Fredrik Haga, CEO and co-founder of crypto analytics firm Dune, has revealed the firm’s plan to lay off a quarter, or 25%, of its staff, citing AI investments as the reason for this decision.

 

 

“We’re restructuring Dune to sharpen our focus around the core data products thousands of customers across the crypto industry rely on. That unfortunately means we’ve let 25% of the team go this week. These are exceptional people I can wholeheartedly recommend. Ping me if you’re hiring top crypto talent,” Haga wrote in a post on X.

 

The decision to lay off some of its staff, according to Haga, is driven by the firm’s plan to accelerate more quickly with AI, with Dune positioning itself as the only firm to have built an end to end stack for crypto data. Its stack performs key roles in data ingestion, quality assurance, storage, cleaning, normalizing, and querying.

 

“With Dune MCP, teams and agents can now build dashboards and workflows without needing to know anything about SQL or data infrastructure and associated costs,” Haga said. Dune Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open protocol that allows AI tools to connect to external data sources in a structured way. It automates much of the manual work associated with data use.

 

By cutting its workforce, Dune aims to double down on AI and its end to end crypto data stack, including its model context protocol, which is already being used by some of the industry’s biggest players such as Polygon Labs, 1inch, Base, OP Labs, Blockworks, and COW Protocol.

 

Tech Layoffs Continue to Rise

Layoffs, especially in the tech and crypto sectors, continue to rise. According to a recent survey, about 81,000 layoffs were recorded in the first quarter of 2026, the highest since 2023, with the number reaching more than 100,000 by early May.

 

Several crypto companies have reduced their workforces in recent months. Coinbase most recently cut 14% of its workforce, laying off about 700 employees. The company cited a volatile crypto market and a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence focused operations as reasons for the layoffs.

 

Other companies, including Crypto.com, Gemini, Algorand Foundation, and Block, have also reduced their workforces. Many of these firms have pointed to a volatile crypto market and a broader strategic pivot toward artificial intelligence as contributing factors to the cuts.

 

 

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.

 

 

MoonPay is not slowing down. The crypto payments giant announced Monday the acquisition of Dawn Labs, an applied AI research startup focused on autonomous trading tools for digital asset markets. Alongside the deal, the company launched Dawn CLI, a product that lets users build and execute trading strategies using plain-English prompts. No coding background required.

 

The move pushes MoonPay deeper into what it calls the "agentic" layer of crypto, where AI systems can reason, plan, and now, apparently, trade on your behalf. It also adds another chapter to the company's broader infrastructure buildout, which has been accelerating through 2025 and into this year.

 

Plain English, Real Trades

Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad, who now serves as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, put it bluntly: until now, building a systematic trading strategy meant being a developer, a quantitative analyst, and a portfolio manager all at once. Dawn CLI collapses all of that into a single interface. You describe what you want, the system writes the code, and then it runs.

 

The platform is launching first on Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market that has seen explosive growth over the past two years, attracting traders betting on elections, sports results, economic data, and geopolitical events. Prediction markets have gone from a niche crypto experiment to a mainstream information layer, and tools to actually trade them systematically have lagged badly behind the demand. That's the gap MoonPay is targeting.

 

"We're starting with prediction markets because they are one of the fastest-growing sectors, and many traders in the space are underserved by existing tooling," Prasad said. Additional trading venues and asset types are on the roadmap for the coming months.

 

Infrastructure First Model

The Dawn Labs deal sits within a larger strategic context. Earlier this year, in February, MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer built on its developer-focused command-line interface that lets AI agents access crypto wallets, execute trades, perform cross-chain swaps, and off-ramp back to fiat, all autonomously. CEO and founder Ivan Soto-Wright described the thinking in stark terms: "AI agents can reason, but they cannot act economically without capital infrastructure. MoonPay is the bridge between AI and money."

 

The service works through a one-time KYC process, after which an agent can transact on behalf of the verified user within preset permissions. Wallets are non-custodial and stored on the user's device, not held by MoonPay. It also supports the x402 standard, a machine-to-machine payments protocol that has been gaining traction across the industry, with Stripe and Cloudflare both adding support in recent months.

 

A Broader Industry Shift

MoonPay is not alone in this push. Gemini launched its own agentic trading feature for AI agents back in April, and Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon have each rolled out AI-compatible stablecoin payment rails in recent months. Solana and Google have made similar moves. The pattern is clear enough: major players across crypto and fintech are racing to build the financial plumbing that AI agents will need to operate as independent economic actors.

