Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Is AI a real threat to DeFi?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Is AI a real threat to DeFi?

I promise that I am not going to turn this newsletter into an AI-focused one:)

But I do think it’s important to talk about how AI could impact DeFi, because there’s no denying that AI is getting insanely good at finding code vulnerabilities.

On May 28, Anthropic (the company behind Claude) released the Opus 4.8 AI model.

Just one day later, a security researcher hired by Zcash discovered, using Opus 4.8, a 4-year-old critical bug in Zcash that enabled the minting of an infinite number of $ZEC.

It took him less than 24 hours to find it using AI.

You can imagine how damaging this could have been if the vulnerability had been found first by a hacker trying to exploit it.

Now, bugs inevitably happen.

Even Bitcoin had a few major vulnerabilities in its early days that were eventually patched. But this incident highlighted something important:

AI is quickly reaching the point where it can outperform humans at finding vulnerabilities. According to Anthropic, Mythos, its most powerful advanced AI model, found 10,000 software flaws in its first month.

So it’s easy to see why AI is becoming a major security concern for DeFi.

But on the bright side, I think there are also two positive things about AI that I haven’t seen many people mentioning, and I believe are worth covering:

• The public version of Mythos (Fable) that got released a few days ago can’t be used to audit smart contracts by the general public

This is deliberately done by Anthropic to prevent its use in cyberattacks.

Depending on how you see it, this is both good and bad. On one hand, letting anyone use Fable for smart contract audits could help well-intentioned developers find more bugs and patch them. On the other hand, it’s somewhat reassuring that hackers can’t currently use it in order to search for smart contract vulnerabilities.

• Some major crypto projects like Ethereum and Solana have reportedly already gained access to the more powerful non-public version of Mythos, which can be used to perform audits and help identify critical bugs

This is obviously great news. If other big projects like Sky, Aave, and Pendle will also eventually gain access to this version of Mythos to perform audits, they could become significantly more secure than they already are.

And I think this is the bull case for DeFi in the AI era.

If the best AI models for security remain gated and are only accessible to vetted teams, auditors, and white-hat researchers, DeFi could eventually reach a point where it becomes incredibly hard for bad actors to find vulnerabilities that haven’t already been discovered and patched by AI.

Now obviously, this depends on what OpenAI and Anthropic will do next.

My hope is that more vetted DeFi teams and auditors will get early access to the most powerful security-focused AI models going forward, allowing them to find and patch vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them.

If this happens, good actors will gain a major advantage over hackers.

So to sum it up, I think that the DeFi projects that take security seriously will be fine.

As Stani, the founder of Aave, shared, the quality of AI-powered tools for hardening security has improved drastically. The projects using those are much less likely to be exploited via bugs found using AI.

That said, my advice is to be increasingly more careful with the dApps you use.

Stick to DeFi protocols with multiple audits from top security firms, built by teams that give you a feeling that they truly care about security.

The next few years will be a stress test for DeFi, but I think AI will ultimately make it stronger and more resilient.

Chart of the week

Hyperliquid is expected to make $172M in extra annual revenue due to its collaboration with Circle

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Morpho raised $175M in funding

Curve Finance introduced Llamalend v2 - a new DeFi lending primitive

NEAR Protocol announced confidential perps powered by Hyperliquid

Starknet released STRK20 - a privacy framework for ERC-20 assets

DeFi Saver integrated Hyperliquid and launched S1 of its rewards campaign. Trade perps or open leveraged DeFi strategies to earn a share of its 50,000 USDC rewards pool

Babylon released native Bitcoin-backed borrowing via Aave V4 on testnet

Ondo released Ondo Perps, enabling to trade RWA perps with TradFi liquidity. It offers 24/7 trading access for equities and commodities

Aave proposed a new risk framework following the rsETH exploit

3Jane, a credit-based undercollateralized lending DeFi app, went live to the public

Helius, Mert’s project, announced plans to build a privacy layer for Solana

Polymarket introduced combinatorial positions, which enable to bundle multiple predictions into one bet

Ethena partnered with Centrifuge to add RWAs as part of USDe’s backing

Nado enabled trading perps with tokenized equities as collateral

SBF applied for a presidential pardon

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎My plan for Bitcoin

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎My plan for Bitcoin

It’s been a pretty rough week for BTC.

The good thing about bear markets, though, is that they bring life-changing opportunities. We’ve seen in both 2018 and 2022 that if you have the balls to buy when everyone else is scared, it can pay off big time.

Earlier this year, I shared my plan and market expectations for 2026.

Now feels like a good time to provide an update, so I wanted to share what I think could happen next for BTC, and explain how I’m positioning myself.

Let’s dive in 👇

The 4-year cycle is still intact

I know the 4-year cycle theory may not make a lot of sense from a fundamental perspective, which is why a lot of people don’t believe in it, but the reality is this:

In 2014, 2018, and 2022, BTC did the exact same thing.

~1 year after it topped in the post-Halving year, it hit its cycle bottom.

And according to the chart below, which shows the BTC ROI over midterm years (2014, 2018, 2022), BTC is now following its usual 4-year trajectory.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it will keep falling as much as it did in previous cycles. Historically, each bear market has been less severe than the previous one.

But based on what happened in the past, I think the most likely scenario is that the cycle bottom will be reached sometime in September or maybe October. I am saying this because Q4 is historically when BTC tends to bottom in the midterm years.

So far, I don’t see anything that indicates that this time will be different.

That said, I think it’s a bad idea to try to time the bottom perfectly.

A lot of people who believed in BTC in 2022 didn’t buy it at $16k because they were waiting for $14k. $14k was never hit again, and they ended up watching BTC go to new all-time highs without any exposure.

I am personally not willing to risk that happening to me, so here’s what I am doing:

My current action plan

For me, anything below $65,000 is a good zone to accumulate BTC.

Even though I think the bottom is not in yet, this week I’ve already started dollar-cost averaging into BTC by buying small amounts daily as long as it stays below $65k.

The truth is that no one knows exactly what the market will do next. So while I’m still keeping most of my stablecoins ready to deploy later as we get closer to Q4, according to my original thesis, I also think buying a bit at current levels makes sense just for the scenario that my thesis is wrong.

Anyway, the lower BTC goes, and the closer it gets to $50k, the more I plan to buy.

I mentioned $50k because, at the moment, I think that if BTC dips below $60k, $50k is the level around which I’d expect it to hit the bottom.

That said, if a major crypto company implodes (like FTX in 2022) or there’s a huge stock market crash that affects all financial markets, it could maybe dip below this level and even reach $40k in a worst-case scenario.

But personally, I’d rather deploy my capital earlier at a slightly higher price than wait for BTC to hit $40k, which may never happen.

My goal is to deploy all my available stablecoins into BTC by the end of November 2026 at the latest, as I think it’s unlikely BTC will continue falling much after that.

I expect to get a great average entry price by doing this.

At some point, I will obviously also be interested in buying some altcoins.

But if you look at how BTC performed relative to most altcoins in the last cycle, I think it makes more sense to focus on BTC for now and only start building significant altcoin exposure once they show clear signs of strength.

The harsh reality is that people who bought BTC at $16k-$20k in 2022 and simply held until new all-time highs outperformed more than 95% of altcoin traders.

I guess the lesson is that less is more.

You don’t need a complicated strategy to outperform.

I hope you found this helpful, and good luck out there!

Better times for crypto will come. You just have to believe.

Chart of the week

Near’s privacy solution is gaining traction fast

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

CFTC legalized perps in the US

Sky and Pendle partnered to launch a fixed-rate sUSDS product

Morpho released the whitepaper for Morpho Midnight - an upcoming protocol for fixed rate, fixed term credit markets

Ethena partnered with Coinbase to launch a new savings product

Tom Lee’s Bitmine announced plans to create a STRC-style product in order to raise money and buy more ETH

Arbitrum Foundation published a proposal asking Arbitrum DAO for ~$43.5M to fund another year of operations

Grayscale launched its Hyperliquid Staking ETF

NEAR Intents surpassed $20B in all-time cross-chain volume

Lighter founder announced they are working on an options product

Exponent V2, a new interest rate trading platform on Solana, went live

EtherFi launched 15% cashback for AI tool bills paid with EtherFi Cash

Zodial, the first portfolio-margin lending protocol in DeFi, went live on Solana

Opensea announced its own perps DEX powered by Hyperliquid

Radiant Capital announced it is shutting down

Cap announced its ICO starting on June 10

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎An underrated DeFi strategy

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎An underrated DeFi strategy

The most obvious and fastest way to make (or lose) money in crypto is trading.

But besides investing or trading, there are also many other, less popular strategies that you can use to gradually grow your stablecoin holdings.

I wanted to talk today about one of these strategies I’ve been using to make money with my stablecoins over the past few months. Let’s dive in:

First of all, I’ll provide a bit of context.

Many yield-bearing assets work this way (I will use Ethena as an example):

You can instantly stake a base asset with no yield, such as USDe, for a yield-bearing asset like sUSDe, but if you want to unstake sUSDe, you have to wait up to a few days.

If an sUSDe whale needs instant liquidity fast, it can choose to instantly sell the yield-bearing asset (sUSDe) on a DEX, but at a slightly worse price than it would get by unstaking sUSDe and waiting for the unstake cooldown period.

And whenever that happens, it often creates a peg arbitrage opportunity.

Because the liquidity for most yield-bearing assets, including sUSDe, is not very deep, if a whale sells, the sUSDe DEX price might temporarily drop below its actual NAV exchange rate shown on its website.

NAV exchange rate = the true value of that token (e.g., for USDC it’s $1.00)

What that means is that you could, for instance, do this:

• Notice that sUSDe is trading slightly under its peg on DEXs after a whale sold

• Check Ethena's website and verify that sUSDe is still overcollateralized, and that there’s not a fundamental reason for the depeg

• Swap 30,000 USDC for 22,000 sUSDe on a DEX (for example)

• Unstake that sUSDe on Ethena for USDe

• Wait 24h (the unstaking cooldown period) and then receive $30,045 USDe in return

• Swap that USDe back to 30,041 USDC and walk away with $41 profit in 1 day

This is just an example with made-up numbers to show you how this strategy (I will call it peg arbitrage) effectively works. The returns vary a lot, but personally, at times, I was able to earn 50-100% APY for a few days by doing peg arbitrage.

That said, peg arbitrage isn’t something you can do every day, as big depegs like this happen only once in a while (e.g., after the rsETH hack, there was a decent sUSDe depeg), but when they do, you can make good money by capitalizing on them.

Next, I will show you how to track depegs like this in order to take advantage of them whenever they occur. Before that, here’s an overview of Pareto:

Brought to you by Pareto

It’s time to make on-chain credit more useful

On-chain credit has been growing fast.

But bringing loans onchain is only the first step.

The bigger opportunity is to make these credit positions easy to use across DeFi and unlock greater capital efficiency.

That’s where Pareto comes in.

Pareto provides vault infrastructure for tokenized credit markets, helping turn credit exposure into positions that can be integrated with lending protocols.

It supports deploying credit vaults with the compliance, liquidity, reporting, and uptime guarantees that institutional products require.

One of the most successful products built on Pareto is the FalconX Credit Vault, which is composable by design:

• Users can deposit USDC into it and get AA_FalconXUSDC receipt tokens

• The capital deposited into the vault is then lent by FalconX to trading firms, hedge funds, etc., in order to generate a yield

• Depositors can then use their AA_FalconXUSDC tokens as collateral on Morpho to borrow USDC against them

• The borrowed USDC can then be used to create a loop position with high returns or for any other strategies. Looping can also be automated through Gauntlet.

This setup provides a lot of flexibility:

Instead of simply holding a credit position, users have the option to access borrowing opportunities while maintaining exposure to the yield-generating vault.

Recently, Matteo Pandolfi, CEO and Co-founder of Pareto, and Craig Birchall, Head of Lending at FalconX, were guests of Unchained’s Bits + Bips podcast.

They discussed there what’s behind the $16 trillion repo market and why bringing it onchain is DeFi’s most important missing piece of infrastructure.

You can check out the full podcast here.

Read more about the $16T repo market and why it matters for onchain credit in this article.

🔎An underrated DeFi strategy (part 2)

How do you catch peg arbitrage opportunities?

There are multiple ways, depending on how far you want to take it.

If you know how to code or you’re a vibecoder willing to spend some time on this, you could build a bot to alert you when such an opportunity arises.

But the simplest way is this:

• Find a list of yield-bearing assets (e.g. Stablewatch has a good one here) and check their charts on Coingecko to see which ones have seen depegs on DEXs before

• After you identify several of them, research how their redemption/unstaking mechanism works, and if there’s any way you can arbitrage them (arbitrage in the way I described works only for the yield-bearing assets that have a permissionless redemption/unstaking mechanism - some don’t)

• Go to Dexscreener → Watchlist

• Add to the Watchlist the yield-bearing assets you found that meet your criteria, click $ button to see their native price, and check the watchlist once or twice a day

• When you notice that one of them dropped >0.05%–0.1% in the last 24h, check whether it’s trading below the NAV rate on its website, confirm the drop isn’t due to an exploit/loss of funds, and arbitrage it if the return is worthwhile (be aware that some assets have redemption fees)

sUSDe, reUSD, and PRIME are a few yield-bearing assets I am monitoring.

