Quai Network, the world’s fastest Proof-of-Work Network, launched its all-in-one DeFi platform called Quainance.

Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out

Recently, I’ve come across a lot of DeFi tools that I consider quite useful.

Since they are all free, I thought it would be interesting to write a newsletter covering these tools and how I use them.

Let’s dive in 👇

1. Pharos Watch

Pharos is a platform where you’ll find any information you need regarding stablecoins.

This includes:

• Recent depegs

• General stablecoin news

• Upcoming stablecoin launches

• A breakdown of each stablecoin's backing and how it works

• Mint authority (This section shows if an asset uses multisigs, timelocks, and other security measures and is helpful to assess how seriously its team takes security)

• A safety score based on the redemption mechanism, volume, DEX liquidity, durability of that stablecoin, and more

And so much more. If you want to research a certain stablecoin product and better understand its risk profile, I think Pharos is a good place to start.

Besides that, Pharos also has a very cool Telegram Alert Bot.

You can use it to get depeg alerts for free on Telegram whenever a stablecoin depegs or there are some unusual on-chain movements related to it.

I find this very helpful because I want to be alerted when one of the stablecoins I hold starts to depeg so I can exit my position quickly if needed.

2. Yieldz

Yieldz is a platform built specifically for yield farming.

It has three main pages:

• Dashboard - Here you can see your positions across money markets such as Aave and Morpho, as well as what collaterals you are exposed to

• Deposit - This one shows the top lending opportunities across Aave, Lista, and Morpho while also displaying their historical performances

• Leverage - This page looks similar to the Deposit page in terms of user interface, but it shows leveraged yield opportunities instead, filtered by APY

The Leverage tab is the one I use the most.

Using it, it is very easy to spot the best looping opportunities across almost all major money markets as Yieldz automatically calculates the yield you’d get for looping a certain asset at maximum leverage.

For each looping opportunity, it also shows how its borrowing and supply rate evolved over time in the form of a chart, which is helpful for assessing its performance.

You'll also find other details on the Yieldz UI, such as how much liquidity is available in a certain market, its utilization rate, liquidation LTV, and so on.

This makes it relatively easy to decide what loop may be worth opening.

Moving on, there’s one more tool I want to cover.

But before that, here’s an overview of Quai, which just launched its DeFi platform:

Together with Quai Network

DeFi just went live on Quai Network

Quai, the world’s fastest Proof-of-Work blockchain, has recently launched Quainance.

Quainance is an all-in-one DeFi platform where you can bridge, swap, and earn yield by providing liquidity from one place.

This makes Quai one of the very few L1s powered by Proof of Work to add support for DeFi.

Here are a few things you should know about Quainance and Quai:

• You can bridge USDT to Quai in just a few clicks via the Quainance website

• Once you bridge it there, you can use that capital to swap into QUAI/WQI, Quai’s native assets, and provide liquidity to earn a yield

• Quai is a highly scalable blockchain with an architecture built to support up to 50,000+ transactions per second without fees spiking

What’s particularly interesting about Quai is its Proof-of-Entropy-Minima consensus mechanism, which can be seen as an upgrade of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work.

Quai’s Proof-of-Entropy-Minima aims to offer the best of both worlds:

It combines a high transaction throughput with the security guarantees of Proof-of-Work, making it well suited for DeFi applications.

Thanks to it, Quai can offer a good DeFi UX while staying decentralized and secure.

To bootstrap user activity, Quai is currently offering triple-digit yields to early users providing liquidity to its pools on Quainance.

Explore Quai’s Quainance DeFi platform here!

🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out (part 2)

3. Monarch

If you use Morpho for DeFi lending, you may like this one.

Monarch Lend has been live for a while, but I only recently discovered it.

It’s essentially a lending platform built on top of Morpho’s smart contracts with advanced features for DeFi power users.

For instance, what you can do on Monarch that isn’t possible via the Morpho UI is to lend directly against a set of collaterals that you choose yourself.

Why does this matter?

Because in this way you get full control over your lending positions and no longer have to rely on a vault curator who may (or may not) do a good job managing risk.

