The Ethereum Foundation has appointed Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik as co-leads of its protocol cluster, following the departure of some of its prominent engineers.

 

“While Barnabé and Tim are moving on from the Ethereum Foundation soon, and Alex Stokes will be on sabbatical, the Protocol cluster, as it exists today, is in large part due to their work. Under their coordination, Protocol launched tracks and helped to ship Fusaka to mainnet in December 2025, introducing PeerDAS and raising the mainnet gas limit on the path to 200M and beyond,” the foundation wrote in a blog post.

 

“Tim, Barnabé, and Alex shaped Protocol in ways that will outlast their time as cluster leads. We are grateful, and we are looking forward to what each of them takes on next.”

 

What to Know About the New Co-Leads

Will Corcoran is a research coordinator within the protocol, with experience working on zkVM proving, post quantum consensus, and the Fast Confirmation Rule. He has also facilitated numerous community calls, breakout rooms, and in-person protocol events, giving him a deep understanding of how the protocol works.

 

Kev Wedderburn leads the zkEVM team in the protocol and has experience working at the intersection of research and engineering, while Fredrik leads the protocol’s security and has been deeply involved in cross-cluster work.

 

About the Protocol Cluster 

The protocol cluster, often called the protocol, is the core group within the Ethereum Foundation responsible for designing, researching, coordinating, and developing Ethereum's base layer, or L1, blockchain protocol. After its rebranding in 2025, it had one goal: to tackle Ethereum's biggest challenges.

 

To address these challenges, the protocol prioritizes three main areas: enhancing Ethereum's scalability, improving user experience, and strengthening the security and resilience of the Ethereum blockchain network.

 

The protocol also oversees several technical domains, including AllCoreDevs meetings, cryptography, prototyping, security, zkEVM, and peer-to-peer systems. It is currently working on Glamsterdam, the next major Ethereum L1 upgrade, which will introduce features such as enshrined proposer builder separation, known as ePBS under EIP 7732, and gas repricing to support higher gas limits.

 

The restructuring of the Ethereum protocol comes shortly after key figures in the foundation, Josh Stark, last month, and Tomasz K. Stańczak, more recently, left the protocol. Other developers within the foundation have also departed to join other Layer 1 blockchain projects such as Tempo.

 

 

JPMorgan Chase filed paperwork Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a new tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, marking the bank's second push into blockchain-based investment products and the latest signal that Wall Street is serious about putting traditional finance on-chain.

 

The proposed fund, called the JPMorgan OnChain Liquidity-Token Money Market Fund and carrying ticker JLTXX, would issue digital tokens on the Ethereum blockchain representing shares backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries, cash, and overnight repurchase agreements. The fund's underlying blockchain infrastructure would be operated by Kinexys Digital Assets, the bank's blockchain unit that was formerly known as Onyx.

 

Built for the GENIUS Act

What makes this filing a bit different from typical money-market launches is who it's designed for. JPMorgan has structured JLTXX specifically to satisfy reserve asset requirements under the GENIUS Act, the U.S. legislation aimed at bringing stablecoin issuers under a regulatory framework. In short, the fund is positioned as a yield-bearing reserve vehicle for stablecoin firms looking for compliant, on-chain Treasury exposure.

That's a strategically significant market. Stablecoin supply has surged past $303 billion as of May 2026, with a large chunk of that liquidity sitting idle in exchange wallets generating nothing. When a bank the size of JPMorgan launches a regulated, on-chain money market product, this changes the game for institutional stablecoin issuers.

 

BlackRock Moved First, Then JPMorgan Followed Days Later

Just days before JPMorgan's Tuesday filing, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager overseeing roughly $14 trillion, submitted its own pair of SEC filings tied to tokenized Treasury products. One of those filings outlined the BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, designed to hold cash and short-term Treasuries and issue what the firm is calling OnChain Shares. Another filing proposed adding an Ethereum-based tokenized share class to its existing $7 billion Select Treasury-Based Liquidity Fund, with BNY Mellon maintaining official ownership records on-chain using ERC-20 token standards.

 

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has been vocal about this for a while. He's argued publicly that blockchain-based settlement can compress transaction cycles, enable round-the-clock trading, and add transparency to capital markets. The firm is now acting on this, and at scale. BlackRock's existing BUIDL fund already manages more than $2.5 billion across eight blockchain networks including Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche, and is increasingly being used as collateral across crypto markets.