 

For MoonPay specifically, it sees this as a natural extension of what it already does. The company, founded in 2019, serves more than 500 enterprise clients and 30 million users globally. Its core business has always been connecting fiat payment systems to blockchains. Extending that to AI systems is, in some ways, the logical next step.

 

Prasad said the company does not view AI agents and human traders as separate customer bases. "We've been building MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, and spend," he explained. "Our agentic products put that same stack in the hands of both humans and machines."

 

What Comes Next

Following the Agents launch in February, MoonPay unveiled a Ledger integration in March, allowing AI-initiated transactions to be signed on a hardware device, a notable security step for users wary of handing autonomous control to software alone. The Dawn CLI launch now adds an execution layer on top of that infrastructure, specifically aimed at traders who want strategy-building capabilities without the technical overhead.

 

Whether retail traders will warm to the idea of an AI agent placing bets on Polymarket on their behalf remains to be seen. But MoonPay is clearly positioning itself well ahead of that question. If the agentic economy arrives on the timeline its backers expect, the company wants to be the rails it runs on.

 

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.

 

 

Social media giant Meta is currently running a pilot program that tests issuing creators’ payouts in stablecoins. “Meta now offers USDC stablecoin payouts via supported crypto wallets on the Solana and Polygon blockchain networks,” the team wrote on its Business Help Center page

 

Since this is still a pilot program, only creators in Colombia and the Philippines are currently eligible for the service, with the program expected to expand to more than 160 countries before the end of the year, according to an X post by Polygon Labs.

 

 

While the announcement was well received by many in the crypto community, a spokesperson for Meta clarified the goal of the initiative, stating that Meta was not issuing its own stablecoin but was instead tapping into Circle’s $77 billion USDC stablecoin, with plans to integrate the stablecoin into its payment infrastructure.

 

The Meta USDC creator payout program is currently supported by several popular crypto wallets, including MetaMask, Phantom, and Binance, with global payments platform Stripe handling the technical infrastructure and serving as the payments provider. Solana and Polygon are the only blockchain networks currently supported for this program.

 

Meta Pushes Again Into Crypto After Setbacks

Meta’s recent move into crypto follows several setbacks it has had to deal with in the past. In 2019, it launched Libra, a cryptocurrency which it said could be used across its different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

 

However, things did not go as planned, as some stakeholders, such as PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa, which were involved in the project, started pulling out due to scrutiny and backlash from U.S. regulators and from some members of the U.S. Congress.

 

Although Meta made several efforts to save the project, including rebranding it from Libra to Diem, a stablecoin backed by the U.S. dollar in an effort to appease federal regulators, nothing worked, as federal regulators stated that the project could not move forward.

 

Other projects associated with Libra and Diem, such as the Novi wallet, a cryptocurrency wallet built by Meta that allowed users to hold and transfer Libra, also failed, and the entire project was eventually wound down. According to Stuart Levey, then CEO of the Diem Association, “it became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead.”

 

 

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.

 

 

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of Amazon, has integrated the data standards and services of the decentralized oracle network Chainlink into its platform, enabling connectivity between traditional cloud infrastructure and blockchain networks.

 

The integration, according to AWS, aims to address the blockchain oracle problem. Although blockchain networks operate as decentralized ledgers, they are not inherently designed to connect with external data sources, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other blockchains. This limitation presents a significant challenge for developers building digital asset solutions and tokenization products that depend on real-world data for operational efficiency.

 

 

By integrating Chainlink data standards into its marketplace, AWS addresses this connectivity problem, making it possible for blockchain networks to connect to its cloud infrastructure while maintaining the security, compliance, and reliability standards required by financial institutions.

 

The integration brings three Chainlink oracle services into the AWS Marketplace. These include Chainlink Data Feeds, which provide access to decentralized price and market data for asset valuation, assessment, and risk management; Chainlink Data Streams, which deliver fast and secure data that enables on-chain systems to respond to market movements in real time and manage risk dynamically; and Chainlink Proof of Reserve, which provides secure and verifiable on-chain reserve attestations for stablecoins and other tokenized assets.

 

Through this integration, enterprises will be able to build tokenization solutions that leverage AWS cloud capabilities alongside blockchain functionality without needing to independently solve the blockchain oracle problem. Developers will also be able to connect external data sources to blockchain applications through secure oracle networks while using AWS compute resources.