You can also set alerts to trigger when a specific price is hit using Dexscreener.

With this strategy, just yesterday, I noticed that PRIME, a yield-bearing RWA asset, dropped to $1.037 for a brief period while its NAV exchange rate was $1.0397.

If you had bought it when it depegged, you could have gotten a 0.26% return in just a few days by buying it on a DEX where it was depegged and by beginning the PRIME unstaking process on its website. (in this case, Hastra)

These are not crazy returns like we are used to in crypto. But if you hold stablecoins, this arbitrage is a nice way to make some additional money on the side IMO.

With that said, I hope you found this guide useful!

What I wanted to show in this post is that while making money in crypto is certainly harder now than it was a few years ago, this market is still very inefficient.

If you hold stablecoins and manage to spot these inefficiencies, you can grow your portfolio even during market crashes.

Chart of the week

Spot HYPE ETFs absorbed 1.04% of HYPE’s circulating supply in their first 10 days

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Hyperliquid launched outcome markets based on real-world events

Base introduced Base MCP - enabling anyone to connect AI agents to their Base account to trade on-chain

NEAR Protocol released confidential on-chain payments

Aave’s proposal to deploy Aave V4 on Avalanche with up to $15M incentives is live

Sui released gasless stablecoin transfers

Resolv announced its recovery plan and introduced primeUSD - a permissioned leveraged RWA product

Liquid introduced Co-Invest - the first way to trade directly via ChatGPT and Claude, powered by Hyperliquid

Ethereum proposal to enable native private ETH and ERC-20 transfers on mainnet was presented by Facet co-founder Tom Lehman

Polymarket released its perps product in the beta phase

Ondo Finance Founder Nathan Allman passed away

Re, a reinsurance platform, introduced its governance token called RE

Babylon proposed bringing native BTC collateral to Aave V4

Euler Finance launched modular lending on HyperEVM

Solstice’s token and airdrop claiming portal went live

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎Tokenized Stocks are getting regulatory clarity

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Tokenized Stocks finally get regulatory clarity

One of the most bullish regulatory announcements in a while dropped this week.

According to Bloomberg, the SEC is reportedly planning to introduce an “innovation exemption” that would officially allow US users to access tokenized stocks.

I think this could have a major positive impact on DeFi and attract significant capital to the industry in the long run, which is why I wanted to cover it today.

Why legalizing tokenized stocks is a big deal

On-chain stocks already exist. Several platforms, including Ondo Finance and xStocks, offer tokenized equities with deep liquidity.

But there’s one major issue:

They mostly operate in a regulatory grey area and are restricted to non-US residents.

This is one of the reasons why I think they haven’t gained significant traction yet.

For now, holding stocks in a TradFi brokerage account simply makes more sense for most investors. It comes with lower regulatory risk and clearer investor protections.

But the SEC’s proposed innovation exemption could change that.

Once regulatory clarity arrives, the value proposition of tokenized stocks becomes much clearer in my opinion, as tokenization can offer major advantages.

For example, DeFi’s composability enables an unparalleled level of capital efficiency.

In DeFi, you could use your stocks and ETFs to borrow stablecoins against them, provide them as liquidity to generate a yield, trade them 24/7, not only during the stock market operating hours, and do all of this while paying lower fees.

Meanwhile, most of these use cases are still either unavailable, limited, or impractical on traditional brokerage exchanges. TradFi is simply much less capital efficient.

That’s why I think the demand for tokenized stocks and ETFs could be massive once the regulatory uncertainty is removed.

Which DeFi projects could benefit from the SEC’s innovation exemption for on-chain stocks?

I already made a short X post about this, but I think it’s worth diving deeper.

The most obvious beneficiaries would be the issuers of tokenized stocks. Right now, the most popular ones are Ondo Finance and xStocks.

Ondo has 60% market share in the tokenized stocks sector, and xStocks has 28%.

That said, there’s an important caveat. Ondo is currently the only major issuer with a live token, but ONDO is a governance token with limited utility for holders today.

There have been proposals around revenue sharing/buybacks, but there’s no timeline for their implementation. So while Ondo’s TVL could grow significantly if tokenized stocks take off, that growth may not necessarily translate into ONDO token pumping.

Another project that could benefit in the long run is Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid doesn’t offer spot trading for tokenized stocks, but it does offer RWA perps, from which it has generated significant revenue.

The only drawback is that Hyperliquid isn’t officially available to users in the US for now, so it may not immediately capture the upside of the SEC’s innovation exemption.

But the Hyperliquid team is working on making it accessible in the US.

Lastly, I think money markets could also see significant growth in TVL, driven by friendly regulations for tokenized stocks and ETFs.

I believe many people would love the idea of borrowing against their equity portfolios for day-to-day purchases, yield farming, or other investments. Right now, Kamino on Solana is the most popular place for borrowing against tokenized stocks & ETFs.

But I expect that projects like Aave will eventually allow that as well.

Overall, I’m excited about the direction crypto is heading.

We’ve been waiting for regulatory clarity and pro-crypto regulation for years.

Now those are finally coming, and they are going to attract more money into the industry than ever before.

Together with Apyx

The fastest-growing STRC-backed DeFi protocol

One of the fastest-growing new DeFi protocols has been Apyx.

In less than 3 months, it surpassed $476M in TVL.

Apyx is the first stablecoin protocol backed by Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) preferred equity, such as Strategy’s STRC and Strive’s SATA.

As STRC has a very high base yield, Apyx can offer 10.73% APY to the holders of its apyUSD yield-bearing asset.

And in addition to this, APYX Airdrop is also coming:

• 5% of its total token supply will be distributed as part of its Season 1 points program that ends on May 22

• 4% of its total token supply is allocated for Season 2 of its points program, which starts right after Season 1 ends

The exact date when the APYX token launches has not been announced yet.

But what we know is this:

The APYX token will have a staking mechanism, enabling stakers to either earn additional APYX tokens or receive apxUSD dividends from the protocol’s revenue.

APYX will provide a way to bet directly on the STRC narrative for the first time.

As Apyx is the largest STRC-backed protocol, it benefits from STRC’s success, and APYX token holders will get more revenue as the dApp grows.

You can farm Apyx by holding apyUSD, apxUSD, or by using them in DeFi across various protocols like Pendle and Morpho.

Start exploring Apyx today!

Chart of the week

EtherFi Cash is one of the fastest-growing crypto neobanks

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Variational raised $50M in funding and launched RWA perps

Polymarket launched pre-IPO markets for trading private companies

SkyMoney increased the SKY Staking Rate from 1.31% to 5.71% (fueled by buybacks)

Pendle released the Pendle Trading Alert Bot, enabling users to set alerts for limit order fills, new market launches, and more

Chainlink SVR was integrated into Aave V4, adding a new revenue stream for Aave from liquidation MEV

Lighter announced Lighter RFQ, bringing institutional-grade liquidity for RWA pairs

CME and NYSE are pushing the US to force Hyperliquid to integrate KYC

ProjectX announced an airdrop (likely in stablecoins) for May 22

Bitwise committed to use 10% of the revenue from its Hyperliquid ETF to buy HYPE

SEC is allegedly preparing to allow on-chain tokenized stock trading

Lombard and Kraken are migrating from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP for their cross-chain infrastructure

Japan officially recognized stablecoins as legal payment methods

Solstice postponed its TGE to May 25

Aave’s proposal to expand to Monad is live

Strategy acquired $2 billion worth of BTC

Thorchain suffered a $10M exploit

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎The fastest-growing DeFi sectors

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎The fastest-growing DeFi sectors

Despite the market conditions, some DeFi apps are still doing extremely well.

I’ve been looking over the past few days at what DeFi sectors have been gaining the most traction lately, and thought it would be useful to share my findings.

Let’s get into it:

1. RWA perps

The success of Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 RWA markets certainly exceeded expectations.

It’s been 8 months since their launch, and the HIP-3 daily volume already regularly exceeds $2–3 billion, with especially strong demand for commodity perps.

I think that an underrated tailwind for this was the Trump administration's habit of making major announcements right after traditional markets closed on Fridays. With no way to hedge or open trades until Monday morning, some TradFi investors started using Hyperliquid's 24/7 RWA perps to act immediately.

Hyperliquid had the first mover advantage by being the first major protocol to offer 24/7 RWA perps, and it benefited a lot from this.

Over time, I expect the competition in the RWA perps sector to intensify.

But for now, Hyperliquid is clearly the biggest winner in this field.

2. On-chain neobanks

On-chain neobanks is the sector that I am personally most excited to see grow.

The reason why I am saying this is that, unfortunately, some banks make the crypto offramping process a nightmare.

On-chain neobanks solve this, letting you spend your crypto easily without dealing with a traditional bank. And they have gotten drastically better over the past few months in terms of user experience.

So far, the on-chain neobank I’ve used the most is EtherFi Cash.

What I like is that it offers a wide range of features, including up to 3% cashback, support for bank transfers, an Earn product, and a borrowing mode that lets you spend cash by borrowing against your crypto.

But there are also many other cool on-chain neobanks, such as UR, Avici, Holyheld, and Gnosis Pay. Plenty of options to choose from.

3. Tokenized stocks

Tokenized stocks have always been a hot topic on CT, but only recently they have started to gain significant traction, as you can see in the chart above.

The biggest reason for this, in my opinion, is the lack of liquidity. No one wanted to buy a tokenized version of a stock when you had to pay a huge slippage to do it.

Fortunately, projects like Ondo and xStocks solved this issue.

For instance, when you buy a tokenized stock issued by Ondo on its app, the protocol uses an RFQ model in order to access TradFi liquidity and avoid AMM slippage.

In this way, Ondo can offer 200+ tokenized stocks and ETFs with very deep liquidity. And I think this is why Ondo managed to become the largest on-chain stocks issuer.

Right now, the functionality of these on-chain stocks is limited to just holding them or borrowing against some of them on apps like Morpho.

But I expect tokenized stocks to become more integrated into DeFi over time.

4. Yield-bearing stablecoins

Yield-bearing stablecoins still represent a pretty small portion of the stablecoin sector.

Yet without a doubt, they have seen tremendous growth over the past few years, and I expect them to continue to take market share from Tether and Circle.

The largest yield-bearing stablecoin app (also the fastest-growing at the moment) is Sky. The supply of its USDS stablecoin surged from $6.49B to $11.7B in Q1 2026 alone.

However, the competition in the yield-bearing stablecoin sector is fierce.

There are over 100 dApps in the stablecoin sector per DeFiLlama, and new ones like Apyx, Altura, Re, and Solstice have also been gaining traction. That’s a good thing, though, as high competition will inevitably lead to more innovation.

Pendle is one project that benefits from this, as it has established itself as the go-to place for fixed stablecoin yield.

With that said, those are all the sectors I wanted to cover.

Overall, I think these are some of the most promising areas in DeFi right now because they’re built around products people genuinely want to use.

When the market conditions finally improve, the protocols that capture the most value from these trends will probably be among the biggest winners.

Together with Altura

Earn a double-digit yield + incentives on stablecoins

A new stablecoin protocol that has been gaining traction lately is Altura.

While most DeFi yields collapsed when the bear market came, as they relied mostly on token emissions, Altura is offering 19,38% APY in real yield right now.

This yield is generated by Altura by deploying capital across four strategies: funding rate arbitrage, basis arbitrage, market making, and physical gold arbitrage.

On top of that, Altura has also recently announced some nice incentives:

• AVLT holders qualify for rewards in $ALTU, Altura’s native token, by simply holding AVLT in their wallet (in addition to the base APY)

• $100K in incentives (in ALTU + AVLT) is being distributed this month under its YieldRun program, rewarding ecosystem participants

• USDT depositors in the AlphaUSDT Prime vault on Morpho are currently getting 6,03% in vault APY + 5.94% APY in USDC incentives from Altura

Altura is incentivizing USDT lenders in the AlphaUSDT Prime vault as it accepts AVLT as collateral. In the first 30 minutes, this vault crossed $0.5M in TVL.

If you wish to loop AVLT for a higher yield, you can also do that by borrowing USDT from this Morpho vault. Right now, the borrowing rate is 7.34%.

To provide transparency into its yield-generating strategy, its team has launched a proof of solvency dashboard on Accountable.

Furthermore, you can find a breakdown of its strategies on its Strategies page.

Check out Altura here!

Chart of the week

Phantom generated $20M+ from its perps product powered by Hyperliquid

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Ethereum Foundation released an upgrade making on-chain transactions human-readable

Hyperliquid made USDC its primary collateral asset after reaching a revenue-sharing deal with Circle

MegaETH started doing token buybacks with its revenue from USDm usage

Aave’s proposal to allow borrowing against native BTC on Aave V4 is live

Extended enabled trading perps with wBTC and ETH as collateral

iExec introduced Confidential Vaults - active DeFi strategy vaults with built-in privacy. The product offers a selective disclosure feature for auditors.