 

A Market That Has Tripled in a Year

The broader tokenized real-world asset sector has crossed $30 billion in total value, more than tripling over the past twelve months. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone represent $14 billion of that, with Ethereum holding over $8 billion of the total. These aren't little numbers anymore.

 

Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon have also announced tokenization initiatives in recent months. Just last week, JPMorgan's Kinexys platform joined Mastercard, Ripple, and Ondo Finance in completing the first cross-border, cross-bank redemption of a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, settling the transaction on the XRP Ledger in under five seconds. This is another huge step... it's one thing to file an SEC registration, quite another to actually run a live settlement across borders in the time it takes to read this sentence.

 

The Race Is On

For context on how quickly this space is evolving, a Boston Consulting Group and Ripple joint projection estimates the tokenized asset market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. Whether or not that number proves accurate, the direction is pretty clear. Major banks are not waiting for the market to come to them.

 

JPMorgan seeded its first tokenized fund, the OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY), with $100 million of its own capital after launching it through its $4 trillion asset management unit. JLTXX represents the bank's next step, this time aimed squarely at the emerging stablecoin compliance market rather than traditional qualified investors.

 

The filings from JPMorgan and BlackRock within days of each other are not a coincidence. Regulatory clarity, combined with the sheer scale of idle stablecoin liquidity looking for a compliant home, has created an opening. Wall Street is moving quickly to fill it, and the tokenization race is looking less like a crypto experiment and more like the next phase of institutional finance.

 

Stablecoin startup Boundary Labs is preparing to launch USBD, a “verifiable” institutional-grade stablecoin, following its most recent successful fundraising round.

 

The $2 million preseed funding round, which began last year, was led by Galaxy Ventures, with other investors, including First Block Capital and BlackWood, also participating in the round.

 

 

Following its recent fundraising success, the Boundary Labs team aims to create a stablecoin whose reserves are completely verifiable on-chain, including the stablecoin’s net asset value and protocol performance. This marks a sharp contrast with other stablecoins that depend on trust-based off-chain reporting and attestations.

 

“The Boundary protocol provides daily reporting on system state, including overcollateralization levels and real-time NAV calculations. USBD is engineered with explicit over-collateralization and delta neutral hedging to protect against market direction risk and volatility,” said Matthew Mezger, co-founder and CEO of Boundary Labs, about the USBD stablecoin.

 

Because trust is important for enhancing institutional adoption of USBD, especially for treasury management, collateral, and fiduciary use cases, Mezger said the team is building the entire USBD infrastructure with advanced smart contract code that moves the industry from monthly off-chain attestations to daily on-chain verification. By doing so, Boundary aims to transition from common trust-based stablecoin systems to a trustless one. 

 

“This shift provides the structural resilience and auditability required for safe, permissionless staking and institutional fiduciary use cases, effectively transforming stablecoins into robust financial infrastructure,” Mezger said.

 

Boundary Lab’s Yield-Generation Strategies

Unlike other yield-generating stablecoins, USBD will not be a yield-bearing stablecoin. Nevertheless, Boundary Labs will create sUSBD, a separate staked token that will enable institutional clients to earn yield from the protocol’s decentralized finance strategies.

 

The revenue generated by the protocol will be used to build treasury reserves, fund operations, and will also be distributed to sUSBD stakers through an on-chain allocation system. The reward system will be fully on-chain and available for users to track and audit.

 

To onboard early institutional clients, Boundary Labs is planning to launch a private placement campaign with the goal of reaching $100 million in total value locked (TVL). Both USBD and sUSBD will be launched on Ethereum.

 

 

South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Upbit, has partnered with the Optimism Foundation to build Giwa Chain, a new Ethereum-based Layer 2 blockchain network.

 

Giwa Chain, which will be built on Optimism’s open source OP Stack, will be the first of its kind built on the self-managed tier of Optimism’s OP Enterprise and stems from the growing need for exchanges to build their own blockchains.

 

 

While crypto exchanges using shared chains are not inherently problematic, issues arise as usage increases, making it difficult for these networks to handle the growing workloads of exchanges, including institutional transaction volumes, compliance requirements, and fee economics, which often compound as an exchange scales. For a global exchange like Upbit, which serves more than 13 million users and ranks among the top exchanges by spot trading volume, owning and managing its own blockchain is critical for performance and scalability.

