2067
Crypto native research, branding and analytics. Powered by DefiLlama and DL News X: https://x.com/dl_research TG: @dlresearch_TG DMs open!
We have a new home on Telegram!
Join us here: /channel/defillama_research
The Pharos Network built an ocean. Circle made sure it had somewhere to flow.
We spoke with Wish Wi, Michelle Kang, and Spencer Jaffe at EthCC about the compliance rails, institutional throughput, and settlement infra RealFi needs to scale.
Check out the full Roundtable here.
Join the DLR analysts next Monday as they dive into topics straight from the State of RWAfi Q1 2026 report:
→ Is RWAfi one market or many?
→ The rapid growth of tokenised stocks
→ What's happening in private credit
→ Permissioned vs permissionless RWA
Featuring our friends from DefiLlama, xStocks, Ondo, RedStone, and Sentora.
Set an alarm for May 4th @ 10:00 AM EST (2:00 PM UTC):
https://x.com/i/spaces/1qxvvkqyvQBxB?s=20
GM! Time to talk to llamas.
Not many people in crypto can say they've informally counselled the Ethereum Foundation and traded alongside Vitalik on the timeline, but then again, not many people are Millie.
Pseudonymous, sharp, and deeply embedded in the industry since just before DeFi summer, Millie is the co-founder of Trueo, a platform for user-created onchain prediction markets, and the builder behind Truth Oracle, an optimistic oracle protocol designed to benefit from the current wave of AI models. They are also part of the Ethereum Silviculture Society, an advisory body that stewards cypherpunk ideals within the EF.
We sat down to talk about why prediction markets are the most underrated derivative category in existence, where the real mispricings are, and why, in Millie's view, all the world will eventually be a prediction market.
Bitcoin developer wants to hard fork the network — and give away Satoshi coins
Читать полностью…
The State of RWAFi Q1 2026 Report is here.
RWA active market cap grew 5x in just over a year, from $4.1B to $25.2B. But only $3.6B is deployed in DeFi.
A lot of what is being called RWAFi right now is really just tokenisation. Putting assets onchain and actually using them are two very different things.
The market is figuring out that difference in real time. And depending on which asset class you look at, the answers are very different.
Developed in collaboration with DefiLlama, this report breaks down tokenised commodities, equities, real estate & alternative finance. Same macro trend, yet evolving differently under unique constraints.
Read the full report here: https://assets.dlnews.com/dlresearch/The-State-of-RWAfi_Q1-2026_report.pdf
From this week’s The Decentralised: DeFi's post-Kelp doom and gloom
A $293 million exploit of Kelp DAO and LayerZero has sent shockwaves through DeFi, but it is the industry's response as much as the hack itself that has people rattled. Arbitrum's 12-member security council froze $72 million in assets sitting on the chain, a near-unprecedented move that, while celebrated by some, prompted Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov to warn that Arbitrum can no longer credibly claim to be neutral infrastructure.
Aave lost its title as the largest DeFi protocol after deposits fell nearly 40% in seven days, and the mood on X has turned genuinely existential. As the Solana Foundation's Seraphim Czecker put it, it feels like DeFi's Lehman moment, with developers and investors questioning whether the risk profile of layered, composable finance is worth the tradeoffs at all.
More from this week's top stories:
→ Drift degen sues Circle, alleging stablecoin giant ‘did nothing’ during $295m hack
→ Ethereum's Wall Street cheerleaders see rise to $250,000, call Bitcoin and gold 'dead capital
→ A trader made $1.5m buying Anthropic ‘shares’ on Solana. Cashing out the win won’t be easy
From the land of DAOs:
→ VOTE: Morpho votes to authorise incentives on Tempo
→ PROPOSAL: Aave DAO debates pausing tokens to address Kelp DAO hack
→ PROPOSAL: Lido DAO debates proposal to increase transparency and consistency in node operator assessment
📰 Get The Decentralised delivered to your inbox every week.
Fact: Llamas are amazing conversationalists, and they love talking with CT's best, brightest, and most absurd. And we hope you enjoy our latest edition of Llama Talks!
Wazz has been in crypto since the Mt. Gox and Silk Road days. Over the years, they developed strong opinions on the industry that resonated with a large audience, which is how they ended up on CT and never left.
We spoke with Wazz about the memecoin machine, why the L2 game is essentially over, and their increasingly complicated relationship with Bitcoin.
Testing can only prove that bugs exist. Formal verification is the only way to guarantee code is truly bug-free.
CertiK CEO Ronghui Gu tells DLR why investors are demanding formal proofs, and why AI-generated smart contracts are making that more urgent in this Paris Blockchain Week interview.
Most DeFi vaults are still optimising for the wrong thing.
APY is the output. Risk management is the product.
Sentora's VP of Research Juan Manuel Pellicer on why the next era of vaults will be won by risk-aware automation and AI-assisted curation.
From this week’s The Decentralised: 'Aave will win'?