Starknet launched strkBTC, a privacy-focused Bitcoin asset

EtherFi released the EURC Liquid vault, enabling users to earn yield on euros

Osero, a new stablecoin savings app, raised $13.5M in a funding round led by Sky Protocol and Plasma. Osero is incubated by Stableswatch

Papertrade, a new perps DEX built on Hyperliquid with 1000x leverage, 0 slippage, and no funding costs, was introduced

Kamino and Jupiter launched USDe looping strategies with 25%+ APY

Coinbase and Circle announced that they bought and staked HYPE

Solana’s Alpenglow, its biggest scalability upgrade ever, went live in a testing phase

Circle raised $222 million for building Arc, its own blockchain.

Injective launched on-chain pre-IPO stocks for OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic

Solstice scheduled its token launch for May 21

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Theo launched a first-of-its-kind yield-bearing stablecoin powered by gold. Learn more about it here!

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Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Why Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 is a big deal

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Why Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 is a big deal

Hyperliquid has finally released its highly anticipated HIP-4 upgrade.

And I think the significant hype around it is justified.

I’ve seen a lot of people on CT reduce HIP-4 to just prediction markets, but HIP-4 is actually way more interesting than that and could unlock many new use cases.

Let me break it down:

What does HIP-4 actually bring to Hyperliquid?

In short, HIP-4 introduces outcome markets on Hyperliquid.

Outcome markets are binary markets that resolve to either 0 or 1.

This includes prediction markets, but HIP-4 can support any type of event-based market with a yes/no outcome.

Any Hyperliquid ecosystem builder that stakes enough HYPE can deploy custom outcome markets on Hyperliquid. That’s one of the most interesting things about HIP-4, in my view, as market creation is permissionless, unlike on Polymarket/Kalshi.

Several Hyperliquid eco projects like Kinetiq are already building on top of HIP-4.

Kinetiq, the largest liquid staking HYPE protocol, is among the first to confirm it will launch a set of HIP-4 outcome markets.

New use cases beyond classic prediction markets

Prediction markets are the most obvious use case of HIP-4.

But in addition to this, HIP-4 could also be used to launch insurance products and a wide range of novel derivative products.

For instance, let’s say that a DeFi investment fund has $10 million lent on Aave.

To hedge against the risk of an exploit, they could create a HIP-4 market titled “Will Aave get exploited this year?”. Then they could buy 10 million YES shares at a low price, since the probability of this happening would likely be low.

In this way, even if Aave gets exploited, they will get their money back, as the capital they lose in Aave will be offset by the money they make on Hyperliquid.

Now, technically, could something similar also be done via a prediction market on Polymarket?

Yes. But HIP-4 has two big advantages that make it fundamentally different:

• The creation of new outcome markets is permissionless - Anyone with enough HYPE staked will be able to create an outcome market for any event, while on Polymarket, users cannot directly create their own prediction markets

• Cross-margin efficiency - The collateral used to buy shares in outcome markets on Hyperliquid can also be used as cross-margin collateral for trading perps

Let’s say you are bullish on BTC, but you’re worried it will crash if Trump decides to attack Cuba later this year.

Thanks to HIP-4, you could make money in both scenarios:

• Use your collateral to long BTC on Hyperliquid

• Simultaneously buy YES shares in a HIP-4 market like: “Will the US attack Cuba in 2026?” using the same collateral

On Polymarket, once you use your capital to participate in a prediction market, your money is stuck there until you close the position. On Hyperliquid, your capital can be deployed across perps, spot, and outcome markets simultaneously.

That unlocks an entirely new level of capital efficiency.

How do HYPE holders benefit from HIP-4?

First of all, HIP-4 markets obviously generate trading fees.

There’s no opening fee, but a trading fee is applied when closing a trade.

These fees are used for HYPE buybacks. But in addition to this, creating outcome markets with Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 requires staking 500k HYPE.

That means projects building on top of HIP-4 will either need to acquire large amounts of HYPE themselves or borrow it through platforms like Kinetiq.

Either way, demand for HYPE increases if HIP-4 adoption grows.

Overall, I am excited to see that HIP-4 went live. It’s still early days for it, but I think it has a lot of room for growth.

Combining perps trading and outcome markets under the same portfolio margin is going to unlock new trading strategies that weren’t possible before.

Together with Theo

The yield-bearing stablecoin powered by gold

Most DeFi yield opportunities rely on unsustainable incentives.

Theo is flipping this model with thUSD - the first yield-bearing stablecoin backed by a delta-neutral gold strategy that has just gone live.

Its strategy is designed to generate yield regardless of whether gold goes up or down.

Here’s how it works:

• thUSD can be bought with USDC

• Under the hood, the collateral backing it is used to buy thGOLD (a tokenized yield-bearing gold product) and open a short hedge on CME gold futures

• The yield then comes from two sources: thGOLD lending to established retailers, and the gold futures basis generated by the gold short hedge

What makes thUSD stand out is that, unlike other yield-bearing stablecoins, it is highly scalable as it is backed by gold - the world’s deepest commodity market.

Those who participated in Theo’s pre-deposit program, which filled up in just 24h, can now claim their thUSD tokens here, as thUSD is now live for everyone.

If you wish to buy thUSD, you can do it directly on Theo website by swapping USDC to thUSD. You can also stake it there to start accruing yield.

Check out thUSD on Theo’s website today!

Chart of the week

Non-USD stablecoins are gaining significant traction

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 upgrade went live

Telegram replaced the TON Foundation and became TON’s largest validator

Polymarket intern revealed that $POLY stakers will have lower trading fees

Ondo Perps announced plans to become the first perps DEX to accept tokenized equities as trading collateral

Trade[XYZ] launched pre-IPO perps powered by Hyperliquid

Ethena’s Season 5 airdrop became available for claiming

Securitize partnered with Jump Trading and Jupiter to launch regulated trading for on-chain tokenized equities on Solana

Liminal introduced limUSD - a yield-bearing asset that automatically allocates capital across the highest Hyperliquid’s yield opportunities

Kelp DAO announced it is migrating the rsETH bridge from LayerZero to Chainlink

Apyx allocated 5% of its token supply to its S1 points program

MegaETH surpassed $600M in USDm issued on its blockchain

Jito announced JTX - its upcoming trading platform on Solana

Drift announced it will issue recovery tokens for the users affected by its exploit

Lighter rolled out V2 of its mobile trading app

Solstice scheduled its TGE for late May

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎 My advice to protect yourself in DeFi

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎 My advice to protect yourself in DeFi

27 dApps were exploited in April, according to DeFiLlama.

This unfortunately shows that, in terms of security, using DeFi is still very risky, especially if you don’t manage your risk properly.

With that in mind, I wanted to share some advice for staying safe on-chain and minimizing potential losses from hacks.

Here are six security tips to protect yourself in DeFi:

Don’t deposit more than 10% of your portfolio in a single dApp

The goal of this is to limit your losses if one of the dApps you use gets hacked.

I make a few exceptions to this rule only for a few major dApps like Pendle that have been live for years without security incidents. But even in these cases, I don’t deposit more than 20% of my portfolio in a single place.

The idea is to never have more funds in a single DeFi protocol than you can afford to lose. This also applies to CEXs.

Not only can CEXs get hacked, but they can also freeze your funds.

Use Rabby Wallet + Ledger for your on-chain transactions

I’ve been using this combination for many years.

The advantage of using a hardware wallet like Ledger is that even if you install a virus on your PC, it can’t steal your funds unless you sign a malicious transaction.

Rabby also has many interesting security features. This includes transaction simulations, bulk revokes for transaction approvals, risk alerts, and so on.

You can connect your Ledger to Rabby Wallet by clicking on “Connect hardware wallets” in the Rabby browser extension, so you can get the best of both worlds.

Check the audits of the dApps you are using

By checking audits, I don’t mean just checking whether an app was audited.

Almost all dApps have been audited. What I usually check is:

• Who completed the audit? Is it a reputable security firm that has also audited top dApps like Uniswap and Aave, or one that no one has heard of?

You can ask AI for more information about a specific security firm.

• How many audits have been completed? I feel more comfortable using a dApp that has been audited many times by different firms, than one audited only once.

• How many critical bugs have been found? This is not something you must verify unless you want to dive deeper, but if you see a lot of critical vulnerabilities mentioned in an audit report, this can indicate one of these two things:

Either the team was not careful when writing the smart contracts (which is obviously not great, as you want to use only dApps built with a security-first approach), or the auditor was excellent and found some vulnerabilities that were very hard to find.

You can usually find details about audits in the docs of each project.

Audits obviously don’t guarantee that a dApp won’t get hacked, but they at least reduce the likelihood of it.

Before we continue, here’s how you can use DeFi Saver to manage your Aave positions:

Brought to you by DeFi Saver

3 options if you’re stuck in an Aave position

The rsETH exploit triggered a bank run on Aave.

As a result, many people who use Aave, such as WETH lenders, remained stuck in their positions as the market utilization rose to 100%.

Aave is working on a recovery plan, but if your position is stuck and you don’t want to wait, there are a few things you can still do to adjust or exit your position.

DeFi Saver has several tools that can help you with this:

• Collateral switching - With this one, you can switch your ETH collateral to wstETH or other assets that don’t have a 100% market utilization and can be withdrawn in just a few clicks (as long as there’s enough liquidity available)

• Repay ETH debt with aWETH - Because of the current situation, aWETH (Aave’s ETH debt) is trading at a slight discount. So if you borrowed ETH on Aave, it makes a lot of sense to repay your loan with DeFi Saver’s Repay, as you will repay slightly less than you normally would have to

• Loan Shifting - If you have a loan on Aave and you’re concerned by Aave’s current high borrowing rates, you can use this DeFiSaver tool to move your loan to another dApp like Sparklend, Morpho, Liquity, and others

Fortunately, it looks like Aave’s current recovery plan will cover all its bad debt.

But if you want to exit your Aave positions now or shift your loans to another protocol with lower borrowing rates, DeFi Saver can help you with that.

Check out DeFi Saver’s tools for Aave here!

My advice to protect yourself in DeFi (part 2)

Calculate your direct and indirect exposure to all DeFi protocols

DeFi composability is one of the main things that makes DeFi amazing.

But at the same time, the fact that many DeFi protocols are deeply interconnected means that a single app being hacked can affect dozens of apps. It’s very important to take this into consideration when thinking about how to protect your funds.

Consider the following scenario:

Suppose you have 10% of your portfolio in Ethena’s sUSDe and another 15% in USDT lent on Aave. If Ethena gets hacked (I am hoping it never happens), your maximum exposure to the hack is not 10%.

It’s 25% (10% + 15%). Why? Because USDT can be borrowed against sUSDe on Aave, your USDT lent on Aave could also be affected by a hack that impacts the sUSDe peg.

This is not only about Aave. USDT lenders on Fluid would also be affected in this scenario.

What this should tell you is that unless you’re willing to take the risk of losing up to 25% of your money in the event of an Ethena hack, you should decrease your sUSDe position, or your USDT lending position on Aave, or both.

This is an example for sUSDe, but you can apply it to any other yield-bearing asset. A lot of people overlook how much indirect exposure they have to a certain app/asset.

My point is that you should try to identify all single points of failure.

If a single potential exploit could cause you to lose a larger portion of your portfolio than you’re willing to risk, then you should diversify your portfolio more and move some funds to apps that are not directly interconnected with each other.

You can find a guide on how to see which money markets would be affected by a potential hack of a certain asset using DefiLlama’s risk metrics below:

Spread your funds across multiple wallets

The reason I suggest this is that if you accidentally sign a malicious transaction, all your funds could be gone in a few seconds.

If you have multiple wallets, you can at least reduce the impact if that happens.

One way to reduce the odds of this happening is by installing the DeFiLlama browser extension, which is free.

If you have the extension and accidentally click a phishing link, there’s a chance it will warn you and prevent you from getting hacked.

Deploy your funds in DeFi only when the yield justifies the risk

I actually wrote an issue about this a few weeks ago.

In short, what I said there is that I don’t believe it’s a good idea to lend your stables in DeFi if you’re only getting 2-3% APY, given the risks on-chain lending carries.

(2-3% APY was the average stablecoin supply rate on Aave before the rsETH hack)

And don’t get me wrong - I am a huge fan of Aave, and I actually used it a lot over the past few months for leverage looping strategies that generated decent returns.

But my point is this: If you deploy your capital in DeFi, ask yourself first whether the return you are getting is high enough to justify the risks involved.

If the return is high enough, that’s great.

But if you believe this is not the case, I think it’s better to just wait for a good opportunity to appear without risking your capital for a yield that is too low.

The most important thing in this industry is to survive.

At the same time, it’s true that you have to take risks to make it.

But you need to make sure you only take calculated risks with high upside potential, not random risks where you risk a lot of money for a very small gain.