 

By partnering with Optimism to build a self-managed chain, Upbit allows Optimism to manage key technical aspects of the chain’s infrastructure, including tooling and engineering support, while still retaining sovereignty over the chain’s control and overseeing key functions such as the primary sequencer, chain configuration, and operational authority.

 

“Operating our own Giwa Chain is a strategic move for Upbit. Our goal is to provide institutional and retail users with a level of performance and compliance consistent with our existing platform,” said Minseok Jung, Chief Operating Officer of Dunamu Inc.

 

“The Optimism Foundation’s self-managed tier provides a suitable framework, allowing us to maintain operational control while building on established infrastructure. This approach aligns with our requirements for scalability and oversight.”

 

Giwa Chain is currently live on testnet, with mainnet deployment to follow. Dunamu, the parent company of Upbit, has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Optimism Foundation on May 4, outlining key aspects of Giwa Chain, including its architecture reviews, performance benchmarking, and security audits.

 

Crypto Exchanges Building Their Own Chains

There has been an increase in the number of cryptocurrency exchanges building their own layer 2 blockchains, with many doing so for improved infrastructural performance and to gain control over fees, transaction sequencing, user experience, and compliance.

 

The OP Stack has been instrumental in this development, with the Optimism Foundation stating that its OP Stack currently houses over 32 layer 2 blockchain networks, including Binance’s opBNB chain, Kraken’s Ink chain, Gate.io’s Gate Layer, and OKX’s X Layer.

 

 

Wasabi Protocol, a multichain decentralized perpetual futures trading platform, was hit by an exploit that led to the loss of more than $5 million across several chains.

 

The exploit, according to blockchain security company PeckShield, was carried out across multiple chains, including Base, Berachain, Blast, and Ethereum, which is its main deployment chain.

 

The incident was also flagged by blockchain security firms CertiK and Blockaid, with both firms attributing the cause of the hack to a compromise of the Wasabi deployer wallet, which allowed the attacker to gain privileged admin access and subsequently drain funds from the protocol.

 

“The Wasabi deployer externally owned account was used to grant admin role access to an attacker-controlled helper contract, which then upgraded the perpetual vaults and LongPool to a malicious implementation that drained balances,” Blockaid wrote in a post on X.

 

“All Wasabi and Spicy liquidity provider share tokens minted by these vaults should be treated as compromised. The underlying assets backing them have been drained or are at risk while the Wasabi deployer key remains active. End users holding these tokens are showing book value, but the redemption value is zero,” the firm added, while recommending the immediate flagging and revocation of these tokens.

 

Blockchain security firm Cyvers also provided further details on how the incident occurred. According to Cyvers, a crypto wallet funded through Tornado Cash was used to deploy a malicious contract on Wasabi Protocol across the Base and Ethereum chains.

 

As a result of this malicious contract deployment, about $4.5 million in various crypto assets, including WETH, USDC, BTC, VIRTUAL, and cbBTC, as well as memecoins such as PEPE, MOG, and REKT, were stolen. The funds were later consolidated into Ether and distributed across multiple wallet addresses outside the protocol.

 

Wasabi Protocol Responds

Following the disclosure of the exploit by security teams, the Wasabi team, in a post on X, stated that they were aware of the breach and were actively investigating the incident alongside security experts, notably Security Alliance and Blockaid.

 

The team also warned against interacting with a list of compromised vaults and EVM positions across Base, Blast, and Berachain, while stating that users whose vaults were not among the compromised list could proceed with withdrawals at any time.

 

The Wasabi exploit closed the month of April, which recorded some of the largest crypto exploits, including those involving Drift Protocol and KelpDAO, which led to losses of $285 million and $293 million, respectively.

 

 

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX has launched Agent Payments Protocol (APP), a new payment protocol that allows AI agents to perform commercial activities.

 

The new payment protocol, according to OKX, is an open standard that defines how AI agents communicate and negotiate, pay for services, and pay each other. It also, for the first time, allows AI agents to move beyond simple payments and into full-scale commerce.

 

 

“In the past few months, AI agents moved from answering questions to running workflows, managing business processes, and acting autonomously on behalf of users,” OKX wrote in a blog post. “The bottleneck shifted from intelligence to commerce - not just paying, but the full cycle of doing business: quoting, negotiating, escrowing funds, metering usage, settling, and resolving disputes.”