 

Platforms Integrate with Decentralized Oracle Networks

Decentralized oracle networks, which are blockchain-based middleware systems that securely bridge real-world data to blockchain networks using several independent nodes, have increasingly been integrated into platforms in recent times.

 

Just this month, Polymarket integrated Pyth Network into its prediction market platform. Through this integration, Polymarket enabled traders to place predictions on real-life commodities such as gold and silver, as well as U.S. stocks, including NVIDIA and Apple.

 

Allor Network, also this month, integrated the decentralized oracle network Band Protocol into its platform, allowing for the secure delivery of real-world data for its Web3 applications.

 

Chainlink decentralized oracles have also been integrated into traditional finance platforms, including SWIFT and SIX Group, the organization behind Switzerland’s principal stock exchange, the SIX Swiss Exchange, with plans underway to integrate them into the Australian Stock Exchange platform.

 

 

Rare Network and SCRIB3 are teaming up to launch Amplify Cardano, a $2 million community-driven marketing and events program that could fundamentally shift how the world's most technically rigorous blockchain tells its story.

 

If you've spent any real time in the Cardano ecosystem, you already know the frustration. The technology is genuinely impressive. The community is deep, global, and unusually committed. The governance transition Cardano pulled off last year was historic. And yet, ask someone outside of crypto to name a breakout project built on Cardano and you'll mostly get silence.

 

That's the gap Amplify Cardano is trying to close, and the two organizations behind it have the credentials to actually do it.

 

 

Two Prongs, One Clear Goal
The proposal, expected to be formally put on chain in the coming days, is currently seeking $2 million in treasury funding and built around a two-part structure. The first prong is a Community Accelerator Fund of $1 million, designed to give 3-5 high-potential ecosystem projects the full-stack marketing support they need to compete with the Jupiters and Jitos of the Solana world. We're talking brand development, paid media, PR, website builds, social media management, the whole thing. And not at inflated agency rates, either. Projects accepted into the program will receive services at 30-50% below standard market pricing, which is a genuinely meaningful discount in an industry where a monthly social media retainer alone can run $25,000.

 

SCRIB3, the crypto-native creative and communications agency co-leading this effort, isn't a newcomer to this space. Founded in late 2022, the firm has quietly built one of the more impressive rosters in web3 marketing, working across DeFi protocols, Layer 1s, and infrastructure projects. Its team includes a former aerospace engineer turned crypto growth strategist who has worked with over 40 protocols, alongside partners with backgrounds in strategy at Uber and private equity. SCRIB3 has also been embedded in Cardano governance for some time now, including sending team members to the Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires in late 2024 and serving on the Growth and Marketing Committee. They know the community. They know the gaps.

 

 

Grassroots at Scale: Rare Network's Events Machine
The second prong is where things get especially interesting for the long-suffering Cardano community member who has watched the ecosystem struggle to show up, across the globe... where it absolutely should have a presence. Rare Network will manage a $1 million Community-Led Events and Marketing Fund, built to support 100-plus projects and individual contributors over 18 months with grants ranging from $500 to $15,000 per request.

 

That might sound modest at the individual level, but the aggregate effect is the point. The vision is coverage and frequency. Cardano should have something happening somewhere, all the time. A local meetup in Lagos. A DeFi workshop in Buenos Aires. Comprehensive content creation. A hackathon at local universities. A networking social at Consensus. Social Media Campaigns. All of it coordinated, funded, and reported back to the community through Rare Network's management layer.

 

Rare Network's track record here is hard to argue with. The company has been running Rare Evo, a premier blockchain conferece, every year for five years now.  Initially spinning out of a pure Cardano Community event, Rare Evo has become a destination for multiple chains, spanning the entire industry. From TradFi to DeFi, Institutions and Policy-makers, and NFTs and Gaming. The Las Vegas event covers every aspect of the indsutry and draws thousands of attendees, pulls over a million related video views across its productions, and has featured Charles Hoskinson, Frederik Gregaard, and Nikhil Joshi from Cardano's founding leadership on stage. Beyond that annual flagship, the team has produced more than 60 side events and meetups at major industry gatherings including Consensus, TOKEN2049, ETHDenver, Paris Blockchain Week, and the Cardano Summit. Their Rare Social events average over 2,000 registered attendees each.