Another advantage is that, by letting you lend directly against a collateral you choose, Monarch often provides higher yields than you can get via Morpho UI.

To give you an actual example, at the time of writing, you can lend USDT against stcUSD collateral on Morpho via Monarch and earn 15.74%.

If I then go to the Morpho user interface, there’s no Morpho vault providing such a high APY, as no vault provides direct exposure solely to stcUSD.

And that’s why I think using Monarch as a Morpho lender makes sense.

That said, the trade-off is that you're fully responsible for managing your own risk.

While using Monarch can definitely offer some advantages as I shared above, it also requires doing proper research on the markets you choose to lend to make sure you understand what risks you are exposed to.

Anyone can list a market on Morpho as the platform is permissionless.

Monarch turns users into their own curators, and there are a few things I recommend you check before lending to a market via it if you intend to use it:

• What oracle the market uses

• How liquidations are performed (based on the NAV price or DEX rate?)

• What collateral it exposes you to and how risky that collateral is (if it’s a yield-bearing asset, look into how it generates yield)

• Whether any well-known curators deposited capital into that market (which can be helpful to determine if other curators trust that market)

Those are the main things I pay attention to.

With that said, I hope you found this list of tools helpful!

I will continue to cover lesser-known DeFi tools that I find useful as I discover them.

Chart of the week

Robinhood Chain surpassed Base in daily active users

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Morpho released Morpho Midnight - a money market for fixed-rate loans

Hyperliquid announced plans to support the permissionless creation of HIP-4 outcome markets

Aave Labs’s proposal to launch Aave App went live

Aerodrome scheduled the launch of Aero, a new multichain DEX, for September

eCash.com announced an upcoming ECX token airdrop in August for every wallet address holding BTC

Ondo released Ondo Points - a points program for trading activity on Ondo Perps

Ethereum’s validator exit queue fell to zero (no one tries to unstake ETH anymore)

MegaETH has shut down its MegaMafia incubator

Telegram announced plans to launch a new crypto wallet with zero tx fees

Hylo launched xBTC - a liquidation-free token offering 3x BTC exposure

Yearn’s proposal to launch a risk tranching system for its vaults went live

Ethena went live on Monad L1

Ostium announced plans to reopen trading today

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎The Clarity Act: How it could impact crypto

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎 The Clarity Act: How it could impact crypto

The US Senate has 25 days left to pass the Clarity Act, the most important piece of crypto legislation in US history, before senators leave for the summer recess.

With this deadline rapidly approaching, I thought now would be a good time to discuss what the Clarity Act could change and why it’s such a big deal.

Because if it passes, it could have a massive positive impact on crypto.

As the name suggests, the Clarity Act can finally bring some much-needed clarity by establishing the first comprehensive US regulatory framework for crypto.

Much of the crypto industry still operates in a legal gray area.

And while I am not a fan of overregulation, the reality is that without clear rules, launching crypto products in the US has become a legal minefield.

Among the biggest changes that the Clarity Act proposes are the following:

1. Establish who regulates what

The Clarity Act establishes that sufficiently decentralized assets should be regulated by the CFTC as digital commodities, while the more centralized ones should be regulated by the SEC as crypto securities.

This matters a lot because the two regulators follow very different rulebooks.

For years, many crypto startups avoided launching in the US, unsure whether their tokens would be treated as securities or commodities and fearing potential lawsuits from the SEC amid regulatory uncertainty.

What the Clarity Act does is give projects a clear path to compliance and clarify how they can operate in the US legally.

This is also expected to make token launches in the US much easier.

2. Introduce investor protection requirements for CEXs

The goal of the protection requirements is to prevent another FTX-like event.

This includes asset segregation (CEXs must segregate customer funds from their operational capital), anti-insider trading measures, and more.

Personally, I mostly use DEXs nowadays and prefer to keep my funds in a self-custody wallet. But for normies entering the space via CEXs, I think this is a great change.

3. Truly decentralized DeFi receives explicit protections

This is the most interesting part to me.