 

This existing problem among AI agents is what OKX aims to solve with its new Agent Payments Protocol (APP), allowing agents not only to manage single payment requests but also to manage payment requests across multiple levels.

 

Inside the Agent Payment Protocol

The agent payment protocol (APP) from OKX is an open standard designed to work across all chains, especially the Solana and Ethereum blockchains.

 

APP unlocks new capabilities for AI agents, making it possible for these agents to operate and communicate autonomously across the full commerce lifecycle, pay each other through agent-to-agent payments, and also allowing AI agents to perform upfront and top-up payments, including deductions.

 

At its implementation layer is the payment software development kit (SDK) that makes it possible for developers to accept and make agent payments with just a few lines of code. According to the blog announcement, the agent payment protocol supports a wide variety of payments, including one-time payments, batch payments, pay-as-you-go, and escrow payments, which OKX says is coming soon.

 

Embedded within the payment protocol is the OKX self-custodial agentic wallet, which supports over 20 blockchains. Since the wallet is secured by means of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), a hardware-based security environment, the wallet’s private keys and sensitive operations are kept highly secure.

 

Despite its early launch, the OKX agent payment protocol is currently supported by major cloud infrastructure firms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alibaba Cloud, as well as blockchain companies such as Uniswap, Paxos, MoonPay, Zerion, and Nansen.

 

With the launch of its payment protocol, OKX joins companies such as Coinbase, Stripe, and OpenAI, which have already launched their payment protocols, namely x402, Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), respectively.

 

 

MetaMask cofounder Dan Finlay has left Consensys after spending about a decade working with the self-custodial wallet firm.

 

Finlay announced his departure from Consensys in a Thursday post on X, citing burnout and the need to spend more time with his family. He also wished the Consensys team well, saying the team has an amazing road ahead of them.

 

 

Since joining Consensys in 2016, Dan Finlay, alongside cofounder Aaron Davis, worked hand in hand on the development of MetaMask, Consensys’s self-custodial wallet. Finlay played an instrumental role in shaping MetaMask, transforming it from a browser-based Ethereum wallet into one of the mainstream crypto wallets, enabling access to decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and many other on-chain services.

 

Finlay was also key in the design and creation of some of MetaMask’s technical features, including Snaps, a MetaMask feature that allows third-party developers to safely extend MetaMask’s capabilities. Some of the capabilities added through Snaps include the ability to explore other blockchains such as Bitcoin, Solana, and Cosmos, as well as improved security features and the ability to receive warnings about malicious transactions occurring within a MetaMask wallet.

 

On his last day at Consensys, Finlay highlighted the launch of Advanced Permissions, ERC-7715, stating that he was over the moon regarding its launch. Advanced Permissions is a feature that allows decentralized applications to request pre-approved permissions from a MetaMask user to execute transactions on their behalf.

 

With this Advanced Permissions ERC-7715 feature, a user can activate or grant a particular request in their MetaMask wallet without having to manually approve it repeatedly.

 

Voluntary Exits Not Uncommon Among Crypto Founders

Like Dan Finlay, it is not uncommon to see crypto founders voluntarily step away from work to focus on other important aspects of life, especially their families.

 

On the same day Finlay announced his exit from ConsenSys, Bitcoin advocate and podcaster Preston Pysh announced that he was stepping away from public work and social media to focus on his wife and children.

 

Earlier this month, Ethereum researcher Josh Stark announced his departure from the Ethereum Foundation after spending five years there. According to an X post, Stark said he was stepping away from work to focus more on his family and friends.

 

 

The Aave DAO is being asked to commit 25,000 ETH from its treasury to help close a massive funding gap left behind by the April 18 exploit of Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge, a vulnerability that drained roughly $292 million from one of DeFi's most widely-used liquid restaking products. The proposal, put forward Thursday by Aave service provider TokenLogic, would make Aave the single largest contributor to a broader coalition effort dubbed "DeFi United", a coordinated response involving some of the sector's biggest names.