 

Perhaps most tellingly, Rare Network was named a formal event partner in Cardano's Unified Global Events Marketing Strategy alongside the Cardano Foundation and EMURGO, a governance proposal that passed with nearly 80% DRep support.

 

 

Fixing What Grants Programs Get Wrong
The proposal is also refreshingly honest about why previous approaches have fallen short. Most Layer 1 ecosystems try to solve the marketing problem through grants programs, but those programs fail at a high rate. They hand projects money and then leave them to figure out the rest, which means navigating agency RFPs, building marketing plans from scratch, and hoping things click, usually on a deadline. Most teams, especially lean early-stage ones, simply aren't equipped to execute that way.

 

The Amplify Cardano model is different. Instead of funding and stepping back, SCRIB3 does the work directly for the Accelerator projects alongside the Accelerator projects, with KPIs and statements of work approved by Cardano's Growth and Marketing Committee and Product Committee. The program isn't just writing checks; it's delivering results against a defined standard with oversight built in from the start.

 

On the community side, Rare Network has already piloted the model. The Amplify Cardano program launched in early 2026 through Project Catalyst Fund 14 and funded five events and two marketing campaigns before the Catalyst program was paused. That pause, actually, underscores exactly why a dedicated fund managed by experienced operators makes sense. Community organizers shouldn't be held hostage to governance cycles when they want to throw an event next month.

 

The Numbers Make Sense
At $2 million total, the ask represents less than 0.02% of ADA's market cap, and is meaningfully below what comparable ecosystems invest in equivalent programming. The Cardano community's own Q4 2025 GMC survey ranked marketing support for builders second and community events third among their top priorities for treasury spending. This proposal answers both in a single package, with experienced operators who have already demonstrated they can deliver.

 

Cardano has spent a decade building something genuinely worth talking about. Now it has a real plan for making sure the rest of the world hears about it.

 

 

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.

 

 

Volo Protocol, a decentralized finance protocol built on the Sui blockchain, has suffered a security breach that led to the loss of approximately $3.5 million in digital assets.

 

In an effort to maintain transparency, the team in an X post on Wednesday publicly announced the security breach. According to the team, the attack only affected assets in selected vaults, including Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Matrixdock Gold XAUm, and USDC (USDC).

 

 

On detecting the breach, the team said it acted quickly to contain it and minimize further damage. It stated, “We detected the attack, immediately notified the Sui Foundation and ecosystem partners to contain the damage, and froze the vaults to prevent any further exposure.”

 

As of the time of its first reporting on the incident, the Volo team said that the $28 million in total value locked across other vaults was safe, adding that all vaults on the protocol were temporarily frozen pending a full postmortem and remediation. The team also said it was in damage control mode and was actively working with on chain investigators and ecosystem partners to recover the stolen funds.

 

The team released updates on the hack

Since the hack happened, the Volo team has, in three separate updates, transparently informed the community about the efforts being made to recover the stolen funds.

 

In the first two updates, the team said it was already working with ecosystem partners and had successfully frozen approximately $500 million of the stolen funds, while also intercepting and blocking the hacker’s attempt to bridge 19.6 WBTC. According to the Volo team, these funds were no longer under the hacker’s control.

 

In a third update, the team said it had already frozen $2 million of the stolen funds, and that together with ecosystem partners and security teams, it had flagged the hacker’s EVM addresses across the majority of centralized exchanges, swappers, and KYC tools.

 

The Volo protocol hack came shortly after the KelpDAO exploit and the Drift Protocol exploit, which led to a combined loss of over $570 million, and are currently the largest DeFi hacks that have occurred this year. So far, over $770 million has been lost to DeFi hacks this year.

 

 

Coinbase dropped a new public discovery tool aimed at making it easier for both people and AI agents to find and use paid online services that settle instantly with crypto micropayments.

 

The platform went live today at agentic.market and works as an open directory for thousands of services built on the x402 protocol. You can jump in and browse immediately without login, API keys, nothing like that required. It pulls fresh data straight from real payments moving through Coinbase’s Developer Platform, so you see live pricing, how much volume each service is actually getting, how many different users are paying, and the latest activity timestamps. This release picks up right where Coinbase left off with its Agentic Wallets back in February, which first let AI agents hold their own funds and spend them independently. 