Chart of the week

Hyperliquid-powered apps captured 50% market share in the RWA perps sector

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

MegaETH launched its token and points program

Hyperliquid surpassed Robinhood in crypto revenue in Q1

Lighter enabled trading perps with $ETH as collateral

Theo launched thUSD to the public, the first yield-bearing stablecoin built on top of a tokenized gold product and paired with a delta-neutral gold carry strategy

Kinetiq launched the Markets app - a Hyperliquid mobile app for 24/7 trading

Pendle launched Omnichain PT swaps, allowing to buy fixed yield PT tokens on other blockchains in a single click

DeFi Saver announced it offers collateral shifting, loan repaying, and loan shifting features for those looking to adjust/exit their Aave positions

Aave announced a plan to fully restore rsETH backing

Pump Fun burned all bought back PUMP tokens (around 37% of its circ. supply)

Ostium launched an institutional hedging layer - an upgrade that hedges directional trading risk offchain and enables deeper liquidity

DefiLlama released risk metrics, a metric that shows how much money would be lost across lending markets if a token got hacked

Polymarket launched CLOB v2, its biggest upgrade yet

Synthetix’s new perps DEX officially became open to the public

Circle announced its investment in AAVE

Western Union announced plans to launch a stablecoin on Solana

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎What we know about the rsETH exploit

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎 What we know about the rsETH exploit

Kelp DAO suffered one of the largest DeFi exploits in a long time last week.

116,500 rsETH (worth ~$290M) were minted out of thin air by a hacker who exploited KelpDAO’s rsETH bridge powered by LayerZero via a forged cross-chain message.

While this alone is a terrible event, the fact that rsETH was deeply integrated into DeFi made things much worse.

For example, it was supported as collateral on Aave.

Once the hacker minted the rsETH tokens, he immediately used them to borrow ETH against them on Aave, leaving Aave with over one hundred million dollars in bad debt.

And Aave is not the only protocol affected by this exploit.

Compound, Lido’s EarnETH vault, some Morpho lenders, Hyperithm's mHyperETH product, Superform's SuperWETH vault, and many other protocols were also impacted as they had some exposure to rsETH in one way or another.

Whose fault is it here?

This situation is a bit more nuanced than in other exploits like Drift.

Because the hacker exploited Kelp DAO’s rsETH bridge, which was powered by LayerZero, rather than Kelp DAO’s own smart contracts.

And no one seems to want to take responsibility. LayerZero is blaming Kelp DAO, and Kelp DAO says that it is the fault of LayerZero.

Now, if we look at this situation objectively, here are some facts:

• For this attack, the hacker compromised two of the RPC providers that LayerZero DVN was using in order to be able to mint rsETH

• Kelp DAO was running only a 1/1 DVN (multisig) setup for its rsETH bridge (meaning that there was a single verifier that had to approve a fake transaction as real for the exploit to succeed)

• LayerZero blames Kelp DAO for using a 1/1 DVN configuration, but at the same time, LayerZero is the one who allowed dApps to use a 1/1 DVN in the first place

• 47% of the dApps leveraging LayerZero’s bridge infrastructure used a 1/1 DVN before the hack, so Kelp DAO was not the only one

So, without getting into too many technical details, to me it seems obvious that LayerZero deserves most of the blame and should recognize their mistakes.

Indeed, the fault of Kelp was that it used a single verifier ( 1/1 DVN) for its rsETH bridge. Using multiple verifiers could have prevented this exploit.

But this hack wouldn’t have been possible if the RPC nodes hosted by LayerZero hadn’t been compromised in the first place.

What’s next?

Fortunately, almost a third of the funds stolen by the hacker had already been recovered by Arbitrum, which announced it had frozen the hacker's funds.

This doesn’t look great from a decentralization perspective.

But I think it is better to do this and protect users, given that it is possible, than pretend that L2s are fully decentralized when in reality they aren’t.

Meanwhile, Aave is considering multiple solutions to cover the bad debt it incurred.

LlamaRisk, Aave’s risk manager, outlined two potential scenarios:

• Uniform socialization of losses across all chains where Aave is deployed, with ETH lenders on Ethereum mainnet being left with a 1.54% loss

• Isolate losses to the L2s where rsETH was used as collateral by the hacker to borrow WTH, with ETH lenders on Mantle being left with a 71% loss

These numbers were mentioned before Arbitrum froze 30,766 ETH held by the hacker, so the loss will likely be smaller.

There’s a chance that Aave uses its treasury to cover a part of the bad debt. Mantle also confirmed it’s working on a recovery plan.

My hope is that the final resolution will include no losses or very small losses for Aave users. Aave has long been perceived as the best DeFi app for low-risk yield, and this incident, unfortunately, significantly damaged its reputation.

Lastly, I’ve seen many people say that DeFi is dead because of this exploit that affected so many tier-1 protocols.

I don’t agree with this, as this industry has faced many setbacks over the past years and has always managed to make a comeback in one way or another.

DeFi will be fine, but there’s a lot of work to be done to make it secure first.

Together with Apyx

The first dividend-backed stablecoin protocol

Most stablecoins and DeFi yields today work against your crypto portfolio.

Apyx flips that model entirely.

Instead of relying on opaque trading strategies, Apyx sources yield from Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) preferred equity, such as Strategy’s STRC and Strive’s SATA.

In this way, it is directly contributing to creating additional buy pressure for BTC, while also generating a high yield.

Here’s how it works:

• Apyx allocates its stablecoin backing collateral to three things: DAT-issued preferred equity (STRC & SATA), cash, and T-bills

• Via STRC, Strategy is raising money in order to buy BTC → so the more money that Apyx allocates to STRC, the more BTC Saylor’s Strategy accumulates

• By buying STRC, Apyx gets a high dividend yield of 11.5% annualized at the time of writing, which goes to its apyUSD yield-bearing asset holders

apyUSD currently has an APY of 11.83%, and it is targeting a 13% APY. It can also be used on various DeFi apps, such as Pendle and Morpho, to earn a double-digit yield.

Apyx has two core assets: apxUSD, a non-yield-bearing stable dollar, and apyUSD, a yield-bearing asset. The yield generated by the underlying collateral accrues entirely to apyUSD holders.

Both earn points toward a future APYX airdrop, the protocol’s governance and value-accrual token tied to reserve growth from preferred equity dividends and onchain digital credit activity.

And the more that Apyx grows, the more buying pressure it puts on BTC.

Its S1 points program ends in 4 weeks, with 5% of Apyx’s future token supply allocated to it. Season 2 will happen right after that.

Check out Apyx here!

Chart of the week

Crypto cards are gaining massive traction

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Polymarket announced the launch of its own perps DEX

Jupiter Lend enabled borrowing against tokenized stocks

Pendle airdropped ~$7.5M in CHIP tokens to sPENDLE holders

Alchemix launched Alchemix V3 - a new DeFi lending primitive

Base announced Base Azul - a network upgrade that will enable it to process up to 5,000 TPS and increase decentralization

Drift announced a hack recovery pool with up to $147.5M from Tether and other partners. The package includes a revenue-linked credit facility

Catalysis, a DeFi insurance vault protocol powered by EigenCloud, went live

USDai, a GPU-backed stablecoin protocol, launched its token CHIP

Kelp DAO’s rsETH was unfortunately exploited for $290M

Arbitrum froze 30,766 ETH held by the rsETH exploiter

Optimism announced stake-based transaction ordering - a feature that enables users to get their transactions processed faster by staking OP

Hit One, a gamified dApp offering 1000x leverage, went live on MegaETH

Brix is launching wiTRY, the first Turkish Lira stablecoin with 37% APY, today

Extended implemented daily withdrawal caps to protect itself against exploits

Avici released Avici Grow and Smart Credit, enabling users of its on-chain neobank to take loans and earn yield via Fluid

Drift hack victims sued Circle for refusing to freeze stolen USDC funds

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Rayls is a blockchain that connects real-world financial activity with onchain markets. Start exploring it here.

GM friends.

I hope you guys weren’t affected much by the rsETH exploit.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• 9 crypto events to watch this week

• A risk analytics dashboard

• Some great crypto reads

Let’s dive in👇

Crypto catalysts to watch this week

1. Polymarket V2 launch - Polymarket V2 upgrade goes live on April 22. It will bring a new collateral token called Polymarket USD and a new architecture designed to reduce the number of failed trades

2. Macro events - Kevin Warsh’s confirmation hearing for FED Chair is set for April 21 + Iran-US ceasefire expires on April 22

3. 1inch’s lending protocol release - 1inch announced plans to launch a lending app with fixed rates and P2P matching, designed to prevent widespread DeFi contagion from one exploit

4. MegaETH’s upcoming announcement - A MegaETH team member said they are working on things internally that will be revealed “really soon”

5. Brix’s launch - Brix, a MegaETH-based project, will launch a Turkish Lira stablecoin offering 45% APY on April 23

6. Solstice’s airdrop registration - Solstice’s airdrop registration window ends on April 24

7. ZKsync’s big announcement - ZKsync will make a big announcement this week

8. USDai’s TGE - USDai will launch its token called CHIP on April 21

9. Paradex’s DIME token upgrade - Paradex will release staking and fee tiers for DIME holders this week

Brought to you by Rayls

The Infrastructure Layer of RWAs

Real-world assets are one of the fastest-growing crypto sectors right now.

But for it to reach its full potential, there needs to be proper infrastructure that supports RWA issuance, movement, and access.

This is where Rayls comes in.

Its public chain launch is scheduled for April 30.

Here’s what makes it interesting:

• Rayls is a chain that connects real-world financial activity to on-chain markets

• Rayls has relationships with the Central Bank of Brazil, the Bank of England, and JP Morgan

• Its primary focus is receivables, and Rayls already tokenizes 40,000 receivables a month with Núclea, Brazil’s largest financial technology infrastructure provider

• AmFi, a private credit tokenization platform, committed to issuing $1 billion in tokenized real-world assets on Rayls

These numbers show that the project is already driving serious RWA growth.

If you were to map the RWA ecosystem, Rayls should be part of that conversation, as it is building the infrastructure that institutions need to tokenize their assets.

If you’re keeping an eye on the RWA sector, Rayls is a project worth watching.

Check out Rayls here!

🛠️Crypto tool of the week

A risk analytics dashboard

The rsETH hack has unfortunately shown that one exploit can affect dozens of dApps.

A tool that you might find useful to analyze correlations between protocols and see where a certain yield-bearing asset is deposited is called DiaData.

For example, if you search for rsETH, you’ll see that rsETH collateral is accepted on Aave, Compound, and Silo, all of which may suffer bad debt due to its exploit.

Besides rsETH, there are hundreds of other yield-bearing assets for which you can see their DeFi exposure on DiaData.

You can check out DiaData here.

6 Alpha Articles

Kelp DAO’s rsETH exploit: What actually happened

How market makers manipulate crime coins

Why the Hyperliquid HIP-4 upgrade is a big deal

The bull case for Pendle

Some valuable thoughts on getting rich vs staying rich

Why Iran’s demand for BTC is a pivotal moment

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Have a fantastic day!

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Altura is a multi-strategy yield protocol offering a 19.8% base APY in addition to future airdrop rewards. Explore its yield opportunities here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Best ways to use RWAs on-chain

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎 Best ways to use RWAs on-chain

Tokenization has undoubtedly been one of the fastest-growing crypto sectors.

Just to put things into perspective, two years ago, the total market cap of real-world assets (RWAs) was $2.2 billion. Today, it is over $29 billion.

And I don’t think that tokenization growth will slow down anytime soon.

Despite being a nascent sector, RWAs are already unlocking a lot of possibilities that the average person doesn’t have access to in the traditional financial system.

Here are the most interesting things you can do with RWAs on-chain today👇

Borrow stablecoins against your stocks/ETFs

Let’s say you wanna buy a car and don’t have cash, but you have a stock portfolio.

If you’re an EU citizen, you generally can’t borrow money against your stocks because of the current regulations, unless you’re a high net worth individual.

So, unless you choose to take a personal loan at a high interest rate, you’re basically forced to sell your stocks to buy that car.

DeFi solves this.

You can buy tokenized stocks and borrow against them on-chain.

There are two popular money markets where you can unlock instant liquidity against your tokenized stock/ETF holdings (only a few collaterals are supported for now):

• Borrow AUSD against SPYx (a tokenized S&P 500 asset issued by xStocks that can be bought on DEXs and CEXs) on Morpho

What’s really interesting is that you’re currently GETTING PAID to borrow AUSD against SPY on Morpho, as the borrowing rate in this market is negative (-6.09%).

This is because of a e current incentive program, and it won’t last forever, but it’s an extremely attractive opportunity for those who hold tokenized S&P 500 shares.

You could, for example, borrow stablecoins against SPYx, get paid to borrow, and deploy these stablecoins in DeFi to earn an even higher yield.

• Borrow stablecoins against SPYx, TSLA, QQQx, NVDAx, MSTRx, AAPLx, and many other tokenized stocks/ETFs issued by xStocks on Kamino (Solana)

xStocks is a tokenization platform acquired by Kraken and is currently the fastest-growing issuer of tokenized stocks. It also has a points program, so the holders of its tokenized assets will probably be rewarded in the future.