In 2024, for example, the SEC accused Uniswap of running an unregistered securities exchange, and Uniswap spent tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to defend itself.

The Clarity Act could prevent this from happening again by distinguishing between centralized intermediaries and truly decentralized protocols. If a protocol doesn’t custody user funds, it may not be regulated like a broker or a centralized company.

This is a big deal because it introduces protections for DeFi software developers and could encourage more people to start building DeFi products in the US.

It also incentivizes existing projects to become truly decentralized if they want to benefit from a more favorable regulatory framework.

So it’s a win-win from any point of view.

What are the odds that the Clarity Act passes?

According to Polymarket, there’s a 41% chance it will get signed into law.

Realistically, there are only 25 days left to pass it, because as I mentioned at the beginning, the US Senate will go into summer recess on Aug. 10.

If it doesn’t pass by then, it could theoretically also pass later in September, but the chances of this happening are low, as Congress has a packed agenda after recess and the upcoming US midterm elections will become the main focus.

So the next 21 days will likely be decisive for the US Clarity Act.

Regulatory uncertainty has arguably been one of crypto’s biggest obstacles. If the Clarity Act passes, that could finally begin to change.

It will likely not trigger an immediate massive market rally or a new bull run.

But in the long run, clear regulations could attract a lot of new capital to the industry, accelerate institutional adoption, and trigger a new wave of innovation.

Together with Ondo Finance

The most rewarding place to trade equity perps

Just recently, Ondo has released Ondo Perps - the first perpetuals exchange purpose-built for tokenized equities, indices, and commodities.

It offers up to 20x leverage and access to dozens of equity markets.

As institutional market makers use it to deliver tight spreads, Ondo Perps is able to offer very deep liquidity, even for large positions.

What’s also interesting is that it has some very attractive incentives:

• $3 million in total rewards - Every week, over $100,000 in USDC incentives from this pool are distributed to active traders

• Ondo Points - While there aren’t many details about Ondo’s points program yet, the Ondo team confirmed that points are already accruing for trading activity

By trading equity perps on Ondo Perps, you can farm two types of rewards at once.

Another thing that grabbed my attention is that you can use tokenized stocks as collateral. (currently available only for Pre-alpha users)

So if you are, for example, bullish on AAPL and bearish on TSLA, you could buy AAPL tokenized stocks and use them as collateral to short TSLA.

This gives traders a new level of capital efficiency that’s hard to get elsewhere.

Check out Ondo Perps here!

Chart of the week

Tokenized stocks trading volume skyrocketed in June

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aave V4 went live on Avalanche with an incentive program

Pendle launched automated PT looping

Ondo released 24/7 trading for tokenized stocks on Solana

Lighter burned $36M worth of LIT tokens

Curve Finance released Llamalend v2 on Ethereum

Cap was caught giving most of its airdrop to its own founder

Quai launched Quainance - an all-in-one DeFi platform on Quai

Hyperliquid Policy Center team met with the SEC to address crypto regulation

Plasma One, an on-chain neobank, went live on Android

Chainlink CCIP was adopted by Aave as the cross-chain infrastructure solution for its upcoming mobile app

Jito released JTX - a new DEX for trading crypto and equities on Solana

EthSystems launched privacy tools for institutions that want to use Ethereum

Polymarket applied for a US License to offer margin trading

Arbitrum announced that 10% of Robinhood Chain’s fees go to its own treasury

Ostium was unfortunately exploited for over $23 million

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Hyperliquid is well known for the biggest airdrop of all time, but many other perps DEXs like Lighter and dYdX also airdropped massive amounts of money.

For me, the biggest airdrop I ever got came from Lighter last year.

And as the valuations of perps DEXs have recently started rising again in pre-markets, I believe it still makes a lot of sense to farm their airdrops in 2026.

In this issue, I cover:

• How to arbitrage funding rates to farm perps airdrops

• My strategy to identify arbitrage opportunities

• A free tool I am using to easily monitor my arbitrage positions

• How I picked which perps DEXs to farm

• A few risk management tips

I also talked about funding rate arbitrage last year, but my strategy changed a lot since then, and I started using new tools, so I decided to share an update.

