth lead in this snapshot was on perps.
This matters for larger orders. A small trade only touches the orders closest to the price, while a large one works through them and relies on size further out. In this snapshot, Bitget's spot liquidity was spread more evenly across price levels, while Binance's was concentrated close to the price. The snapshot doesn't tell us why the books are shaped this way.
Slippage
Slippage figures here are simulated execution costs. We walked each buy order through the order book as displayed at the time of the snapshot, so they are not actual executed trades. Real fills would also depend on how the book moves while the order executes.
At $1000, simulated slippage was below 5 bps across almost all , centralized venues tested, with differences becoming more pronounced at larger order sized. 
Slippage is the extra cost of a buy order relative to mid price / best ask, found by walking the order through the displayed book. At $100k, only Bitget and Binance could fill a simulated order on every ticker. Binance was cheaper on AAPL (11.8 bps vs Bitget's 96.2 bps), TSLA (3.4 vs 7.7) and SPY (2.8 vs 4.7). Bitget was cheaper on GOOGL (6.4 vs 9.5). The AAPL gap is an outlier, and because it reflects one snapshot of the displayed book, we would not read it as a standing difference. Neither venue wins across the board.
Perps vs spot
We did not compare perp and spot execution costs like-for-like, so this piece makes no claim about which is cheaper. The two are different products. Perps are cash-settled derivatives with no underlying share, and their costs include trading fees, funding, margin and liquidation risk, none of which are covered here. Spot slippage above is simulated from the displayed book for Bitget and Binance only, because the other venues could not fill a $100K order.
Conclusion: Volume Alone Doesn’t Show Where Liquidity Sits
Tokenized stocks now have real scale, and this piece set out to test whether the liquidity behind them matches the headline numbers. In this snapshot, volume was a poor guide to where displayed liquidity sat. Bitget never led on 24-hour perp volume, yet it had the deepest perp book on all four names we tested. It was also one of only two spot venues, alongside Binance, that could fill a simulated $100k order on every ticker.
Perp depth was Bitget's clearest strength in this snapshot. On spreads, it quoted wider than Binance on several names, and it cost more on most simulated $100k spot fills. The gaps are small on most names, though AAPL was a clear outlier on $100k spot fills.
There's a lot this snapshot can't tell us. It can't show what drives the differences in displayed depth. We didn't compare fees, which affect where liquidity providers post size. And because this was a single snapshot taken outside US trading hours, we don't know whether these rankings hold when the US market is open or across other market conditions. A US-hours comparison is a natural next step.
As tokenized equities expand across trading venues, liquidity and execution quality are becoming important measures of market competitiveness. This analysis shows why trading volume along cannot capture those differences. In the September 29 snapshot, Bitget recorded the deepest perpetual order books across all four instruments tested, while spot execution costs varied across venues and order sizes.

Now that the market has real size, how good is the liquidity behind it? To find out, we took a live snapshot of four names (AAPL, TSLA, GOOGL and SPY) across perps on Bitget, Binance, OKX and Bybit, and spot on Bitget, Binance, OKX, Bybit and Hyperliquid.

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