Trade traditional financial assets 24/7

If you’ve been active on CT, you already know that Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 markets for trading RWAs 24/7 have become extremely successful.

The reason why is simple:

A lot of big announcements (especially from the Trump administration) tend to drop on weekends or after market hours, when traditional financial markets are closed.

For example, the Iran war started on a Saturday. When this happened, traders wanted to long oil and short stocks, but the stock market was closed until Monday.

So they went to Hyperliquid, where they could trade these assets 24/7.

And this is how Hyperliquid became the premier venue for 24/7 price discovery on oil, metals, and indices when traditional markets are closed.

I expect 24/7 RWA perps to become increasingly popular over the next few months and even flip crypto assets in volume at some point.

Access institutional-grade yield strategies

This is probably the most exciting thing that tokenization enables.

For the first time, sophisticated strategies, previously reserved mainly for hedge funds and very wealthy people, are being made available to everyone with a wallet.

Basis trading, RWA looping, institutional lending, and GPU financing are just a few of the RWA strategies that retail investors couldn’t use before DeFi appeared:

• Ethena’s sUSDe - generates yield via basis trading / T-bills exposure

• Sky’s sUSDs - generates yield via dozens of off-chain and on-chain strategies

• Theo’s thUSD - generates yield via a delta-neutral gold strategy

• Altura’s AVLT - generates yield via funding rate arbitrage, market making, and a gold arbitrage strategy

• RAAC’s iREET - generates yield by buying and renting real estate properties

• Maple’s syrupUSDC - generates yield via overcollateralized loans to institutions

Now you can simply buy a yield-bearing asset to get exposure to all these strategies.

For those of us who have been in crypto for at least a few years, yield-bearing assets may seem like nothing new. But yield-bearing assets actually enable a level of capital efficiency that you can’t get in traditional finance.

There’s a reason why US banks are trying to ban stablecoin yield: they realize that yield-bearing stables offer returns that bank deposits can’t compete with.

Price-wise, the past months have been difficult, but if you look at how many use cases RWAs enable, it’s hard to believe that more money won’t eventually flow on-chain.

I remain confident that DeFi will make a comeback.

Together with Altura

The stablecoin yield vault built for all market conditions

Most TVL deposited in DeFi today gets less than 5% APY.

This is because, as we entered a bear market, most crypto-native yield sources and token incentive programs have dried up.

This is where Altura comes in.

Altura is a multi-strategy stablecoin yield vault that uses real-world assets, funding-rate arbitrage, and market-making strategies to generate competitive returns.

Here is what makes it stand out:

• Altura’s base APY is currently 19.8% for holding AVLT, its yield-bearing asset

• The protocol has an Accountable transparency dashboard where you can see where its reserves are deployed and AVLT collateralization ratio

• Altura has recently surpassed $14M in TVL in 3 months after its launch

Where is the 19.8% APY coming from?

Most of it comes from Altura’s physical gold arbitrage strategy.

Via an asset manager called Inessa Holdings, Altura buys gold from institutional sellers, which is then verified and documented to be tokenized, transported to a refinery buyer via logistics providers, and sold to generate an arbitrage profit.

In addition to the base 19.8% APY yield that AVLT holders receive, they are also eligible for ALTU airdrop rewards that will become claimable at TGE.

Start exploring Altura’s yield opportunities today!

Chart of the week

Odds of MegaETH releasing a token in April skyrocketed

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Morpho announced Morpho Midnight - a new fixed rate lending protocol

Aave‘s ‘Aave Will Win’ proposal to distribute all its revenue to Aave DAO passed

GMX rolled its first-ever 24/7 RWA perps for Gold and Silver

Hyperliquid launched priority fees for faster trade execution

Monad distributed a new airdrop to its most active users

Polygon launched sPOL - its liquid staking POL token with yield from priority fees

BRIX, a project on MegaETH, announced it will launch a Turkish Lira stablecoin offering ~45% APY backed by money market funds

Tether, the USDT issuer, launched its own self-custodial consumer wallet

EtherFi migrated from Scroll to OP Mainnet

Lido DAO approved launching a $20M LDO buyback program

xStocks went live on Mantle enabling 24/7 tokenized equity trading

WorldLibertyFi proposed locking the WLFI tokens of its public sale investors for another 4 years💀

Kevin Warsh, the next FED Chair, disclosed that he invested in over 30 crypto projects, including Solana, Polymarket, and Lighter

Polymarket token preview page was created on Coingecko

SEC clarified that DeFi front-ends can operate without broker-dealer registration

Aerodrome announced plans to launch Aero, a new cross-chain DEX, in July

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Rayls launched $RLS Transparency Portal, offering full visibility into its fundamentals and on-chain metrics. Check it out here.

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• 9 crypto events to watch this week

• An on-chain analytics platform for stablecoins

• Some great crypto reads

Let’s dive in👇

Crypto catalysts to watch this week

1. Hyperliquid’s priority fees - Hyperliquid just launched priority fees for high-frequency traders, adding a new revenue stream. Users can pay them in HYPE

2. Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade - The devnet for Ethereum’s next big upgrade, called Glamsterdam, is expected to launch to this week

3. Polygon’s big announcement - Polygon teased a big announcement for the near future

4. Kinetiq’s investor call - Kinetiq’s first investor call is scheduled for April 15. Q1 and Q2 updates will be covered there

5. MegaETH’s incentives for Aave users - MegaETH teased the launch of an incentive program for the Aave users on its L2

6. Macro events - Iran and Lebanon will hold peace talks on Feb. 14 + the US blocked the Strait of Hormuz for ships entering or departing Iranian ​ports

7. Polymarket’s upgrade - Polymarket will launch its own stablecoin and a rebuilt trading engine over the next few weeks

8. Solana Summit - Solana Summit, an event bringing together institutional investors, policymakers, regulators, and devs to learn about Solana, happens today

9. Solstice’s airdrop snapshot - Solstice, a popular stablecoin protocol on Solana, announced it has taken the snapshot for its S1 airdrop and will enable claiming soon

Together with Rayls

Rayls just became way more transparent

There’s a huge need for more transparency in DeFi.

A project that is taking this seriously is Rayls - a blockchain for banks that connects private institutional blockchain assets with public DeFi markets.

It is already tokenizing 40,000 receivables per month and has established relationships with the Central Bank of Brazil, the Bank of England, JPMorgan, and Tether.

Just a few days ago, Rayls released its RLS Transparency Portal.

The transparency portal offers full visibility into the RLS token supply, distribution, revenue, and network usage.

Here is some of the key info you can find there:

• RLS has a fixed 10B maximum token supply with 1.4B currently in circulation

• In January and February, Rayls generated $211,000, respectively $175,000 in monthly revenue

• 50% of RLS is allocated to the community, and the rest is reserved for initial investors, contributors, and the technology provider

Public chain revenue, transaction count, USDr ecosystem details, and vesting diagrams for its token allocation schedules will also be added in the near future.

Rayls is helping institutions bring their financial assets on-chain while ensuring privacy, compliance, and public verifiability.

And now, thanks to the RLS Transparency Portal, you can see exactly how the ecosystem is structured, RLS tokenomics, and how Rayls’ revenue evolves over time.

I think that releasing a transparency portal is a great step in the right direction.

Check out the Transparency Portal here!

🛠️Crypto tool of the week

An on-chain analytics platform for stablecoins

Not all yield-bearing stablecoins have the same risk profile.

A tool I’ve recently found that offers a lot of useful data on 184 stablecoins, including the risks each one carries and which are the safest, is Pharos.

You can also find there their safety scores, upcoming stablecoin launches, depegs, and much more.

And what is great is that accessing all of its features is free.

You can check out Pharos here.

7 Alpha Articles

An underrated Polymarket strategy

How Strata enables higher yields + other interesting on-chain developments

How Trump's sons made billions off crypto

A new dashboard for stablecoin yields on Solana

The real reason why Chaos Labs left Aave

How Apyx and Saturn protocols compare

Who will win the neobank wars

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DeFi Saver now supports Aave V4, bringing its leverage management and automation tools to V4. Learn more about this here.

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Is DeFi lending still worth it?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Is DeFi lending still worth it?

There has been a debate on Crypto Twitter in the past days about DeFi lending.

Some people see it as a passive, low-risk way to earn some additional money.

Others argue that DeFi lending is currently not worth it, given the risks involved and the very low yield on most money markets.

I wanted to share my take on this and some data that I believe is useful.

Let’s dive in 👇

I’ll start by sharing some quick facts:

• The avg. APY for stablecoin lending is currently at ~4%

• 8 lending projects suffered losses due to exploits/technical errors in 2026 so far (with Drift’s $280M hack being the largest one), according to DefiLlama

• The U.S. T-Bills Yield, which is considered risk-free, is between 3.5% & 3.8%

• Most people on Euler, Silo, and Morpho who lent money to pools with exposure to Resolv’s wstUSR or Stream Finance’s xUSD still didn’t get their money back

The reason I shared this is to illustrate the following:

While overcollateralized crypto lending may seem low-risk to many people (since, theoretically, once the collateral value falls below the loan value, the collateral should be liquidated instantly and lenders should get their money back), the reality is that lending comes with many risks.

There are many things that can go wrong.

• Oracles can be misconfigured and trigger liquidations only when it is too late (happened many times)

• Risk curators on permissionless lending protocols like Morpho or Euler are incentivized to accept riskier collateral in order to collect higher fees, even though they are putting their vault users at risk by doing this

• Lending protocols (especially the new ones, not the OGs) are historically some of the most vulnerable dApps to hacks

Aave has historically done a great job at accepting only high-quality collateral and avoiding bad debt. That’s why so many people trust it, and it has $42 billion TVL.

But on Aave V3, its USDC supply APY is 2.6% at this moment.

Even with its fantastic track record, it’s hard to say the yield justifies the risk when the risk-free yield on US Treasury bills is above 3.5%.

So what’s my advice?

First of all, if you still choose to lend your capital in DeFi, make sure you fully understand what you are doing. Check what oracle is used for liquidations, who curated that market, and what collateral you’re exposed to.

All of this might sound a bit complex, but if you don’t fully understand the risks you are taking first, then I don’t think it is worth lending.

Secondly, I believe that most of the time it’s better to be a borrower than a lender when using a lending protocol.

Borrowing obviously also comes with higher risks, but in the post below, for instance, I shared a PT looping strategy on Aave that returns up to 15% APY.

15% APY is almost 6 times higher than the USDC lending yield on Aave V3.

You’re indeed taking several risks when looping, but at least the yield is high enough to justify taking risks from a risk/reward perspective.

A looping strategy obviously carries liquidation risk in the event of depegs, and you need to constantly monitor borrowing rates and your health factor, but to me, it makes more sense to be a borrower than a lender, given the significantly higher yield.

Especially considering that you can automate stop losses, repayments, and/or alerts for your borrowing positions on many protocols with tools like DeFi Saver.

To sum it up:

If you have idle stablecoins in your wallets, I don’t think it’s worth lending them out if the yield you’re getting is lower than the US Treasury bills yield (3.5%).

You risk losing your entire (or a good part) of your capital for a very low return.

If you want to use them in DeFi, make sure you first understand the risks associated with each opportunity and that the yield you get is high enough to justify them. Otherwise, it may be better to just keep the stablecoins in your wallet.

Your number one priority (especially in a bear market, when most exploits and rug pulls occur) should be to survive.

Take risks, but make sure that they are always calculated risks.

Together with DeFi Saver

DeFi Saver has integrated Aave V4 from day 1

Aave V4, one of the protocol’s biggest upgrades to date, has just gone live.

And from the start, DeFi Saver is bringing its suite of DeFi automation and management tools to Aave V4.

Here’s what you can do on Aave V4 via DeFi Saver:

• Use its 1-transaction leverage management tools to open a leveraged position or close one on AAVE V4 in just a few clicks

• Set stop loss, take profit, or other leverage management orders for your loans

• Migrate from Aave V3 to Aave V4 using DeFi Saver’s Loan Shifter tool

• Use Collateral and Debt switch options to swap out your collateral or debt asset for another asset

• Lend assets into V4 hubs

DeFi Saver is an asset management application that can save you time and enhance your user experience through its exclusive features built for Aave V4.

Over $1 billion of assets in Aave V3 positions are managed through DeFi Saver.

The user interface is designed to be intuitive, making DeFi Saver easier to use.

Later in April, DeFi Saver will also release its Notify features, allowing users to set up notifications for Aave v4 position health changes and market cap changes.

Learn more about the DeFi Saver’s Aave V4 integration here!