Let’s dive in 👇

Funding rate arbitrage: How and why I use this strategy

First of all, if you are unfamiliar with funding rate arbitrage, here’s an intro:

When you open a long or short position on a perps DEX, you either pay or receive a small payment called funding rate at fixed intervals (every 1 to 8 hours).

Every major perps DEX uses a funding rate mechanism.

When there are more shorts than longs, the people with long positions receive the funding rate payment. When there are more longs than shorts, the opposite happens.

Positive funding rates mean short positions get paid, while negative funding rates mean long positions get paid.

And these funding rates differ from exchange to exchange.

This creates an arbitrage opportunity: on one exchange, you might be paid to long BTC, while on another exchange, you might be paid to short it.

In these cases, you can open a delta-neutral BTC position between these exchanges and earn a nice yield from the positive funding rate spread. And that’s how funding rate arbitrage works.

With this strategy, I’ve been earning an average APR of 14% on my perps portfolio with a ~2x cross-margin account leverage over the past few months.

That said, the most valuable thing I get from funding rate arbitrage is perps airdrop points, as I am arbitraging funding rates only between perps DEXs.

I believe the points of certain perps DEXs like Variational could be worth a lot of money at TGE, which is the main reason why I arbitrage funding rates.

The best part about this strategy is that you can get a lot of points while being delta-neutral and not having to bet that prices will go in a certain direction.

How I identify funding rate arbitrage opportunities

The tool I’ve been using for this lately is bendbasis.com. I’ll show you how to use it.

There are many funding rate analytics platforms, but I’ve been using Bendbasis because it offers a lot of cool features you can’t find elsewhere.

An example is Bendbasis’s “Funding Arbitrage” dashboard, which you can access for free at bendbasis.com/arbitrage.

Once you get to this page, there are a few things I suggest doing:

• At “Exchanges”, select only the perps DEXs you intend to farm (for example, I selected Hyperliquid, Variational, and Extended)

• At “Filters” → “Min Open Interest”, select a minimum open interest between $150k-$700k depending on the size of your portfolio

• Then click on “APR” to see the top arbitrage opportunities by APR

After you do this, Bendbasis will show the top funding rate arbitrage opportunities by 15-day APR, rather than by live APR, as most other tools do.

This matters because, ideally, you want to find arbitrage opportunities with a stable, positive funding rate spread so you don’t have to constantly rotate your positions.

This dashboard also features a “Stability” indicator on the right side of the page. The greener the indicator, the more reliable the spread has been over time.

An example of a good funding arbitrage opportunity at the time of writing is a delta-neutral ATOM position between Hyperliquid and Variational.

(long ATOM on Hyperliquid while shorting it on Variational)

To see how this position performed in the past 30 days, you can click on it on Bendbasis directly from the Funding Arbitrage page.

This will open a historical ATOM funding rate chart like the one above.

As this chart shows, over the past 30 days, the funding rate spread for this delta-neutral ATOM position has always been positive, with Variational’s funding rates for the short position (the red line) consistently above the green line representing Hyperliquid’s funding rates for the long position, which is exactly what you want to see.

A funding rate spread is positive when you earn more from funding rates than you’re paying. On the chart above, that’s the case when the red line is above the green line.

In conclusion, longing ATOM on Hyperliquid while shorting ATOM on Variational is a great funding rate arbitrage opportunity at the time of writing.

ATOM funding rates may change by the time this issue goes live, but I hope this example explains well how to find arbitrage opportunities on your own.

Next, I want to show you the easiest way, in my view, to monitor the performance of your arbitrage positions after you open them.

Note: If you're finding this guide useful and decide to farm any of the perps DEXs I mentioned, I'd appreciate it if you used my invite links below.

Variational: omni.variational.io/?ref=OMNIMLU9GFM2

Extended: app.extended.exchange/join/DEFINVESTOR

Hyperliquid: app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/DEFINVESTOR

Some of these links provide points boosts or trading fee discounts as well.