 

The attack exploited a configuration flaw in Kelp's LayerZero bridge adapter, which was running a single-verifier setup. That weakness let the attacker mint 152,577 rsETH tokens that had no actual ETH backing, which were then used as collateral on Aave to borrow approximately $190 million in legitimate assets. The fallout was severe. More than $10 billion in net withdrawals hit Aave in the days following the breach, and the protocol's affected V3 deployments on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Mantle were left sitting on bad debt that, by various estimates, lands somewhere between $123 million and $230 million, depending on how recoveries play out.

 

The Funding Gap and How It Gets Closed

At the prevailing rsETH-to-ETH ratio of 1.0696, the original shortfall came out to roughly 163,183 ETH. Since then, a series of coordinated actions have chipped away at the hole. Kelp recovered and froze tokens representing approximately 43,168 ETH in value. The Arbitrum Security Council stepped in to freeze 30,766 ETH that the attacker was still holding on that network, following input from law enforcement. Liquidating the hacker's remaining positions across Aave and Compound is expected to recover a further 14,168 ETH. That gets you to a shortfall of around 75,081 ETH, still a very large number.

 

To plug what remains, the DeFi United coalition has assembled a funding stack that combines direct donations, a credit facility, and the requested Aave treasury contribution. Public contributors including EtherFi, Lido, Ethena, Ink Foundation, BGD Labs, and several individual ecosystem participants have pledged a combined 14,570 ETH so far, with more conversations reportedly in progress. Mantle has proposed a credit facility of up to 30,000 ETH, structured with interest at Lido's rate plus 1% and a repayment term of up to 36 months. Bybit co-founder Ben Zhou said the exchange, as Mantle's largest stakeholder, would vote yes on the facility, drawing a parallel to industry support Bybit received after its own security incident. Together, those streams narrow the residual gap to approximately 30,000 ETH. The Aave treasury request covers most of that.

 

 

A Complex Recovery With Real Execution Risk

What makes this more complicated than a straightforward treasury disbursement is the mechanics of actually executing the recovery. The coalition needs to place the full 120,015 ETH into the LayerZero lockbox to restore rsETH's backing. But a significant chunk of the expected recoveries, roughly 44,787 ETH worth, are not yet liquid. They depend on the Arbitrum Security Council releasing frozen funds, and on successfully liquidating the attacker's positions on Aave and Compound. Those processes could stretch out over weeks.

 

To bridge that timing gap, the coalition is arranging a separate tranche of short-duration loans from additional ecosystem partners. The proposal also includes a notable authorization: Aave Labs would be permitted to pledge DAO assets and future protocol revenue as collateral to secure these funding arrangements. That is a significant move, and the TokenLogic proposal is candid about the risks involved, noting the recovery depends on actions outside the coalition's control, including Kelp reopening withdrawals, LayerZero reopening its bridge, and the Security Council completing its process. "This is a call to arms," the proposal states. "The path there is not risk-free."

 

What the Industry Is Saying

Aave founder Stani Kulechov has already put skin in the game, pledging 5,000 ETH personally stating that "Aave is my life's work and we're working nonstop to find the best possible outcome for users.". The response has drawn both measured optimism and pointed skepticism from across the ecosystem. Matthew Pinnock, COO at Altura DeFi, told Decrypt the effort signals that DeFi is "moving beyond isolated protocols to a more coordinated financial system," while also emphasizing that "socialised recovery methods" need to be paired with clear accountability frameworks. Georgii Verbitskii, founder of yield platform TYMIO, was more cautious, telling the publication that without concrete details on the initiative's structure, "it's difficult to expect any meaningful structural shift in DeFi." He also predicted the incident would push users and protocols toward more conservative, base-layer configurations, likely reducing appetite for wrapped products and liquid staking derivatives.

 

 

On the constructive side, Sergey Kravtsov, CEO of Papaya Finance, described the coordinated effort as "an emergent immune response of a financial system that is actually decentralized", competing protocols stepping in because letting bad debt cascade, as he put it, "would have hurt everyone."

 

Governance Process Still Underway

The proposal is currently in the community feedback phase on Aave's governance forum. If it reaches consensus, it moves to a Snapshot vote before heading to an on-chain AIP. Timing matters here. The DeFi United coalition has flagged that ETH price appreciation could make the dollar-denominated bad debt worse by the hour if governance moves slowly. A separate proposal to pause AAVE buybacks has also been floated, suggesting the DAO is bracing for a period of concentrated capital deployment.