Chart of the week

ETH supply on exchanges is at all-time lows

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Hyperbeat launched Liquid Banking - the first on-chain neobank on Hyperliquid

Ethena announced plans to use institutional lending, RWAs, and equity basis trade to generate yield

INFINIT launched the Prompt-to-DeFi Strategist Challenge on BNB Chain - a competitive program rewarding users for creating innovative yield strategies

Lighter’s perps trading was integrated into Telegram

Polymarket announced Polymarket USD - its own stablecoin

OpenCover launched Covered Vaults - DeFi insurance for Morpho lenders

Solana Foundation announced STRIDE - a 24/7 threat monitoring program to protect Solana dApps from potential exploits

RAAC launched iREET - an index real estate exposure token

Polygon is in talks to raise $100M for a new stablecoin payments business

Saturn, a yield-bearing stablecoin protocol backed by STRC, went live

Kinetiq launched kHYPE V2 - a major upgrade to its liquid staking $HYPE token

Chaos Labs stepped down as Aave’s risk manager

Across’s proposal to replace its token with equity passed

SushiSwap launched its perps product powered by Hyperliquid

Based bought back 4% of its token circulating supply in its first buyback

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Metals.io released a first-of-its-kind platform that lets you invest in multiple critical metals. Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• 10 crypto events to watch this week

• A tool you can use to get DeFi insurance

• Some great crypto reads

Let’s dive in👇

Crypto catalysts to watch this week

• Ethena’s USDe backing diversification - Ethena announced plans to diversify the backing of USDe and use RWAs, overcollateralized institutional loans, and equity & commodity basis trades, to generate yield

• US-Iran ceasefire talks - Iran FM spokesman said they have prepared their response to ceasefire proposals and will announce it soon

• Kinetiq’s kHYPE V2 - Kinetiq will launch kHYPE v2, a major upgrade to its HYPE liquid staking token, on April 6

• Polygon’s Guiliano Hardfork - Polygon’s Guiliano Hardfork upgrade, which will make the network faster, is expected to launch on April 8

• Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 prediction markets upgrade - Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 prediction markets upgrade is rumored to go live in the next 1-2 weeks

• Meteora’s product upgrade - Meteora will launch a new product upgrade, aiming to make liquidity provision easier, this week

• Pendle’s PT expansion - Pendle will soon expand its fixed yield product to Solana

• Macro events - US FOMC meeting is scheduled for April 8

• Aave’s GHO Savings Rate - Aave’s ARFC proposal to launch Aave Savings Rate, a 4.25% APR fixed yield product, just passed

• Across’s token-to-equity exchange proposal - Across’s proposal to exchange ACX tokens for company equity ends on April 7

Together with metals.io

Get direct on-chain exposure to metals

When uranium.io launched in 2024, it solved a fundamental investment access problem.

Uranium markets required licensing, futures margin accounts, or expensive ETFs with tracking errors.

Most investors who wanted direct exposure simply couldn’t get it.

Tokenization changed that: Physical U3O8 in regulated depositories, digital fractional ownership, 24/7 global trading, and no minimums.

Now the same team is expanding that access to 6 other key metals powering our future.

Metals.io just went live with 6 additional metals: gold, hafnium, rhenium, indium, neodymium oxide, and praseodymium oxide.

Why these metals? Because they’re critical to technologies defining our future. Neodymium powers every EV motor. Gallium enables 5G infrastructure. Hafnium goes into jet engines. Germanium runs fiber optic networks. Each has a constrained supply, concentrated production, and no viable substitutes.

Until now, accessing these markets meant navigating commodity brokers, vault storage arrangements, and institutional minimums. Most investors were locked out entirely.

Metals.io removes those barriers with fractional ownership, instant settlement, transparent verified reserves, and custody by licensed institutions.

Built for investors who want direct exposure to the metals powering the future.

The platform is live, so start exploring: metals.io

🛠️Crypto tool of the week

A tool you can use to get DeFi insurance

In light of the recent DeFi exploits, I wanted to cover an on-chain insurance tool.

The most popular crypto insurance platform right now is Nexus Mutual. You can access its products via opencover.com, which is essentially a user interface for it.

Here you can find protocol cover, depeg cover, and custody cover.

If a protocol you’re using gets exploited via a smart contract vulnerability and you bought insurance for it, then you’ll get your money back.

That said, the insurance on OpenCover doesn’t cover all types of exploits:

For instance, it doesn’t protect against private-key breaches, as was the case with Resolv and Drift recently. But it covers the losses caused by smart contract exploits.

OpenCover currently offers insurance coverage for a few dozen protocols.

You can check it out here.

6 Alpha Articles

How the Drift hack happened

The current state of crypto

Should you quit a 9-5 job to focus on crypto?

Why the Polymarket airdrop could be massive

The veTokenomics Exodus

Ethena’s USDe backing diversification

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Liquity is one of the only truly decentralized stablecoin protocols - fully onchain, immutable, and with no admin keys. Check it out here.

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎 What is the Ethereum Economic Zone

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎What is the Ethereum Economic Zone?

It’s no secret that Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling strategy has been a success.

7 out of the top 20 chains by TVL are Ethereum L2s, according to DeFiLlama. And their transaction fees are effectively negligible.

That said, L2s face a major problem:

Constantly moving assets between L2s to access certain dApps, ensuring you have ETH for gas across multiple networks, and liquidity fragmentation all contribute to a poor user experience.

Fortunately, a new proposal aims to fix these issues for good.

A few days ago, some Ethereum ecosystem builders proposed the Ethereum Economic Zone, which some people refer to as the “Ethereum 3.0 vision”.

What is the Ethereum Economic Zone?

In short, it is an ambitious attempt to unify Ethereum L2s.

Ethereum Economic Zone is an L1<>L2 framework.

Technically, L2s that adopt it will become synchronously composable with the L1. This will allow a smart contract on an L2 to call a smart contract on another L2 or on the Ethereum mainnet and receive a response within a single transaction.

In practice, this would make using multiple L2s feel like using a single blockchain.

To give you an example, let’s say you have USDC on Arbitrum and want to provide it as liquidity to a liquidity pool on Aerodrome, the main DEX built on Base.

Today, you'd need to manually bridge your USDC from Ethereum to Base first.

With the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), you could deposit directly into Aerodrome in a single transaction. With no manual bridging required.

Who is building this?

Surprisingly, this initiative is not coming from the Ethereum Foundation.

The Ethereum Economic Zone framework has been proposed by Gnosis, an OG team building on Ethereum since 2015.

Gnosis built the constant product AMM model, CoW protocol, Safe, Gnosis Chain, and several other highly successful products and infrastructure projects.

While the Ethereum Foundation isn’t directly involved in building the Ethereum Economic Zone, it is funding the team behind it, which gives credibility to the project and makes me think it actually has a good shot at succeeding.

What to expect next?

Over the next few weeks, the EEF team will publish a clear roadmap for existing Ethereum apps to leverage the Ethereum Economic Zone framework (EEZ).

Based on what's been shared, it looks like it will be an opt-in solution for DeFi protocols that want to expand to multiple L2s without fragmenting liquidity, rather than something that automatically applies to all Ethereum-based protocols.

It is unclear, though, when exactly this framework will fully go live.

But overall, I have to say I am very excited about this.

For years, the Ethereum community has been rightfully complaining that the current fragmented experience offered by Ethereum L2s is far from ideal.

Ethereum Economic Zone might finally unify L2s and abstract away bridging.

Together with Liquity

The sovereign dollar

Let’s be real:

Many projects claim to care about decentralization but aren’t decentralized at all.

Liquity, an OG stablecoin protocol with $219M TVL, is an exception to the rule.

In short, this is what makes it different:

• Immutable smart contracts - Liquity V2 cannot be changed or upgraded

• Fully backed by ETH - Liquity’s BOLD stablecoin is overcollateralized and backed only by ETH and ETH liquid staking token holdings

• No admin keys - The team can’t access user funds even if they want to

• On-chain privacy via Privacy Pools - BOLD holders can use Privacy Pools to anonymously transact on Ethereum in a compliant way

When you use Liquity, you have the guarantee that no humans can freeze your funds, and you can’t get rugpulled as the protocol is immutable and fully on-chain.

On top of this, its stablecoin BOLD is offering some very interesting yields.

If you deposit BOLD in sBOLD or yBOLD, you’ll earn an avg. APY of 8% generated in a sustainable way from interest rates and liquidation fees.

Opaque yield generation strategies and compromised admin keys have, unfortunately, led to billions in losses from other projects over the past few years.

Liquity is one of the few fully transparent and decentralized projects.

Discover what makes BOLD stand out here!

Chart of the week

Over 80% of crypto revenue is now generated by apps instead of infrastructure projects

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aave V4 went live on Ethereum

Hyperliquid launched Hyperliquid mobile app in a public testing phase

Pendle launched Pendle Skills and MCP, enabling AI agents to access Pendle

Lido DAO proposed a $20 million LDO token buyback

Gnosis announced the Ethereum Economic Zone - a project aiming to solve Ethereum’s liquidity fragmentation

iExec introduced the iExec Confidential Token - a mechanism that turns any token into a confidential, auditable asset

edgeX and Based released their tokens

Ondo introduced Ondo Perps - its own 24/7 equity perps futures product

Aerodrome and Velodrome will merge into a single DEX project called Aero

Sky launched a revamped website to access its 3.75% APY Sky savings rate

USDai released its airdrop claim portal (the token is not transferable yet)

Base revealed its 2026 roadmap, which includes bringing all major asset classes on-chain and supporting stablecoin gas fee payments

Chainlink SVR was adopted by AAVE on two L2s to capture MEV revenue

Midas, an on-chain investment products app, raised $50M in funding

Aster reduced its monthly token emissions by 97%

Drift Protocol has been exploited for $280 million

Google gave a 2029 transition deadline for making Bitcoin quantum-resistant

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Pareto is a private credit marketplace. Check out how you can earn a double-digit APY using a levered RWA Strategy built on top of it!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• 10 crypto events to watch this week

• A new tool for finding stablecoin loop opportunities

• Some great crypto reads

Let’s dive in👇

Crypto catalysts to watch this week

1. Polymarket’s trading fees - Polymarket will start charging trading fees for all markets today. Some of the fees will be used for its Maker Rebates program

2. Lido’s $20M buyback program - Lido DAO submitted a proposal to use up to ~$20M from its treasury for a LDO buyback

3. EthCC conference - Ethereum’s largest European conference starts today. Expect some big announcements from ecosystem projects

4. Jupiter Offerbook - Jupiter will soon launch Jupiter Offerbook, a new lending protocol for fixed-term loans

5. Midas’s mRE product launch - Midas will soon launch mRE, a tokenized Liquid Reinsurance Fund targeting 8-9.5% APY from reinsurance markets

6. Macro events - Trump reportedly considers launching ground operations in Iran + FED Chair Powell will hold a speech today

7. edgeX TGE - The edgeX TGE and airdrop are scheduled for March 31

8. FTX’s distribution - FTX will distribute $2.2 billion to its creditors on March 31

9. Sushi’s perps launch - Sushiswap will launch a perps product on April 2nd

10. Synthetix’s upgrade - Synthetix will launch multi-collateral trading and a new incentive program in April

Together with Pareto

Private credit that actually works in DeFi

Private credit is one of the fastest-growing asset classes in TradFi.

And it’s already making its way on-chain, driven by increasing institutional adoption and demand for RWA yield.

Pareto sits at the forefront of this, operating a private credit marketplace that connects institutional lenders and borrowers.

Bringing private credit to DeFi opens up many new possibilities.

A good example is FalconX Credit Vault - one of the first RWA credit facilities built on Pareto.

Here’s what makes it interesting:

• FalconX earns yield by lending funds to end-counterparties such as trading firms, hedge funds, etc.

• In less than a year, FalconX vault attracted over $128 million in TVL

• FalconX vault deposits can be used as collateral on Morpho directly, or deposited into Gauntlet for an automated looping strategy - showing how onchain private credit can be reused more efficiently

Gauntlet Levered FalconX Strategy has been generating a 13.77% APY in real yield by borrowing USDC against them in order to create a looped position. That’s the true power of composability.

By combining TradFi assets with DeFi composability and bringing private credit on-chain, protocols can unlock a lot of new yield strategies.

Learn more about composable private credit here!

🛠️Crypto tool of the week

A tool you can use to find stablecoin loop opportunities

It’s no secret that DeFi yields have drastically decreased lately.

But it is still possible to get a double-digit APY on your stablecoins via several looping strategies on Morpho. A new platform that makes it easier to identify these opportunities is Yieldz.

Yieldz’s Leverage dashboard shows the looping opportunities on Morpho that currently have the highest APY, and even lets you open the loop position in a few clicks from its UI if you don’t want to do it manually.

There are plenty of opportunities there with 10%+ 30-day APY.

You can check it out here.

6 Alpha Articles

How to know if a chart is a good buy or not

A new solution to unify Ethereum L2s

Best yield opportunities on Solana

How Pendle became one of DeFi’s most successful apps

The Great Perpification

The three types of DeFi yield

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Have a fantastic day!

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Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Reya is an innovative perps DEX backed by Coinbase. Explore its ongoing trading competition here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎All you need to know about AAVE V4

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎All you need to know about AAVE V4

It’s been a pretty rough week for DeFi.

If you’ve been active on CT, you probably heard of the Resolv exploit.

