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Providing credibly neutral coverage of all things DeFi by https://defillama.com.
Tokenised real estate today sits at half a billion dollars in onchain value, a modest foothold in what Deloitte sees as a $4tn market by 2035.
It's the first sector under the microscope in our upcoming joint report with DefiLlama, "The State of RWAfi."
Read on in this pre-launch Spotlight, "Onchain real estate: technically mature, institutionally constrained"
🦙 Llama News Round-Up | 20 Feb - 27 Feb
News 📰
→ Jane Street enjoyed ‘impossible‘ insider advantage amid $40bn Terra collapse, lawsuit alleges
→ Prediction markets are bending insider trading rules. But will they break them?
→ France crypto kidnappings linked to overseas kingpins, police say
→ South Korean lawmakers set to crack down on crypto after Bithumb’s $40bn Bitcoin blunder
→ Why SEC’s new stablecoin haircut will ‘open the floodgates’ for institutional finance
→ A ‘coordinated attack,’ deleted posts, and falling tokens. What’s going on at World Liberty Financial?
→ Man poisoned business partner’s coffee after bad crypto investment, say prosecutors
→ Putin lets courts confiscate Bitcoin as Russia cracks down on freewheeling crypto sector
→ Dutch government to amend tax on unrealised crypto gains: ‘Something simply went wrong’
→ Tokenised gold outshines crypto prices amidst political chaos
Layer 1 & 2 ⛓️
→ Ethereum devs lock-in controversial censorship resistance proposal for coming Hegota upgrade
→ Vitalik proposes ‘quantum roadmap’ for Ethereum
→ Why transaction volume on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is surging
→ Justin Drake: Ethereum L1 Strawmap
→ BNB Chain processes ~40% of stablecoin transactions with ~5% of total supply
DeFi 🏦
→ Aave price tumbles as ‘most productive’ contractor leaves DAO
→ Why Fluid devs want to give DAO ‘ultimate authority’
→ BDG is leaving Aave
→ Kamino crosses $1bn in total RWA market size
→ Tether to wind down offshore yuan stablecoin CNH₮
→ Yearn’s Weekly Blue Pill
→ Quarterly Ethereum smart contract deployments hit record-high in 2025 Q4
→ LobsterDAO’s Ivan joins Ethereum Foundation
→ Step shuts its doors
→ CurveDAO proposal to compensate users affected by Curve.fi DNS hijacking
→ ZachXBT exposes Axiom employees for insider trading using private wallet tracking
→ MagicEden shutters Bitcoin API, ME Wallet, and EVM & BTC marketplaces to focus on Solana
Reads 📚
→ From “Adoption” to Annexation: The End State of Institutional Adoption
→ Zeus: Your RWA token doesn’t capture value. Here’s why
→ Pine Analytics: The Compression of L1 Value Capture
→ Are audits dead?
→ Balancer: What 961 Token Launches Taught Us About LBP Configuration
→ A1: Perp Dex Wars
→ Kyan: The end of wasted capital
Raises & Acquisitions 💰
→ Deal terms ‘more attractive’ as crypto startups raise $95m led by prediction markets, AI agents
→ Based raises $11.5m in Series A led by Pantera.
→ Bitwise acquires staking infra provider Chorus One
Security 🛡
→ Bitcoin dev says we’re ‘not prepared’ for quantum future where major players are ‘spooks’
→ South Korean prosecutors recover $22 million worth of lost Bitcoin
→ AI-powered audit uncovers ‘high-severity’ bug in Ethereum software
→ Going to a crypto conference? SEAL_ORG says to be careful
AI 🤖
→ Citrini AI report terrified Wall Street. Here’s why its vision is a boon for Bitcoin’s price
→ Vitalik Buterin backs Anthropic in White House clash after Citrini report predicts AI dystopia
→ Uniswap releases open-source AI Skills suite for agents.
Llama Update 🦙
→ DefiLlama adds “Date of Last Attestation” and “Attestation Frequency” to RWA pages.