 

For Aave, this is partly precedent-following. After the 2022 CRV short-squeeze incident left the DAO with roughly $1.9 million in bad debt, it chose to cover the shortfall rather than socialize losses among suppliers. The current situation is orders of magnitude larger, but the underlying posture is the same: the Aave DAO balance sheet is being positioned as a backstop for systemic DeFi events, at least when the protocol itself is directly exposed. Personally, it is amazing to see the DeFi community rally behind this endeavor in wake of such a monumental exploit.

 

Tokenized stocks have crossed the $1 billion market cap marking a major turning point for RWAs on-chain. Public equities drove the surge, with platforms like Ondo Global Markets and xStocks leading the charge, while tokenized private equities on Solana continue to gain early traction and expand rapidly.

 

The rise of tokenized stocks brings several benefits to investors as they enable 24/7 global trading without the traditional T+2 settlement delays, allowing markets to operate continuously rather than shutting down after regular hours. Fractional ownership lowers the barrier for smaller investors to gain exposure to stocks and private investments. Assets can be used directly as collateral in DeFi protocols, creating new opportunities for yield generation and liquidity with instant settlement that reduces counterparty risk and improves capital efficiency. 

 

Ondo Finance and xStocks together account for over 90% of the tokenized stock market cap. Ondo leads at $741.1M (heavily on Ethereum at $440.1M and BNB Chain at $283.2M), followed by xStocks at $315.2M (dominant on Solana with $258.4M and reach through CEXs like Kraken and Bybit). The rest includes Superstate, Robinhood on Arbitrum, Dinari, and PreStocks’ $17.8M in tokenized private equities. Launched in June 2025, xStocks has already facilitated over $3.5 billion in on-chain transaction volume and $25 billion in total trading volume, tokenizing major assets like SPYx, QQQx, NVDAx, and TSLAx. 

 

Another interesting segment is tokenized pre-IPO stocks that bring exposure to private companies like Anthropic directly onto Solana via platforms such as PreStocks. These tokens are created through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that hold shares or exposure acquired on secondary markets. PreStocks then issues 1:1 backed SPL tokens on Solana that track the company's implied valuation which lets holders get price exposure with 24/7 trading on DEXes like Jupiter. The tokenized pre-IPO sector has grown roughly 200% year-to-date, with Anthropic leading the surge. 

However, Ethereum is still the clear leader when it comes to bringing stocks on-chain, as it’s become the primary home for major financial moves as the value of funds moving onto Ethereum has grown 20x since the start of 2024, thanks to massive names like BlackRock and Fidelity launching their own products there. This dominance extends across other major real-world asset categories as well, with the network maintaining a strong position in tokenized commodities, funds, and stablecoins.

 

 

Nasdaq has secured SEC approval to trade tokenized Russell 1000 stocks and major index ETFs on the same order book as their traditional counterparts, while the NYSE is building a 24/7 on-chain venue with instant settlement and stablecoin funding in partnership with Securitize and the DTCC’s tokenization infrastructure. Firms like Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and Apollo are rolling out tokenized money market funds, credit strategies, and other securities across networks that reache beyond Ethereum and Solana to include chains like Polygon, Avalanche, Base, Aptos, and Stellar, reflecting a multi-chain strategy to plug directly into different DeFi ecosystems. 

 

Ondo Global Markets, now one of the main issuers of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, blocks U.S. users and anyone trading from inside the country, and pushes those restrictions through partners like MetaMask, Binance Wallet, and centralized exchanges that list its products. Kraken’s xStocks do the same, limiting access to non U.S. clients in a set list of jurisdictions and explicitly excluding residents of the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Australia. On Solana, the pre-IPO names led by PreStocks let people trade tokens linked to companies like Anthropic, but they sit in a gray zone because they’re SPV based claims with no audited, public proof of backing, wide gaps between implied token prices and private round valuations, thin liquidity, and no clear path for U.S. retail to participate. So while Binance, OKX, Kraken, and others rush to put tokenized stocks in front of millions of users, most of the real volume is still offshore, and U.S. investors are mostly stuck watching from the sidelines until policy catches up.

 

 

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has rolled out crypto-backed loans for users in the United Kingdom, allowing users to borrow USDC against Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Coinbase Wrapped Staked Ether (cbETH) holdings.