The stablecoin protocol was exploited by a hacker who minted 80M unbacked USR and dumped it on DEXs.

What’s worse is that this hack affected not only Resolv but also many other dApps, as a lot of money markets supported Resolv’s assets as collateral and incurred bad debt. Fluid, for instance, incurred $23M bad debt.

Fortunately for its users, Fluid announced it will cover this loss.

On the bright side, Aave is gearing up to launch Aave V4, a new iteration of its lending protocol, which is bringing some major improvements to DeFi. In today’s issue, I’ll cover it as I think it’s a pretty interesting upgrade.

What changes will Aave V4 introduce?

V4 is its biggest upgrade to date and has been under development for a long time.

As a fun fact, Aave V4 has 345 days of cumulative security review. So its team is taking security seriously.

Among the new features that it brings, the ones I find most interesting are:

• A Hub and Spoke architecture - On V4, all assets deposited in the protocol on a network will be stored in a Liquidity Hub. The Hub will allocate the assets to multiple lending markets called Spokes, each with its own risk parameters.

  This will enable the permissionless creation of lending markets for riskier assets, such as RWAs or Uniswap v3 positions, which wasn’t possible on Aave before, as risk will now be better isolated thanks to the Hub and Spoke architecture.

• Risk Premiums - Borrowing rates will no longer be the same for all assets, and will instead depend on the quality of the collateral.

  Borrowers with high-quality collateral, such as ETH, will receive lower borrowing rates, while borrowers with riskier collateral, such as RWAs, will pay higher rates.

• Aave Pro - The Aave V4 launch will include the release of an upgraded interface specifically designed for advanced users (which you can see below)

• Reinvestment Module - The Reinvestment Module will ensure that unused liquidity on Aave is put to work by deploying it into low-risk strategies, such as short-term US Treasury Bills

There are also a few other marginal improvements, but I think I've covered all the main changes Aave V4 brings.

How will it benefit users?

Well, first of all, V4 should significantly increase the yield that lenders get on Aave.

Right now, USDC lenders get 2.18% APY on AAVE.

This seems insanely low to me, and it doesn’t justify the risk given how many smart contract exploits are happening, even though AAVE can be considered battle-tested.

But thanks to the Reinvestment Module and the Risk Premiums mechanism, I expect stablecoin lenders’ yield to increase significantly.

Just for context, US T-bill rates are currently hovering around 3.7%–3.8%.

By deploying idle liquidity into Treasury Bills (which are considered risk-free, as you would lose money only if the US Government defaulted), via the Reinvestment Module, the lending APYs on AAVE could increase substantially.

The other thing I like about V4 is that it will be able to support a wide range of riskier collateral for borrowing (RWAs, volatile altcoins, Uniswap v3 LP positions, maybe tokenized stocks, etc.) thanks to its new architecture.

This should enable some very interesting yield opportunities.

Overall, I have to say I am pretty excited about AAVE V4.

Aave’s ARFC proposal to deploy Aave V4 on Ethereum has just passed.

If everything goes well, then V4 should be live on mainnet within the next few weeks.

Together with Reya

Reya and Ethena join forces

Reya, a fast-growing perps DEX backed by Coinbase, just announced a major collaboration with Ethena and a new trading competition.

As part of this partnership, Reya’s LP Pool, called RLP, is now fully backed by Ethena’s USDe and sUSDe.

This enables Reya RLP LPs to earn a significantly higher yield as their rewards now come from four sources: Ethena’s yield, market-making returns, trading, and liquidation fees.

The best part is that RLP can also be used as collateral for trading.

Its team is currently running a trading competition ending this week, with 16M REYA in Rewards.

Here’s what you should know about it:

• The scoring metric is absolute realized PNL, with most rewards being distributed across the top 20 Reya users by absolute realized PnL

• To qualify, you just need to hold more than 100 RLP in your margin account, trade at least $10,000 in volume, and compete for top absolute realized PnL

• 0.20% of the REYA token supply will be given in total to the winners at TGE

By participating, not only can you earn some nice rewards from the competition, but you’re also farming Reya points at the same time.

Learn more about the trading competition here!

Chart of the week

ETH and BTC are outperforming all major TradFi assets since the US attacked Iran

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Jupiter launched pre-IPO trading on Solana

Strategy announced plans to raise $42 billion to buy more BTC

AAVE was integrated by Whop to generate yield for Whop’s 21 million users

Sky announced that a new treasury company accumulated ~8.78% of SKY’s total supply

Polymarket introduced trading fees for all markets and teased an airdrop

Silo V3 went live, introducing a dual liquidation system and risk reporting across every market

Grayscale filed for a new Hyperliquid ETF

Kelp DAO introduced KUSD - a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by trade receivables and payment activity

Tori Finance, a new protocol generating up to 15% APY from TradFi market-neutral strategies, was introduced

Chainlink was integrated by Coinbase to bring its exchange data on-chain for the first time

Sui introduced Hashi - a primitive that enables using native BTC as collateral on Sui

Aevo launched Aevo PERPS+, a DeFi primitive that bundles perpetual futures with options into a single product that is easy to use

Resolv was exploited by a hacker who minted 80M of uncollateralized USR

Balancer Labs is shutting down following its exploit last year

Variational sunsetted loss refunds for traders

Backpack launched its token BP and airdrop claiming portal

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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RAAC is building a DeFi lending and borrowing ecosystem powered by real-world assets. Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• 10 crypto events to watch this week

• A tool you can use to see when global markets open

• Some great crypto reads

Let’s dive in👇

Crypto catalysts to watch this week

1. Polymarket - Polymarket will make a big announcement on March 23. Rumors are also spreading that Polymarket is in talks to raise funds at a $20b valuation

2. Token launches - Backpack TGE is scheduled for March 23 + USDai TGE is scheduled to happen this month + Based TGE will happen on March 30

3. Morpho’s new product - Morpho will launch a new DeFi primitive for fixed-rate lending markets soon. The goal is to onboard institutions that are looking for fixed-rate lending and borrowing terms

4. edgeX airdrop - Registration for edgeX airdrop is open until March 30. edgeX TGE will happen on March 31 and 30% of its token supply will be airdropped

5. FTX’s $2 billion distribution - FTX will give $2.2b to its creditors on Mar. 31

6. Starknet’s STRK20 testnet launch - Starknet will launch the testnet for STRK20, a new token standard that will make any ERC20 token private, this week

7. DeFi App’s trading competition - DeFi App’s new trading competition for its Hyperliquid-powered perps product starts on March 26. Up to $5 million in vested HOME tokens will be airdropped to participants

8. Hey Anon’s upgrade - Hey Anon, Daniele Sesta’s project will release a new launchpad for AI agents and a major token upgrade this week

9. AAVE x Tempo - AAVE teased the upcoming release of a set of innovative credit products on Tempo

10. US x Iran war - Trump said he will stop military strikes against Iran’ power plants and energy infrastructure for 5 days, citing “very good” talks with Iran. But Iran denied having peace talks with the US

Together with RAAC

RAAC’s yield isn’t going anywhere

pmUSD has been one of the fastest-growing stablecoins of 2026.

In under 3 months, RAAC’s gold-backed stablecoin crossed $35M in TVL on Curve Finance, making it one of the top stablecoin yields in the space.

But the number getting attention right now:

RAAC accumulated $CVX and now controls 4.1% of all Curve voting power. This brings answers regarding the sustainability and predictability of pmUSD yields.

When a protocol owns that much gauge influence, it doesn’t depend only on bribes. It directs emissions. That’s a structural advantage.

On the horizon, there is also iREET, RAAC’s new product, a tokenized index of real-world properties.

iREET tokens will represent exposure to real estate tokenized on RAAC, bringing real yield from the rental income those properties generate.

Once RAACLend launches, iREET can also be used as collateral to borrow crvUSD, making it a fully composable DeFi primitive backed by physical real estate.

Launch date to be announced soon.

Check out RAAC here!

🛠️Crypto tool of the week

A tool you can use to see when global markets open

Especially if you’re a daily trader, knowing when CME and other major global exchanges reopen matters as volatility often spikes at their opening time.

Loris Tools built a free tool that shows when the top 30 global TradFi exchanges open in your time zone.

It has filters for commodities, equities, fixed income, and so on.

I’d say that it’s pretty helpful for those who trade TradFi assets 24/7 on Hyperliquid, as it also has a notification system alerting you when a major exchange opens.

You can check it out here.

7 Alpha Articles

7 interesting things that happened in DeFi

Why Taiki Maeda is bullish on BTC

5 poker concepts that will make you a better trader

Why Morpho is building a fixed-rate lending product

What assets could be tokenized next

Things that everyone in crypto should have

The hidden math behind every decision you make

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Have a fantastic day!

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Liquity offers the lowest rates for borrowing against ETH and LSTs in DeFi. Borrow stablecoins with ETH or staked ETH using Liquity!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Saylor’s new strategy to buy BTC

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Saylor’s new strategy to buy BTC

BTC has performed pretty well over the past few weeks.

Yes, it has now retraced from $74,000 to $69,000. But overall, it has still performed better than stocks and gold on most days since the US–Iran war started.

I think one key reason for that is the massive recent buying pressure from Strategy.

In the last 19 days alone, Strategy, the largest Bitcoin Treasury company led by Michael Saylor, bought over $3 billion worth of BTC.

And March 2026 is now on track to be the month with the largest increase in the amount of BTC bought by Strategy through STRC since it launched.

STRC is Michael Saylor’s latest financial experiment, funding Strategy’s recent major BTC buying spree. I believe it played a big role in BTC’s relative outperformance.

I’ll explain how it works below👇

What exactly is STRC?

STRC is a perpetual preferred stock launched by Strategy that pays high monthly dividends while targeting to maintain a stable price of $100.

In some ways, it is like a yield-bearing stablecoin with an 11.5% APY.

That said, as I’ll explain, it definitely comes with risks.

When you buy STRC, it’s like you’re lending money to Saylor’s Strategy.

With the money raised via STRC, the company is buying more BTC. The recent surge in demand for STRC is why Strategy has been able to buy so much BTC lately.

How does it work under the hood?

As I said earlier, STRC targets a stable price of $100.

Everyone who holds it gets a monthly dividend.

When STRC trades above $100 due to high demand, Strategy can issue new STRC shares and sell them to raise more capital, which is then used to buy BTC.

When it trades below $100, Strategy can choose to increase its dividend to attract more buyers and restore its par price.

Initially, the monthly dividend for buying STRC was 9% annually. Now it is 11.5%.

So Strategy is basically paying people 11.5% to borrow their money and buy BTC. Where does all this money come from?

A big part of the answer is MSTR.

When MSTR stock trades at a premium to the value of its underlying Bitcoin holdings, Strategy can issue new MSTR shares and sell them for a profit.

That gives Strategy another source of capital, which supports the whole mechanism.

Initially, STRC was listed only on Nasdaq and on platforms like Robinhood.

But now there are also DeFi protocols like Apyx and Saturn that have brought a tokenized version of it on-chain, further increasing demand for it.

Is STRC actually sustainable?

Strategy has ~$2 billion in cash reserves that it can use to cover all the STRC dividend payments over the next 1-2 years.

So it’s very unlikely that Strategy will suddenly no longer be able to pay dividends to STRC holders at any point in the near future.

But a crucial thing to remember is that the STRC price isn’t fixed at $100.

If you buy it at $100, you’re not guaranteed that you’ll be able to sell it at $100 later, even though, so far, it has always returned to this price after short-term dips.

Yet if BTC stays in a prolonged bear market for several years, demand for STRC could decline, leading to a depeg.

Strategy’s financial model relies primarily on MSTR stock trading at a premium.

If the MSTR premium also disappears, Strategy loses one of its main ways to raise capital and may be unable to pay STRC dividends without selling BTC.

That could lead to some very bad situations for Strategy. So there are definitely risks.

But for now, STRC is clearly generating significant buy pressure for BTC.

If you hold BTC and were wondering why it has performed better than most asset classes lately, Michael Saylor is probably the guy you should thank:)

Together with Liquity

Borrow against ETH and LSTs at the lowest rates in DeFi

If you used DeFi for borrowing, you know this problem:

Borrowing rates are very unpredictable, and sudden rate spikes can end up costing you a lot of money.

Liquity V2 solves this with fixed borrowing rates:

• Users can set their own rates and fix the cost of borrowing.

• Compared to other protocols, Liquity’s rates don’t spike during major market moves

Further, you enjoy one of the highest LTV ratios, which will help to spare you from liquidations.

Liquity offers some of the lowest and most predictable rates for ETH and LST holders.

Average rates for the past 3 months have been ~3.1% for wstETH and ~2.99% for ETH.

Currently the lowest rates are 3.1% for ETH, 0.5% for wstETH and 2.86% for rETH.

If you’re a yield farmer and hold ETH, you can use Liquity to borrow stablecoins at a cheap cost and deploy them in DeFi to earn yield.

The Liquity team has a track record of 4+ years and billions in TVL. V2 has been audited by 5 auditors such as ChainSecurity, Dedaub, Cantina, etc.