→ DefiLlama upgrades “Token Rights” dashboard, expanding coverage to 49 protocols with more context and deeper summaries (including domain & IP ownership)
→ Going to ETHCC? So are we! DM us to meet up; interview slots available.
A simple workflow to streamline your DeFi research with LlamaAI:
> Prompt "Send me a summary of recently listed protocols each day at 8am. Include: description, metrics, and community sentiment."
> Confirm your alert setup
> LlamaAI will email you a daily breakdown of new protocols, along with their fundamentals and links to recent discussion about those protocols
https://defillama.com/ai
We've added Date of Last Attestation and Attestation Frequency to our RWA pages.
Transparency and third-party verification are critical to analyzing offchain assets
Track RWA data here:
https://defillama.com/rwa
Ever had to use a new wallet or DeFi protocol, googled it, and worried about picking the wrong one from a scam ad?
DefiLlama Search is designed to help avoid phishing attacks.
Whitelisted, manually vetted links for thousands of DeFi apps, wallets, and websites.
https://search.defillama.com
Transient capital. Short-term incentives. Disconnected governance.
The vote-escrow model emerged to fix what liquidity mining broke, evolving at the protocol level through Curve, Solidly, and Aerodrome.
@katana_network builds on that evolution.
Within "Katana: Bringing ve(3,3) to the Chain Level," we break down how Katana transforms ve-tokenomics from a protocol tool into a network-wide coordination engine:
→ Chain-level emissions instead of siloed liquidity wars
→ vKAT directing incentives across the entire DeFi stack
→ avKAT restoring liquidity without breaking alignment
→ Bi-weekly gauge voting across DEX, lending, perps, and yield
→ Emissions designed to transition from inflation to revenue-backed buybacks
This is ve(3,3), extended to the base layer.
Katana treats liquidity as shared infrastructure:
➰Emissions attract liquidity.
➰Liquidity deepens execution.
➰Execution generates fees.
➰Fees flow back to aligned voters.
➰Rewards compound into more locked KAT.
As emissions give way to Vaultbridge yield, AUSD yield, chain-owned liquidity returns, and sequencer fees, the model shifts from subsidy to sustainability.
A coordination layer for an entire chain.
🌐Check out the full report here.
Which RWAs are actually being used in DeFi? Which are true permissionless assets and which are ledger entries?
Introducing the new DefiLlama RWA dashboard.
450+ RWAs tracked & classified by:
* Transferability
* Redeemability
* KYC requirements
* Self custody options
* Asset class
Plus two new metrics: DeFi Active TVL & Active Marketcap.
DeFi Active TVL represents the proportion of an asset that’s actually being used in DeFi and not sitting idle, to clearly gauge whether they’re productive.
Active Marketcap is the portion of a coin's marketcap that excludes internal addresses such as treasuries and team addresses, to show what’s in users’ hands onchain rather than closed loops or internal bookkeeping.
Tokenised equities are all the rage these days.
Onchain stocks have grown ~25x in a year, nearing $1b in value as institutional rails, exchanges, and regulators align and intersect.
Our latest report, in collaboration with Sentora, breaks it all down
Once a fringe experiment, tokenised equities are now backed by real infrastructure.
Institutional-grade platforms, multi-chain settlement, and late-2025 regulatory breakthroughs are reshaping how global investors access public markets onchain.
This report breaks down:
→ who controls liquidity
→ where activity is settling
→ why equities are scaling faster than other RWAs
The DLR team learned a great deal working with Sentora, an emerging leader in institutional DeFi infrastructure and onchain market intelligence.
That perspective helped shape this report on what may be the biggest development in DeFi.
🔗 Read the full report here.
What does the token actually do?
This has been one of the most fundamental unanswered questions in DeFi since the beginning.
Does the token control governance?
Does it have any claim on the treasury?
Does it receive protocol revenue via buybacks or dividends?
Today, we launched Token Rights on DefiLlama.
Token Rights gives you a clear, standardized view of what a token entitles holders to: revenue, treasury, governance, or none of the above.