Three of Aave DAO's longest-serving service providers have announced their departures from the collective, citing what they describe as a growing concentration of power around Aave Labs, the company run by protocol founder Stani Kulechov. The exits follow a landmark funding vote that will see the DAO provide Aave Labs with $25 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens, in exchange for the firm routing 100% of revenue from Aave-branded products back to the DAO treasury.
Aave Chan Initiative founder Marc Zeller, one of the most prominent critics, argued that Aave Labs' funding request failed to meet the transparency standards expected of other service providers, and accused Labs employees of using their voting power to influence the outcome. Kulechov's response has done little to ease tensions. His post declaring "Aave will win" called for a "zero-bureaucracy" approach with "zero room for friction," a framing that sits uneasily with the open deliberation that DAO governance is supposed to embody.
More from this week's top stories:
→ Roman Storm defends Tornado Cash operation as judge weighs acquittal
→ A hacker created $1.2bn of counterfeit crypto. They only sold it for $237,000
→ Ethereum is abandoning layer 2s. Arbitrum’s creator still sees a bright future ahead
From the land of DAOs:
→ VOTE: Aave DAO to decide if it will axe Aave V3 on Scroll blockchain
→ VOTE: Sky DAO votes to launch new cross-chain bridge for Avalanche blockchain
→ VOTE: Across DAO greenlights transition from DAO to US-based C corporation
[FEATURE]
Worried about how quantum computing might affect the blockchain? Worry no more: Octra, an L1 blockchain native to Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) represents the next stage of cryptography.
Find out more about Octra and their token sale via Uniswap CCA.
📰 Get The Decentralised delivered to your inbox every week.
Another week, another Llama Talks! 🦙💬
This time, we sat down with Hoeem, the pseudonymous pirate, crypto trader, AI researcher, and creator behind the Seven C newsletter. Hoeem is spearheading AI fluency for the masses, having called it “digital leverage” and making it his mission to help people turn increasing screen time into cash flow using modern workflows and onchain intelligence.
We got into all of it: smart money tracking, AI opsec, why crypto is the only financial rail that makes sense for autonomous agents, and what it means to be AI fluent in 2025.
Every blockchain and cloud system today exposes data during computation. It has to be decrypted to be processed.
Octra is building the infrastructure to fix that via four distinct layers:
→ The Octra L1 network
→ Circles (Isolated Execution Environments)
→ A Decentralised Storage Network
→ The Octra Protocol
And the team has opened the OCT token sale to anyone via Uniswap Continuous Clearing Auction. Find out more in this Octra-fueled Spotlight.
Has DeFi earned mainstream trust yet?
Defi.com CEO Neil May says no, and his team has spent several years building the fix: a single DeFi ID, crosschain wallet unification, and privacy-preserving compliance in one layer.
More in this EthCC interview.
Forget scanning your eyeballs. Verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions lets you derive a key from a biometric without revealing the underlying data.
At EthCC, Human.tech cofounder Shady El Damaty tells us how VOPRF can be the backbone of trustless proof-of-personhood.
Japan's regulatory clarity is becoming a competitive advantage in enterprise blockchain.
Startale Group CEO Sota Watanabe sat down with us to discuss vertical integration, the JPYSC and USDSC stablecoin pair, and building compliant onchain infrastructure.
Full interview here.
A wallet tied to one of crypto’s most notorious hackers is laundering funds again
Читать полностью…
From this week’s The Decentralised: $300M pledged as DeFi responds to Kelp DAO breach
An impromptu recovery fund called DeFi United has raised more than $302 million to cover losses from the Kelp DAO hack, with Arbitrum DAO, Mantle, and Consensys each pledging at least 30,000 Ether, and Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov contributing 5,000 Ether of his own. Even parties largely unaffected by the exploit have joined in, with the Solana Foundation and Tron founder Justin Sun both announcing plans to deposit stablecoins into Aave to help stabilise its lending markets.
Not everyone is cheering. Euler Labs' former CEO Michael Bentley called it "good marketing," noting that DeFi United has a nicer ring to it than bailout. Inside Aave's own governance forum, some members are pushing back on a proposal to contribute 25,000 Ether from the DAO treasury, arguing the funds should not flow without first requiring systemic reforms to prevent the same failure from happening again.
More from this week's top stories:
→ Crypto’s biggest selling point is responsible for $8.5bn in losses. But it can be made safe
→ How GoDark targets $100m in daily trading through its new crypto dark pool
→ ‘I suspected I was being socially engineered.’ Why crypto’s hacking epidemic is getting even worse
From the land of DAOs:
→ VOTE: Lido DAO votes to contribute 2,500 Ether to DeFi United Recovery fund
→ VOTE: Aave DAO votes to contribute 25,000 Ether to DeFi United
→ VOTE: Aave DAO votes to formalise buyback pause
LLAMA FEATURE:
The State of RWAFi Q1 2026 Report is here.
Developed in collaboration with DefiLlama, this report breaks down tokenised commodities, equities, real estate & alternative finance.
📰 Get The Decentralised delivered to your inbox every week.
What's the current state of RWAfi? tokenised ≠ used.
Nearly $30 billion dollars. That's the amount of real-world assets tokenised onchain. Yet only $1.9 billion is being put to work.