None of these perps DEXs compensated me for being included here. These are only the projects I’m personally farming via funding rate arbitrage with my own capital.

How I track the performance of my arbitrage positions

The thing is, funding rate spreads like this don’t last forever.

In the example for the delta-neutral ATOM position, the funding rate spread has been stable over time, but there’s always a chance it will disappear overnight.

When the positive spread is gone for several hours in a row, it's usually time to close the trade and rotate your capital to a better opportunity.

This is why it’s important to actively monitor your positions.

To do this, I use another Bendbasis feature called “Portfolio”.

You can find it here: https://bendbasis.com/portfolio.

Basically, it works like this: You have a Positions tab where you can click on “+ Add Position” in order to import your positions there manually.

For example, if you opened the delta-neutral ATOM position I mentioned earlier, you can add its details manually there.

Once you do that, Bendbasis will start tracking your position.

It will automatically calculate your fees, slippage, funding rates, and APR. And on top of that, for each position, Bendbasis Portfolio will show “Funding Live”, which is essentially the funding rate spread between the two exchanges.

Whenever the “Funding Live” APR flips negative for several hours in a row, it might be a good idea to close that position and move on to the next arbitrage trade.

I simulated a new funding rate arbitrage portfolio on Bendbasis below so you can see what the interface looks like:

As you can observe, once you add multiple positions, Bendbasis Portfolio also shows your total portfolio performance over time, which I personally find very helpful.

And you can see your profit and APR for each position there.

I highly recommend using this feature because otherwise, if you don’t track your P&L, you might think your arbitrage strategy is profitable when it’s not.

Personally, I check the Portfolio tab on Bendbasis 3-4 times a day to see how my arbitrage positions are currently performing and if there’s anything I need to do.

It’s much easier to use this feature than to keep multiple browser tabs open to check funding rates across different DEXs separately.

How I picked which perps DEXs to farm

At the time of writing, there are 193 perps DEXs listed on DeFiLlama.

Now, you can imagine that with so many different platforms building the same thing, using most of them is a waste of time, since many will inevitably fail.

That's why I'm extremely selective about which ones I farm.

Here are a few of the things I am looking for in a tokenless perps DEX:

1. Unique selling proposition (USP) - Hyperliquid was among the first perps DEXs to bring a CEX-like trading performance on-chain. Meanwhile, Lighter was the first perps DEX to introduce zero fees.

I believe that having something that makes them unique and the fact that Hyperliquid and Lighter didn’t just copy their competitors played a major role in their success.

So when thinking about whether a certain perps DEX is worth farming, ask yourself whether it has a feature that makes it stand out or if it’s just a copycat.

2. The team committed to doing a big airdrop or heavily rewarding early users

One interesting secondary effect of the Hyperliquid airdrop is that it led many newer perps DEX teams to allocate a larger percentage of their token supply to their airdrop in hopes of building a strong community.

For example, Lighter did a 25% token supply airdrop. And Extended promised to airdrop an even bigger allocation of 30% of its token supply at TGE.

Farming the perps DEXs that are transparent about their intentions to heavily reward their community generally has a higher chance of paying off.

3. There’s a strong community supporting the project

This is probably the most important factor because, for an airdrop to be successful, there needs to be strong demand for its token at launch to reach a high FDV.

Both Hyperliquid and Lighter have very active communities on CT. I believe this played a big role in the success of their TGEs, as crypto is an attention economy.

If no one talks about the perps DEX you are using, this might be a sign that you are early, but the most likely scenario is that you are farming the wrong project.

Now that you have a general idea of what I am looking for, let’s also talk about the actual perps DEXs that I am farming.

These are the three tokenless projects I am currently focused on farming:

• Variational - It’s arguably the tokenless perps DEX with the most mindshare on CT rn + its team stated several times that they like how Hyperliquid did its airdrop + it stands out as the largest perps DEX with an RFQ architecture + it raised $50M from VCs

• Extended - It’s the first perps DEX (to my knowledge) that enabled users to trade perps with yield-bearing vault shares as collateral + eToro directly invested in it and teased a future potential integration with Extended + the Extended team confirmed a 30% token supply airdrop at TGE

  In terms of UX, Extended also offers a great trading experience in my opinion, as it has deep liquidity and several features you can’t find elsewhere.