 

The x402 Bazaar is where paid online services show up once they’re set up with the right discovery info and start receiving payments, so you don’t have to submit a separate listing. It acts as x402’s backend index, tracking what’s available, how it’s priced, and what’s happening on-chain, while Agentic.Market turns that into a public marketplace where people and AI agents can easily search, compare, and plug these services into their workflows. This includes things like AI model runs, data and analytics feeds, media tools for images and video, search and scraping services, social and messaging integrations, core infrastructure like storage and compute, and even trading tools for moving assets around. Coinbase says the protocol is built so both humans and machines can pay programmatically for things like paid APIs, pay‑per‑call tools, and agents buying access at runtime, so the whole setup is really about making it simple.

 

 

Coinbase noted that the x402 protocol already has more than 165 million transactions and moved roughly 50 million dollars in volume, with over 480,000 agents actively taking part across around 100,000 services. The directory puts the busiest and most reliable ones front and center, which helps both humans and machines figure out what is actually getting real traction day to day. 

 

This is about smoothing out the little daily frictions that slow down building, and rolling out useful agents that can move naturally between on-chain steps like shifting assets or chasing better yields and off-chain jobs like running inference or grabbing fresh data, all paid for through in stablecoins. Teams handling internal automation or tools that face customers now have one, clean spot with data to check out providers without digging through random docs or dealing with payment mismatches. Work in DeFi or tokenization gets clearer ways to add agent driven logic that works natively instead of forcing awkward bridges or extra steps.

 

This is still early, so real momentum will come down to more services jumping on the x402 standard and agents getting better at handling payment details and safety checks on their own. Even with that, the way it indexes itself automatically and stays completely open shows Coinbase leaning toward letting the ecosystem expand through actual use rather than any kind of control. Groups that start implementing x402 features into their agents today could end up in a much better spot, as these machine-to-machine payments become normal.

 

 

Wrapped XRP (wXRP) is now live on Solana, issued by regulated custodian Hex Trust and bridged securely via LayerZero, backed 1:1 of XRP that lets users trade, provide liquidity, lend, and earn yield across Solana’s DeFi apps. 

 

 

This is the latest piece of a multi-chain rollout that Hex Trust detailed back in December 2025, as the same wXRP infrastructure is already operating on Ethereum, Optimism, and HyperEVM, giving XRP holders regulated on-ramps into deeper liquidity pools wherever DeFi happens. RippleX SVP Markus Infanger, noted the move addresses growing demand to use XRP across the wider crypto ecosystem and it aligns with Ripple’s own RLUSD stablecoin work. LayerZero handles the bridging that has captured the majority of reliable cross-chain volume after earlier bridge exploits elsewhere.

 

Major Solana based players such as Ondo Finance which has expanded tokenized treasury and equity products onto the network, and Superstate whose leadership has publicly endorsed Solana as one of only two viable chains for RWAs work alongside Ethereum now operate in a way where they can integrate wXRP straight into liquidity pools lending markets and atomic settlement flows. 

 

At the same time, big institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are building on Solana with their own tokenized market funds. BlackRock brought its BUIDL fund  which holds cash and Treasuries to deliver dollar yields to Solana, giving qualified investors fast, low-cost access to on-chain returns. Franklin Templeton did the same with its on-chain US Government Money Market Fund. WisdomTree brought its tokenized funds covering money markets, stocks, bonds, alternatives, and balanced portfolios, VanEck launched its low-fee Treasury bill fund VBILL, Hamilton Lane added tokenized access to private infrastructure and secondary funds, and Apollo made its ACRED private credit product available as collateral in protocols like Morpho. This lets firms keep their traditional compliance and custody setups intact while plugging these assets straight into Solana, so institutions can easily use wXRP for liquidity, collateral, or quick settlements.

 

Solana has been scaling RWA activity with tokenized ecosystems on-chain surpassing two billion dollars in value and protocols like Kamino handling over one billion dollars in real world asset deposits across isolated lending markets, where institutions borrow against assets and earn yield from cash flows. Ripple has targeted these kinds of entities through its custody solutions and partnerships with banks, including BBVA, DBS Bank, DZ Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and more recently Kyobo Life Insurance, for on-chain settlement and staking capabilities that now extend naturally to Solana networks.

 

There’s support across Phantom wallet, Jupiter Exchange, Meteora, and Titan Exchange, ensures that the infrastructure is ready for immediate use, which removes one of the frictions that has kept payment assets like XRP siloed from builders who prefer Solana for its sub-cent fees and near instant finality.