Borrow against ETH and LSTs at the best rates with Liquity.

Chart of the week

RWAs’ on-chain market cap has skyrocketed in 2026

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

BlackRock launched its staked Ethereum ETF

Fluid released the Fluid Lite USD Vault automating stablecoin yield strategies

Pendle launched limit order incentives offering up to 100% APR

S&P Dow Jones launched the first official S&P 500 perps market on Hyperliquid in partnership with trade[XYZ]

Tempo, the Stripe-backed blockchain for payments, launched its mainnet

Tangent introduced USG - a stablecoin backed by Curve’s LP tokens and Pendle PTs

Pump Fun became Solana’s first dApp to generate $1 billion in revenue

Aave DAO is voting to cut its annual AAVE buyback budget from $50M to $30M

Pareto introduced Pareto Studio - an institutional platform for building and managing on-chain credit facilities

zkSync announced Cari Network - a zkSync-powered platform used by five U.S. banks to bring bank deposits onchain

Lido launched EarnETH & EarnUSD - two new vaults for stablecoin and ETH yield

Ethena reduced the sUSDe unstaking cooldown period to 1 day

Hinkal added support for private transactions on Solana

Opensea delayed its TGE and airdrop indefinitely

Katana launched its token KAT with a ve(3,3) tokenomics model

Aster launched its privacy-focused Layer 1 blockchain

Byreal introduced Byreal Perps powered by Hyperliquid

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Theo launched the first yield-bearing stablecoin backed by gold. Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎How will the US-Iran war impact crypto?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎How will the US-Iran war impact crypto?

As you all know, a new war between US + Israel and Iran has recently started.

While the Iran Supreme Leader Khamenei was already killed in a strike, it doesn’t seem like this is a conflict that could be ended in a few days like in Venezuela.

So I thought it would be helpful to share a few thoughts about what impact this could have on the crypto market over the next few weeks.

Because whether we like it or not, all markets are influenced by geopolitical events.

Here you can see how BTC has reacted in the past when a major conflict started:

• Russia attacks Ukraine in February, 24 2022 → BTC dips 8% on that day, but it quickly recovered and rallied for the next 30 days

• Hamas attacks Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 → BTC dips 5%, but then it resumes the uptrend later that month

• US attacks Iran on June 22, 2025 → BTC dips 4%, but it quickly recovers and starts going up the next day

Wars are a horrible thing, and my hope is that this new one in Iran ends quickly with as few victims as possible. But as you can observe, their impact on markets tends to be short-lived and limited.

This is something worth keeping in mind though:

Iran’s biggest strategic leverage is that it controls the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important oil shipping routes in the world. Around 20% of the global oil supply passes through it via tankers.

Since the war in Iran began, it has become extremely dangerous for ships to pass through, as Iran has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation.

This is why oil prices have been surging over the past few days.

How does this impact crypto?

Well, it indirectly affects it by creating a new geopolitical crisis and additional macro uncertainty, which is not great for risk-on assets.

If Strait of Hormuz remains closed for a longer period of time (several weeks), it will eventually lead to higher inflation and more panic. Several countries are already working though on a plan to escort tanker convoys through the strait.

That being said, historically, most geopolitical shocks created a pattern:

• Everyone initially panics, and BTC dips a few percent

• After a few days, markets start recovering

A new major crash could probably be caused by this war only if the US decides to send boots on the ground in Iran. (which seems unlikely)

If that doesn’t happen, from a market perspective, I doubt that this war will have a major negative impact on crypto prices going forward, and I wouldn’t be surprised if BTC performs relatively well in the next few days/weeks.

However, I still believe the BTC cycle bottom hasn’t been hit yet and that this bear market is unfortunately not over. (but not because of the war in Iran)

As you can see in the chart above (shared at the end of Feb. 2026), BTC tends to go up slightly in March during midterm years (2026, 2022, 2018).

However, this pump has historically lasted only a few weeks.

If this bear market continues to resemble the previous ones, I believe that BTC will hit its final bottom sometime in late Q3 / early Q4 2026.

Obviously, I don’t have a crystal ball. So take this with a grain of salt.

But so far, this cycle has been extremely similar to the last two cycles, and I don’t see any big catalyst that could trigger a new bull run in the short term.

So my plan is to buy major BTC dips in the meantime with a relatively small portion of my capital, while keeping most of it ready to DCA heavily starting in Q3.

History doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Together with Theo

The gold-backed yield-bearing stablecoin is live

Tokenized gold has been one of the fastest-growing RWAs of this cycle.

For the first time, Theo Network is now turning gold into a sustainable yield source via a delta-neutral gold strategy that hedges price exposure.

Its pre-deposit vault just went live this week with a $100M TVL cap.

In short, this is how Theo’s gold-backed stablecoin called thUSD generates yield:

• A part of its collateral is used to buy thGOLD, a gold-backed asset, and then the physical gold backing it is lent to retailers who pay interest

• The 2nd portion of its collateral is used to short gold futures via CME to capture yield from the spread between spot gold and gold futures (futures roll yield)

In this way, thUSD is backed by a delta-neutral gold strategy.

Throughout 2025, Theo’s strategy delivered 8.3% APR, outperforming the yields currently offered by most yield-bearing stablecoins.

And the best part is that it is very scalable, as gold has a huge open interest.

The thUSD Vault was filled in under 24 hours, which showcases exceptional demand for gold-derived yield in the current market conditions.

Learn more about thUSD here!

Chart of the week

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets hit a new ATH in daily open interest

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 upgrade, which will add support for prediction markets, went live on testnet

Nasdaq partnered with Kraken to bring tokenized equity markets to Ethereum and Solana

Theo launched thUSD, the first stablecoin earning yield from gold futures instead of crypto perps or T-Bills. thUSD Genesis Vault was filled in less than 24h

Polymarket is reportedly trying to raise funds at a $20 billion valuation

Stargate announced that 100% of its revenue will be directed to ZRO buybacks starting next month

Across proposed converting ACX tokens to equity

Jupiter launched Jupiter Card - a crypto card integrated inside Jupiter Mobile

Virtuals introduced ERC-8183 - a mechanism designed to enable commercial transactions between AI Agents on Ethereum

xStocks launched a points program for the users of its tokenized stocks

Starknet introduced STRK20 - a new standard that makes all ERC-20 tokens private

Lido enabled permissionless stETH minting for all stVaults

Polygon launched Agent CLI, enabling AI agents to create wallets and manage funds on-chain

Sonic introduced USSD - Sonic’s native USD stablecoin built in partnership with Frax

Based launched its airdrop checker

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Liquity enables earning 8-10% APR on stablecoins generated in a sustainable way. Put your capital to work with Liquity!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎How to find high DeFi yields

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎How to find high DeFi yields

I’ve covered several stablecoin yield opportunities on X recently, but I thought it’d be helpful to also show you how you can find them yourself.

Even though the market conditions haven’t been great lately, there are still plenty of decent yield farms as long as you know where to look.

In this post, I will cover a lesser-known strategy I’ve been using to find emerging DeFi ecosystems with attractive incentive programs.

Let’s dive in:

As some of you may know, DeFiLlama has a Chains dashboard where you can easily see the fastest-growing blockchains by TVL.

How is this dashboard related to yield farming? Well, it isn’t directly related.

But in some cases, the blockchains seeing a rapid increase in TVL are gaining traction thanks to high ecosystem incentives you can take advantage of.

Here’s an actual example of how I use the DeFiLlama Chains dashboard for yield farming purposes:

• Sort the blockchains shown on the dashboard by “DeFi TVL”

• Start by looking for chains with the largest positive 1-month TVL change

• The first one that caught my attention was Provenance, which saw a 57% TVL growth. When I clicked on it, I only found a single CeDeFi app built on it that didn’t seem to offer any yield farming incentives, so I moved on and started looking for other chains with positive TVL changes

• The next one that stood out is Mantle, which had a 175% TVL growth in the past 30 days. Once you click on it, you realize that this is mostly thanks to AAVE’s growth on Mantle, where most of Mantle TVL is deposited

• If you go to the AAVE website and select the Mantle market, here you can get 4.28% APY on USDT and 6.89% APY on GHO stablecoin, due to Mantle’s new MNT incentive program, as you can see in the image below

4.28%-6.89% APY on stablecoins might not seem like a huge yield, but it is significantly higher than what you can get on AAVE on other blockchains.

I’d say that this is a good yield if you’re looking for a low-risk opportunity.

Yet you can also use DeFiLlama’s Chains dashboard to find higher yields if you’re open to taking more risks. I will give you a few examples next.

But before we continue, here’s an overview of Liquity:

Together with Liquity

Earn real yield on your stablecoins

There are lots of high-yield opportunities in DeFi.

But the problem is that most of them rely on opaque yield-generation strategies and are based solely on unsustainable token emissions.

That’s where Liquity comes in.

Liquity is one of the few truly decentralized stablecoin protocols that offers 8-10% APR generated in a fully sustainable way.

Here’s what makes Liquity stand out:

• Its stablecoin called BOLD is backed only by ETH and ETH LSTs collateral

• BOLD offers pure on-chain yield from liquidation fees and interest rates

• Its smart contracts are immutable to minimize the attack surface

• You can earn ~8% avg APY on sBOLD/yBOLD pool in the form of real yield + exposure to airdrops from 15+ Liquity forks

What’s more, BOLD received an A- rating from the rating agency Bluechip, placing it above USDC and DAI due to its decentralization and transparency.

With Liquity, you can earn a high yield in a trustless, decentralized way.

Explore various yield strategies with Liquity here.

How to find high DeFi yields (Part 2)

After Mantle, the next blockchains that have seen significant TVL growth over the past 30 days are Katana, Ink, and Monad.

All of those have a DeFi incentive program with rewards for yield farmers, which is why they have surged in TVL lately.

Now, as a general rule of thumb, this is something important to keep in mind first:

→ On tokenless blockchains (Katana, Ink), you can earn rewards primarily in the form of points or locked tokens, which you can’t sell until the TGE happens. Those are worth farming only if you believe their token will have a high FDV at launch

→ On the blockchains that already have a token (Monad), the farming rewards are generally a bit smaller, but they can be sold at any point, so the yield you are earning is much more predictable, although it is still dependent on the price action of the farming token, unless the yield is generated in a sustainable way

I’ll focus on the yield opportunities on Monad this time, as this one has liquid farming $MON rewards that you can claim and trade for other tokens at any point.

Since I saw Monad’s TVL was growing quickly according to DeFiLlama’s Chains dashboard, I decided to explore its ecosystem more closely.

The process is straightforward:

• Go to the Monad chain page on DeFiLlama

• Check out its top ecosystem protocols by TVL (Accountable, Morpho, Upshift, Curvance, etc.) there

• Visit their websites

• Look at the top yields they are offering and how they are generated

For example, in this way, I found these interesting stablecoin yields (most of which are subsidized with MON token incentives):

• 12.37% APY by depositing USDC into Hyperithm Delta Neutral Vault on Accountable, which deploys capital into several delta-neutral strategies like buying Pendle PTs, providing liquidity to lending apps, and funding rate arbitrage

• 11.33% APY by lending AUSD stablecoin to the earnAUSD market on Curvance, a money market on Monad

• Up to 25.77% APY by depositing USDC into Midas’s mEDGE leveraged farming pool on Gearbox (note: this is a high-risk strategy, though, as it requires using leverage to achieve this high yield)

This is the base APY without points rewards, which you also get from most of these yield opportunities, but the value of points is hard to determine in advance.

In the same way I showed you for Mantle or Monad, you can use DeFiLlama’s Chains dashboard to also find other DeFi ecosystems with attractive yield opportunities.

All you have to do is monitor which chains/dApps are surging in TVL and try to determine why this is happening.

Chances are you’ll find some interesting DeFi yields in this way.

I hope you found this guide helpful 🫡

Chart of the week

The value of tokenized assets on Ethereum surpassed $15 billion for the first time

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Solana announced the launch of on-chain IPO shares via Backpack

ACI, a major Aave DAO delegate, is leaving AAVE after disputes with AAVE Labs

Kraken became the first crypto company to gain access to FED’s payment system

INFINIT launched the Prompt-to-DeFi Strategist Challenge, a competitive program for creators to build verified DeFi strategies

Hyperliquid community members proposed HIP-6 - a permissionless token launch auction mechanism for Hyperliquid ecosystem tokens

Opinion and Paradex are launching their tokens today

Starknet introduced strkBTC - a wrapped Bitcoin with built-in privacy capabilities

Trump criticized banks for trying to ban stablecoin yield

Steakhouse launched a new set of curated stablecoin vaults for distinct risk profiles

MetaDAO launched Futardio - a new permissionless launchpad on Solana

Resolv’s Season 4 airdrop claim went live

Balancer V3 went live on Monad

Lighter launched the LIT Fee Credits program, enabling market makers to pay with LIT for fee discounts

AAVE’s proposal to expand to Monad and launch a $15M incentive program is live

USDai raised $19.4M during its ICO

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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