We’ve rolled this out across two dozen protocols, including additional context like historical governance discussions around token rights and whether teams raised equity separately from the token.
DefiLlama has acquired Bulletin, one of the few platforms providing structured valuation and OTC data for private crypto companies.
Founded by David Mirzadeh, Bulletin shines light on a massive but opaque market: private market crypto equity.
DefiLlama already has the most comprehensive onchain fundamentals data. With Bulletin, we’re extending that transparency to private markets, giving investors real comparables across public tokens, protocols, and private companies.
This data will be integrated into our main platform to give investors another important data point about how fundamentals and valuations align in the private market.
Protocol income statements are now available on DefiLlama Pro dashboards.
Add financial granularity alongside charts to understand line item protocol fundamentals.
Income Statement flow visualizations are now available on DefiLlama Pro custom dashboards.
Add income statements alongside other custom charts to understand a protocol's financials.
We asked LlamaAI to compare top Layer 1s by ecosystems, metrics, and recent updates.
This was the result.
Inside BlockDAG’s $442m crypto maze of missing miners, unpaid employees, and breached contracts
Читать полностью…
If you haven't checked out our Pro dashboard library recently, now is the perfect time to.
It includes 100s of community-created dashboards and now features a Trending section so you can see what other people are researching.
Hunting airdrops?
You can now find the highest potential ones directly on our Yield dashboard.
We've incorporated fundraising data into our pools table. Hover over the money with wings icon to see a protocol's last known valuation.
We've upgraded our Token Rights dashboards:
- Expanded coverage to 49 protocols
- Deeper summaries and clear explanations of every right
- Domain and IP ownership
- Sources linked for each section
Available on the "Token Rights" tab of protocols.
Introducing Llama Talks 🦙💭
We recently spoke with the pseudonymous trader and researcher CryptoCondom about their transition from mining to trading, their thesis on the energy and defence sectors, and why they believe the traditional altcoin cycle is broken.
Starting as a hobbyist miner in 2019, CC built a substantial operation of GPU rigs before selling the top in 2020 to focus on full-time trading. Known for their blunt market commentary and focus on fundamental analysis over hype, they have built a reputation for spotting consensus traps and identifying long-term structural shifts.
🎤 In this interview, CC breaks down why they believe ETH is dragging, why energy and defence are the trades of the decade, and a bold prediction for how crypto companies will exit to traditional markets in 2026.
Yield used to move capital.
Now liquidity depth, governance design, and execution discipline determine whether capital can scale.
🔖In “Curation as an Infrastructure Layer,” we examine how kpk positions curation as the next structural layer of DeFi.
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Over the past year, we've seen curation emerge as a core layer of DeFi infrastructure.
In early 2025, seven of ~31 entities labelled 'active risk curators' had TVL of over $100m. Today, that number has climbed to 12 out of 43, with aggregate TVL across curated strategies peaking near $10 billion.
The demand for structured access to risk-defined DeFi is clear, but why?
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Big money and institutions do not want exposure to the operational complexities of the protocol puzzle that fuels capital growth.
Like any IRL large fund, they want enforceable rules: risk constraints, allocation limits, response mechanisms, all defined under a continuously monitored mandate.
In that lies the foundation of kpk's understanding of curation.
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The report also covers:
→ The EURC liquidity stress event
→ Real-time agent-driven rebalancing
→ Comparative analysis across leading curators
→ The evolution from curated vaults to tokenised Funds
📖Check out the full report here.
Our Yield Dashboard just got smarter.
Pools now include a Yield Score (coefficient of variation). This measures whether a yield is consistent or inflated by short-term spikes.
Use yield score to:
> Evaluate the reliability of a single pool
> Compare stability across pools
Join us tomorrow on X at 11am EST for a discussion about RWAs and tokenization.
https://x.com/i/spaces/1gqGvrjdvbjGB?s=20
Elon Musk’s xAi dives into crypto, tradfi amid $1tn merger with SpaceX
Читать полностью…
From this week’s The Decentralised: Quantum Ethereum
The Ethereum Foundation has formed a dedicated post-quantum research team led by Thomas Coratger, following what researcher Justin Drake described as years of quiet R&D and rapidly accelerating timelines. Recent advances from Google and warnings from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin that quantum attacks could arrive before 2028 have pushed the issue to the forefront.