 

The launch, announced this Monday, is part of Coinbase’s overall efforts to build a leading financial app in the UK that allows users to invest, manage, and grow their money.

 

 

The loans will be issued through Morpho, a decentralized finance lending protocol on Base, and according to Coinbase, users will be able to borrow up to $5 million in USDC, depending on the amount of Bitcoin and other eligible assets they hold as collateral. Coinbase says the interest rates will vary, depending on market conditions on Base, and that these rates will be set by Morpho.

 

It is also important to note that while there is no fixed repayment schedule for the borrowed loans, borrowers face liquidation risk if the loan-to-value ratio exceeds specific thresholds that will be set by Coinbase.

 

The crypto-backed loans can be accessed through the Coinbase app, where users can choose the amount of USDC they want to borrow and their preferred collateral asset. Once this is done, the pledged collateral will be transferred on-chain to a Morpho smart contract, and the USDC loans will be automatically disbursed to the user’s Coinbase account, which can then be converted to British pounds (GBP).

 

Coinbase Expands Its Crypto Efforts

Coinbase is one of the cryptocurrency exchanges leading development at the intersection of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

 

In an X post last weekend, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the exchange was testing and integrating two AI agents into Slack and email. These AI agents will serve as virtual workers, able to perform on-chain actions such as holding funds, spending and sending money, trading, and earning yield.

 

This recent development comes shortly after Coinbase launched the x402 Foundation, designed to enhance the use of its x402 protocol as a standard payment protocol for internet native payments.

 

To achieve its “Everything Exchange” goal, Coinbase made a number of significant acquisitions last year, including the acquisition of the Deribit exchange and Echo. The exchange has also rolled out stock and ETF trading in-app for all eligible users, with its most recent rollout in Canada.

 

 

AllUnity, a regulated European stablecoin issuer, is bringing EURAU, its Markets in Crypto-Assets compliant stablecoin, to major decentralized exchanges.

 

The announcement, made recently by the issuer, will see the introduction of AllUnity’s EURAU stablecoin in two trading pairs across multiple chains. These include the EURAU/USDT pair on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains via Uniswap and Raydium, as well as the EURAU/USDT0 trading pair on the Tempo blockchain via Uniswap.

 

To support this expansion initiative, Flowdesk, a regulated digital asset trading firm, will serve as the main liquidity provider for the EURAU rollout across the different decentralized exchanges. This move is expected to improve EURAU’s integration and utility in decentralized finance, enabling traders to swap between EURAU and USDT with reduced slippage.

 

According to Rupertus Rothenhäuser, Chief Commercial Officer at AllUnity, the expansion represents a key step toward building a robust and accessible euro liquidity layer. He added that it will enable seamless euro to dollar trading and empower institutions and liquidity providers to participate in deep and efficient markets.

 

Dollar-pegged stablecoins continue to dominate

Stablecoins tied to the U.S. dollar continue to maintain the largest share of the more than $320 billion stablecoin market cap. According to a report, USD pegged stablecoins make up about 99 percent of the total global stablecoin supply, with Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC being the largest by market cap.

 

Euro pegged stablecoins account for a small share of the global supply, with a market cap of about €450 million to approximately $1 billion, representing less than 0.3 percent of the total.

 

Despite remaining a niche segment of the crypto market, euro pegged stablecoins have seen some institutional adoption in recent months. In February this year, Société Générale, one of Europe’s largest banks, expanded its euro pegged EURCV stablecoin to the XRP Ledger and the Stellar blockchain.

 

In December last year, about twelve of Europe’s largest banks, including ING, UniCredit, BNP Paribas, and CaixaBank, formed Qivalis, a joint consortium to launch a euro pegged stablecoin. The consortium has engaged in regulatory dialogue with the Dutch National Bank and has entered advanced talks with cryptocurrency exchanges regarding the launch, which is expected this quarter. 

 

 

A carefully planned attack on Kelp DAO's cross-chain bridge drained 116,500 rsETH, worth roughly $292 million, from the liquid restaking protocol on Saturday, instantly becoming the largest DeFi exploit of 2026. The fallout spread almost immediately, pulling in Aave, SparkLend, Fluid and Lido before Kelp's own emergency systems could fully catch up.