• Trade[XYZ] - Trade[XYZ] is the most popular tokenless perps DEX product powered by Hyperliquid. I thought a lot about whether Trade[XYZ] is worth farming, since it doesn’t have a points program and there’s no confirmation it will have a token, so it doesn’t meet the second criterion I mentioned above.

  But I ultimately decided to include it in my farming strategy because it gives me exposure to two potential airdrops: Hyperliquid Season 2 and Trade[XYZ]. Neither is confirmed, but I think that if any of these airdrops happen, they will be massive given how much CT mindshare both Hyperliquid and Trade [XYZ] have.

Even if Trade[XYZ] doesn’t do an airdrop, I won’t really regret using it because there are many great funding rate arbitrage opportunities between Hyperliquid (Trade[XYZ] is an interface of Hyperliquid), Variational, and Extended.

That said, I have high expectations for Variational and Extended airdrops.

A few final tips

Before wrapping up, I want to share a few arbitrage tips based on my own experience that might increase your profitability (and help you better manage your risk):

• Don’t arbitrage memecoins or other highly volatile tokens that are easy to manipulate - This is important to reduce the probability of getting liquidated

• Set take-profit / stop loss orders to avoid getting liquidated - Let’s say I short $TRUMP on Variational as part of a delta-neutral position and my liquidation price is $4. Then I will set a stop-loss at $3.8 (slightly below $4) on Variational and a take-profit order at $3.8 on the exchange where I have the long hedge. In this way, I significantly reduce the liquidation risk during extreme volatility

• Don’t do funding rate arbitrage on a market where the slippage/spread for a market order exceeds 0.12%. The reason is that slippage is already the highest cost you incur when opening a delta-neutral position. If it’s too large, then it will take a lot of time till the funding rate spread PNL offsets your slippage loss

• Check your funding rate arbitrage positions (I do it via Bendbasis Portfolio to avoid visiting several DEX websites separately) at least 2-3 times a day to ensure you aren’t close to being liquidated, and the funding rate spread APY is still positive

• If you use cross-margin mode, don’t use an account leverage above 2x-2.5x on the perps DEXs you are farming - Obviously, you could get a higher return with a higher leverage, but a high leverage also increases liquidation risk. I'd rather earn a bit less and stay safe

That’s all for today.

I know this was a longer issue than usual, but I hope you found it useful.

Personally, I believe 2026 will be a great year in terms of returns for perps airdrop farmers, just like 2025 was with the Lighter airdrop.

If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe for more content like this.

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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Theo, one of the most popular tokenless stablecoin protocols, has launched its largest points campaign to date. Check it out here.

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

USDT and USDC have dominated the stablecoin market over the past few years.

While hundreds of other stablecoins have been released, unfortunately, no one has managed to break this duopoly yet.

But that may change soon.

This week, an alliance of 140+ TradFi giants announced they are launching their own stablecoin called Open USD.

Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and BNY are among the biggest financial institutions that teamed up to launch Open USD.

These companies obviously have massive distribution power, which is why Open USD could be a noteworthy competitor in the stablecoin sector.

Stripe, for example, could introduce exclusive Open USD integrations across its products, driving adoption at a massive scale.

Initially, when I read the Open USD announcement, I have to say I was skeptical.

Many of these TradFi companies have a long history of overcharging users with outrageous fees to maximize their profits.

But after looking closely into Open USD, two things caught my attention:

• Partners (protocols integrating Open USD) receive all of the earnings from Open USD’s reserves, less a small management fee to cover Open USD’s operational costs

• Businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost

The profit-sharing model is especially interesting to me.

Why does this matter?

Because for a long time, Tether and Circle have captured almost all of the profits generated by the collateral backing their stablecoins, while barely sharing any of it with their users or the platforms integrating their products.