So where's the disconnect? This is one of the topics we explored in our latest report with DefiLlama 🦙
Looking at utilisation alone misses something. For instance, tokenised gold should behave like gold; most holders want exposure, not yield. The low utilisation reflects the asset, not a failure of the market.
The State of RWAfi report points to three blockers keeping assets idle:
1) Tokens represent claims through legal wrappers and not direct ownership, which limits how freely they can move into DeFi.
2) Liquidity is fragmented across issuers, chains, and venues, making it harder for lending protocols to integrate them.
3) Regulation varies by jurisdiction, so what you can do with an asset onchain depends heavily on where you are.
The assets that have cracked it so far (private credit, gold) share one thing: their economic function maps naturally onto DeFi use cases like collateral and yield.
The ones still sitting idle mostly haven't found that fit yet.
We went deep on this across four asset classes, looking at what's being used, how it's being used, and what blockers are slowing progress.
🌐 Everything you need to know is in The State of RWAfi Q1 2026.
95% of EU crypto derivatives volume was offshore. Until now.
After OKX announced MiCA-regulated X-Perps at Paris Blockchain Week, we spoke to OKX Europe CEO Erald Ghoos about bringing perps volume back onshore and the future of regulated trading in the EU.
More in this interview.
"Users who take the risk of holding a stablecoin deserve a share of the returns. Otherwise the system mirrors a traditional bank."
At Paris Blockchain Week, we spoke with Usual Money's Pierre Person about who stablecoins really work for and how he's changing it.
MiCA gave Europe a framework. But practical adoption still isn't harmonised across the EU.
OpenPayd CEO Iana Dimitrova spoke to us about regulation, stablecoins, and the real friction points in fiat-to-digital infrastructure during Paris Blockchain Week.
"Hey LlamaAI: Zachxbt just hit 1 million followers on X. Plot a historical chart of projects that were called out by Zach as being malicious, and focus on the effect on project TVL after being flagged."
The following responses were generated by DefiLlama's LlamaAI.
🦙🤖🦙🤖🦙🤖🦙🤖🦙🤖🦙🤖
Try LlamaAI out for yourself:
https://defillama.com/ai
Privacy in Web3 isn't one problem. It's three different ones with three different answers.
We sat down with privacy experts from Miden, Octra, and Arcium to map where ZK, FHE, and MPC win, where they strain, and what a future private web requires.
This one gets technical, but in the best way. How data gets processed privately will define the future of the Web3 and beyond, and these three are working on it from the frontlines.
"Hey LlamaAI, chart the TVL growth of Aave V3 vs V4 and give me a projection of future V4 growth."
Sure, there's a 1400x difference in scale. But let's see what LlamaAI thinks about V4's future growth.
How, you ask? One simple prompt. Well, two, because we also asked for V4 fee and revenue projections. And Llama AI delivered.
0G published the DiLoCoX decentralised training paper in June 2025. Nvidia's CEO validated the category nine months later.
In this EthCC interview, 0G Labs VP Jake Salerno discusses being first to market on verified decentralised AI and what's coming next.
Trust is the bottleneck for agentic finance. Data, specifically.
At ETHCC, Space & Time CMO Catherine Daly explains how Proof of SQL offers cryptographic assurance that the data an agent acts on is untampered from the moment it enters the system.
More in this interview.
For the first time, fully expressive smart contracts run directly on Bitcoin L1. No bridging, no wrapped tokens, no voodoo.
OP_NET introduces a complete DeFi stack for the most liquid asset in crypto, powered by the SlowFi thesis.
From this week’s The Decentralised: Big DAO win
Alabama and West Virginia last week joined Wyoming in signing versions of the Decentralised Unincorporated Nonprofit Organization Act into law, giving DAOs legal recognition across three US states. The move allows these organisations to contract with businesses, appear in court and limit personal liability for participants, while maintaining their decentralised structure.
For years, the absence of legal status forced protocols to set up foundations as neutral proxies, a workaround that a16z crypto's Miles Jennings and Aiden Slavin argue bred opacity, inefficiency and the kind of internal squabbling that has repeatedly eroded community trust. With three states now on board, they say the fiction of the foundation model is no longer necessary.
More from this week's top stories:
→ North Korea behind $286m Drift Protocol hack, investigators say
→ How Ethereum’s biggest conference exposes crypto’s identity crisis
→ World Liberty Financial gets ‘D’ grade from new crypto risk rating firm
From the land of DAOs:
→ VOTE: Lido DAO weighs in on plan to use 10,000 stETH to buy back LDO token
→ ANNOUNCEMENT: Aave DAO adviser Chaos Labs leaves over risk ‘misalignment’
→ VOTE: Arbitrum DAO mulls improvements to its audit programme
[LLAMAFEATURE]
DefiLlama just launched Investor Relations dashboards, a new product for evaluating onchain businesses using verified public information.
Want an IR dashboard for your project? Reach out to sales@defillama.com
📰 Get The Decentralised delivered to your inbox every week.
White House: Clarity Act allowing stablecoin yield won’t harm banks
Читать полностью…