 

The exploit was first flagged by on-chain investigator ZachXBT at around 2:52 PM ET, with six attacker wallets identified. Those wallets, it turned out, had been pre-funded via Tornado Cash, the coin-mixing service widely used to obscure transaction origins. That kind of preparation doesn't happen overnight, and points to a deliberate, well-resourced operation that had studied Kelp's architecture before making its move.

 

How the Attack Worked

At 17:35 UTC, an attacker-controlled wallet called the lzReceive function on LayerZero's EndpointV2 contract. LayerZero is the cross-chain messaging infrastructure that Kelp relied on to move rsETH between networks. By spoofing a valid instruction from another chain, the attacker tricked the bridge's verification logic into releasing 116,500 rsETH directly to an address they controlled. It was a clean hit. Kelp's emergency multisig paused core contracts 46 minutes later, at 18:21 UTC. Two follow-up attempts at 18:26 and 18:28 UTC were blocked, each carrying the same LayerZero packet aimed at pulling another 40,000 rsETH worth roughly $100 million. The pause held.

 

The bridge that was drained served as the reserve backing wrapped versions of rsETH deployed across more than 20 networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Linea, Blast, Mantle and Scroll. With those reserves gone, holders of rsETH on layer 2s are now left wondering what exactly their tokens are worth. That uncertainty creates a dangerous feedback loop: panic redemptions on layer 2 networks pressure the unaffected Ethereum-side supply, which in turn could force Kelp to unwind underlying EigenLayer restaking positions to honor withdrawals.

 

The Contagion Moves Fast

The stolen rsETH didn't just sit in an attacker's wallet. The second phase of the attack played out on Aave V3, where the attacker deposited the drained rsETH as collateral and borrowed a substantial volume of Wrapped Ether against it. Because the rsETH was no longer backed by anything real at that point, the resulting debt positions are effectively unliquidatable. Aave's WETH reserve is now carrying bad debt it cannot recover through normal liquidation mechanisms. Some estimates put the bad debt exposure on Aave V3 at close to $177 million.

 

Aave moved quickly, freezing rsETH markets on both V3 and V4 within hours. Founder Stani Kulechov clarified on X that Aave's own contracts had not been compromised and that the freeze was precautionary while the situation was assessed. The AAVE token still dropped about 10% on the news, a reflection of how exposed the protocol's broader ecosystem appeared even if its core code was clean. SparkLend and Fluid followed with their own rsETH market freezes.

 

Lido Finance paused additional deposits into its earnETH product, which carries rsETH exposure, while being careful to note that stETH and wstETH remain unaffected. Ethena, the stablecoin issuer, took its own precautionary step, temporarily shutting down its LayerZero OFT bridges from Ethereum mainnet for roughly six hours despite having no direct rsETH exposure and maintaining collateralization above 101%. Upshift, which runs non-custodial yield vaults, paused deposits and withdrawals to its High Growth ETH and Kelp Gain vaults, though its USDC and AUSD products had no rsETH exposure.

 

Kelp's Response, and Its History

Kelp, which operates under the KernelDAO umbrella, posted its first public acknowledgment on X at 20:10 UTC, nearly three hours after the drain. The team said it was investigating the suspicious cross-chain activity with LayerZero, Unichain, its auditors and external security specialists. It has not yet disclosed how the attacker bypassed the bridge's validation logic or what the path to recovery looks like for rsETH holders across layer 2 networks.

 

It isn't Kelp's first serious incident. Back in April 2025, a bug in its fee contract caused excess rsETH minting and triggered a temporary pause, though that event did not result in direct user losses. This time the damage is far more severe and far more public.

 

 

The Kelp DAO exploit overtakes the Drift Protocol hack from April 1, 2026, where attackers drained roughly $295 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange in a targeted administrative breach, as 2026's largest DeFi loss. The pattern is hard to ignore. DeFi attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated, and as Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet noted earlier this month, AI tools are now actively lowering the cost and complexity of carrying out these attacks.

 

What the Kelp incident also lays bare is a structural risk baked into DeFi's composability model. Liquid restaking tokens like rsETH were whitelisted as collateral on major lending protocols because they held real value and generated real yield. The assumption underlying all of that was that the token would remain fully backed. When that assumption collapsed on Saturday afternoon, there was no circuit breaker, no committee vote and no grace period. The losses cascaded instantly across protocols that had nothing to do with the original exploit. That's the architecture working exactly as designed, and also its greatest vulnerability.