If Open USD gains meaningful market share, it could pressure Tether and Circle to share some of their profits as well in order to stay competitive.

This would be a huge win for both DeFi protocols and users:

• DeFi protocols - DeFi protocols with large amounts of stablecoin deposits (e.g. Aave) could get a new revenue stream from stablecoin reserves profits instead of watching all of it go to entities like Circle or Tether

• Users - Some DeFi protocols could choose to share this additional yield with their users, which would lead to an increase in DeFi yields

Just to clarify, I'm not rooting for Open USD itself to become the world’s largest stablecoin. Many of the companies behind it have spent years openly attacking crypto.

However, if Open USD succeeds in creating real competition for Tether and Circle, forcing them to adopt profit sharing, all DeFi could benefit, as I mentioned above.

More serious competition in the stablecoin sector will inevitably lead to better stablecoin products and maybe also higher yields for DeFi users.

So it’s a win-win scenario.

Ultimately, though, I'd still like to see a crypto-native issuer, whether it's Sky, Ethena, Theo, Aave’s GHO, or another crypto native protocol, winning the stablecoin wars.

Together with Theo

Theo has launched a new points program

If you’re farming DeFi yields, you probably heard of Theo at least once.

It’s one of the largest tokenless stablecoin protocols, and just a few days ago, its team released a new points program aiming to reward early users.

Here are a few things you should know about it:

• The points program is centered around thUSD, which is Theo’s stablecoin backed by a delta-neutral gold basis trade strategy

• thUSD can be staked for sthUSD, a yield-bearing asset with a base APR of 5.40%

• The strategy offering the highest points boost is depositing thUSD in Theo’s Core+ vault, which offers a 7.2% fixed APY and 4x Theo points in exchange for locking your capital there for 6 months

If you’re willing to take higher risks to maximize your yield, another solid option is Theo’s Boost Vault with 11% fixed APY + 2x Theo points for 6 months.

This vault also comes with a 6-month lock, and it deploys user funds into a leveraged sthUSD strategy on Morpho in order to generate a return. What’s interesting about it is that the APY you get is fixed at 11% regardless of Morpho’s rates.

Overall, there are plenty of options for everyone.

With thUSD, Theo is bringing gold basis trading, one of the most popular TradFi yield strategies, on-chain.

In other news, Theo dropped a big announcement this week:

They announced a $20 million investment in FILQ, Fidelity International’s tokenized USD digital liquidity fund. This is the first time when a crypto-native platform has accessed Fidelity International’s tokenized fund offering.

Check out Theo’s new points program here!

Chart of the week

Maple Finance hit a new ATH in outstanding loans

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Robinhood Chain, Robinhood’s own Ethereum L2, went live

Aave announced they are working on a new automated buyback mechanism

Pendle cut its token incentives by 71% in the past 6 months

Mantle announced the launch of Openstock on its L2, bringing pre-IPO vaults on-chain. The Mantle H1 2026 Recap report also went live

Lighter’s perps were natively integrated into Robinhood Wallet

Resolv introduced primeUSD - a structured yield product generating yield via leveraged strategies on tokenized US T‑bills

Open USD, a new stablecoin backed by 140+ TradFi businesses, was announced

Ethena partnered with BlackRock to integrate USDe into BlackRock’s Aladdin app

Ethereum Institutional, a non-profit designed to accelerate Ethereum’s institutional adoption, was introduced

Theo launched a new thUSD points program

dYdX rebranded to Arcus and announced its deployment on Robinhood Chain

Uniswap announced its upcoming deployment to MegaETH

TradingView integrated Hyperliquid charts

World, a fully native prediction market platform on Solana, went live

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎First real tokenized stocks are here

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

Today’s email is brought to you by Apyx - A dividend-backed stablecoin protocol

Check out the Apyx 2.0 announcement here.

🔎First real tokenized stocks are here

If you’ve been following the tokenization sector, you know that projects like Ondo Finance and xStocks already launched on-chain stocks a while ago.