Alongside the new team, Drake said the foundation will run bi-weekly quantum security calls, offer a $1 million prize for quantum-resistant cryptography, and publish a roadmap for a full transition without downtime or fund loss. Optimism co-founder Karl Floersch said OP Labs is already planning to replace quantum-vulnerable components, with final choices expected to follow Ethereum’s lead.
More from this week's top stories:
→ Hyperliquid token surges 25% amid commodities trading frenzy
→ Delegates clash as Optimism token buyback proposal goes to a DAO vote
→ Ethereum ‘blob’ increase strains network, studies find
From the land of DAOs:
→ VOTE: CoW DAO votes to fund developer team
→ VOTE: GnosisDAO votes to enable ranked-choice voting
→ VOTE: GMX DAO votes to fund development team
[REPORT] The State of DeFi 2025 is out; see what grew, what broke, and what's next.
📰 Get The Decentralised delivered to your inbox every week.
DeFi data just became model-ready.
Introducing Query Builder for DefiLlama Sheets.
Instead of writing complex formulas or stitching together multiple queries, you can now pull exactly the data you want into Sheets or Excel in a few clicks.
> Build spreadsheet formulas visually
> Query multiple projects in a single request
> Analyze historical metrics side by side with clean, consistent data
DefiLlama data is now one pip install away.
Introducing the DefiLlama SDK for Python.
This brings our APIs together in one library, making it easier than ever to integrate DeFi data into your workflow.
The @ llama X account is going to share insights generated by LlamaAI.
Worth a follow to track big movers in onchain metrics.
Join our X Space on January 27 at 10AM ET (3PM UTC) as we break down the State of DeFi report.
Featuring a stacked lineup with DefiLlama, Hemi, RedStone, Mantle, Katana, kpk, and Kyan.
https://x.com/i/spaces/1ZkKzZenjjDKv?s=20
The DefiLlama API is ideal for vibe coding crypto apps:
> Our basic API is free with no key required, allowing you to quickly deploy apps
> We have LLM-specific docs to help coding agents use our endpoints
Use it to integrate price, yield, and fundamental data into your app.
From this week’s The Decentralised: Inside Pump.fun 💊
Burwick Law has refiled a lawsuit accusing Pump.fun, Solana Labs, and related entities of running a rigged, unlicensed gambling operation, citing thousands of private messages between founders and engineers. The suit argues that Solana’s priority fee system allowed insiders and bots to consistently buy ahead of retail users, framing the platform as a casino where outcomes were effectively predetermined.
Some messages appear damaging, including admissions that most users lose money, and claims from anonymous influencers that paid promotions and early access were common. Still, the case hinges on selective disclosures and hearsay, with limited evidence that Pump.fun executives personally profited. For now, the lawsuit raises uncomfortable questions about fairness and guardrails in memecoin markets, even if its criminal claims remain unproven.
More from this week's top stories:
→ Ethereum staking bottleneck breaks as long-running exit queue clears
→ Why did Monero just hit an all-time high? ‘We’ve allowed increasingly dystopian systems to exist’
→ Polygon rises 13% as blockchain’s developer unveils new stablecoin framework
From the land of DAOs:
→ PROPOSAL: Optimism proposes token buyback program
→ VOTE: CoW DAO votes on renewing grants program
→ PROPOSAL: Vitalik Buterin proposes bandwidth-efficient mempool system
[Sponsored] See how crypto is taking shape around the world. Read the Bybit World Crypto Rankings for a data-led snapshot of where adoption is strongest.
📰 Get The Decentralised delivered to your inbox every week.
All DefiLlama users, free and paid, can now download charts as clean png images.
These automatically include a legend, chart title, and are formatted to 16:9 for easy sharing.