However, those historically came with several limitations and are better seen as wrappers rather than on-chain stocks with real ownership.

But a few days ago, Backpack released the first real US stocks and ETFs.

I’ll explain why I found them particularly interesting and what I mean by “real”.

There are several things that make Backpack’s tokenized assets stand out from other tokenized stock products:

• Real ownership under New York law - This matters as it ensures that even if Backpack declares bankruptcy at some point, the holders of its tokenized stocks would retain legal ownership of their shares

• They have the same legal framework as Robinhood and Fidelity

• Cash dividends are offered to their holders

• Brokerage transfers are supported - Backpack is the first tokenization platform that allows you to transfer your on-chain stocks / ETFs to other brokers

This last point is what really caught my attention.

If at a certain moment you decide to transfer your on-chain stocks off-chain, Backpack is the only crypto platform that actually allows you to do that.

You can transfer them in and out to Interactive Brokers, Robinhood, or other brokers and have access to 1:1 redemption into the underlying real share.

In other words, you legally own the stock, not just a synthetic representation of it.

I think stuff like this is really important because I’ve talked with several people about tokenized stocks over the past months, and the concern I heard repeatedly is this:

"Why buy stocks on-chain when I can just buy them through a traditional broker, which is regulated and comes with significantly stronger legal protections?"

The big deal about Backpack’s on-chain stocks is that they offer real ownership and are regulated, unlike most other tokenized stock products.

And the demand for their product is proving to be pretty high.

In just a few days since launch, Backpack has already captured 74% of the tokenized equities volume across spot DEXs:

I believe that tokenization will eventually bring trillions of dollars on-chain.

But for that to happen, investors need confidence that tokenized assets provide the same ownership rights and protections as their traditional counterparts.

That's why I think what Backpack shipped is an important milestone.

Together with Apyx

Apyx’s response to its first major stress test

Over the past few weeks, STRC suffered its largest depeg yet.

As the largest STRC-backed DeFi Protocol, Apyx has also been impacted by this, with apxUSD and apyUSD suffering a depeg.

In response to this, Apyx announced a new framework called Apyx 2.0.

The goal is to increase the protocol transparency and clarify how it handles redemptions during such events.

Here’s what Apyx 2.0 brings new:

• Two distinct metrics (redemption value and total collateral value) will be published on its transparency dashboard going forward

Redemption Value is the price at which minting and redemptions occur.

• An RFQ redemption mechanism - On top of the protocol’s automated redemption mechanism, users will also be able to submit redemption requests through an RFQ process that allows approved counterparties to complete them at better rates

• The overcollateralization buffer will not be used for redemptions. All of it will be allocated to STRC, with the yield generated given to the apyUSD holders

And from now on, the buffer will act as a backstop.

In a catastrophic scenario where the protocol is severely affected, the buffer will be used together with all other collateral and distributed pro rata among users.

Thanks to its buffer, apyUSD should always generate a higher yield than STRC.

Learn more in Apyx’s article on Apyx V2 here.

Chart of the week

Aerodrome is processing 53% of all DEX volume on Base

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aster allocated 99% of its trading fees to token buybacks

Plasma launched Plasma One - a DeFi neobank with up to 4% cashback

Pendle started teasing its expansion to Monad

MegaETH launched MOSS - a new DeFi wallet aiming to improve on-chain UX

Variational started paying dividends on stock or ETF longs

Curve Finance launched LlamaLend V2 on Optimism

Re, an on-chain reinsurance platform, launched its token called RE

Lighter launched Atomic Orders, enabling to long and/or short multiple markets in a single transaction

Hylo introduced Leveraged Tokens for ETFs - enabling getting leveraged exposure to ETFs with liquidation protection

NEAR Protocol announced an incentive program for those using its privacy solution

Coinbase announced plans to launch 1:1 backed tokenized stocks

Morpho teamed up with Zama to launch the first confidential USDC yield vault with built-in privacy

Citigroup announced plans to roll out tokenized shares of private companies

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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

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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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.

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

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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!

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