Franklin Templeton, one of the largest asset managers on the planet, has formally partnered with Ondo Finance to bring tokenized versions of its exchange-traded funds to blockchain networks, allowing investors to hold and trade exposure to traditional financial products directly through crypto wallets, at any hour of the day or night. The announcement, made Wednesday, marks a meaningful escalation in the firm's already aggressive push into digital asset infrastructure.

 

Under the arrangement, Ondo will purchase shares of five Franklin Templeton ETFs, including FFOG, FLQL, FDGL, FLHY, and INCE, then issue blockchain-based tokens through a special purpose vehicle. Those tokens pass along the economic exposure, so holders receive the return stream of the underlying fund but do not technically own the underlying shares directly. Liquidity will be supported by Ondo's network of market makers, including during windows when traditional exchanges are closed.

The platform powering this is Ondo Global Markets, which launched in September 2025 and has already reported more than $620 million in total value locked and north of $12 billion in cumulative trading volume across roughly 60,000 users. That kind of traction, relatively early in its life, helps explain why Franklin Templeton was willing to put its name on this deal.

Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton's head of innovation, framed the initial ETF lineup in straightforward terms: the chosen funds offer a broad mix of exposures and a useful test case to see what actually resonates with a new audience. The products will initially be available in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. U.S. availability, the firm said, hinges on further regulatory clarity around how third parties can distribute registered funds on-chain.

 

Making Moves

For those tracking Franklin Templeton's blockchain strategy, this is less a sudden pivot and more the next logical chapter. The firm launched its Benji Technology Platform back in 2021 and with it the first U.S.-registered money market fund to run on a public blockchain, the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. That fund has since grown to $557 million in assets as of February 2026, not a trivial number for a product built on infrastructure that most institutional investors were still treating with skepticism just a few years ago.

Kaul also made waves at the Ondo Summit in New York in February, where she argued that the next evolution of asset management would be what she called "wallet-native": a world where stocks, bonds, private funds, and more are all held and managed through tokenized digital wallets rather than fragmented across brokerage accounts, banks, and paper records. The Franklin Templeton-Ondo partnership is a direct expression of that vision, and it is now live.

 

The Race Is On

Franklin Templeton is not operating in a vacuum. BlackRock's BUIDL fund has surpassed $2 billion in assets under management. JPMorgan rolled out its My OnChain Net Yield Fund on Ethereum late last year, crossing $100 million in short order. WisdomTree and Fidelity have both signaled similar intentions. And just this week, the New York Stock Exchange announced a partnership with Securitize to enable tokenized securities trading on its platform. The momentum is real and it is accelerating.

For Ondo, landing Franklin Templeton as a partner is a significant credibility stamp. The firm's ONDO token carries a market cap above $1.2 billion, and the broader real-world asset tokenization market has grown to over $15 billion in total assets according to RWA data, up sharply over the past year. The question now is whether tokenized fund structures can attract meaningful adoption beyond the crypto-native crowd that already lives in wallets.

 

 

What This All Means

None of this is without complication. Tokenized ETFs do not immunize investors from market volatility. Bitcoin hit an all-time high near $126,000 in October 2025 and was trading around $70,500 by late March 2026. Easy access to assets at any hour cuts both ways. Regulatory uncertainty in the U.S. remains a genuine constraint, with questions around compliance, investor identification, and how registered funds interact with decentralized infrastructure still unsettled.

Franklin Templeton has also partnered with Binance to allow tokenized fund shares to serve as collateral for institutional trades, which introduces new connections between regulated finance and crypto exchange infrastructure. That might be efficient under normal conditions, but critics will rightly note that interconnected systems have a history of amplifying stress in bad times. The 2022 crypto collapse left lessons that the industry has not fully metabolized.

Still, when a firm managing $1.7 trillion commits to blockchain as a primary distribution channel rather than a side experiment, competitors pay attention. The walls between traditional finance and crypto markets are getting thinner fast, and the Franklin Templeton-Ondo deal may end up being one of the more consequential ones to watch as this story unfolds.

 

Balancer Labs, the core team behind the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer, has announced plans to wind down after a $116 million exploit that occurred in November.

 

The decision, according to CEO Marcus Hardt, was driven by the impact of the hack. Despite continuing to generate revenue, Balancer Labs’ economic model was no longer sustainable in the aftermath of the hack.

 

“We were spending too much to attract liquidity relative to what that liquidity was actually generating in revenue,” Hardt said. “We were diluting BAL holders to sustain a system that, in my view, was no longer serving the protocol well. At some point, you have to be honest about that.”

 

With Balancer Labs winding down its operations, the protocol is expected to be managed by the Balancer Foundation and its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), an approach supported by co-founders Hardt and Fernando Martinelli. 

 

DAO members have been asked to vote on a proposal to restructure the protocol and its tokenomics. If approved, BAL emissions will end, all fees will be routed to the treasury, and the protocol’s share of swap fees will be reduced. The team size will also be cut.

 

So, while Balancer Labs, the core development team, is winding down, the protocol will continue operating under new management with a leaner structure.

 

 

The Balancer Protocol Exploit

On November 3, 2025, Balancer Protocol suffered a smart contract exploit targeting its V2 composable stable pools, resulting in the theft of significant amounts of cryptocurrency.

 

Although Balancer had a permission system in place, a bug in the smart contract allowed the attacker to bypass these controls. The attacker exploited the vulnerability to gain unauthorized access to the protocol’s shared vault system, enabling them to drain assets from multiple liquidity pools across different blockchains simultaneously.

 

The hack had a severe impact on Balancer, causing its total value locked (TVL) to drop from about $775 million to $258 million within days of the exploit, according to a report. Its native token, BAL, also fell by about 30%.

 

The shutdown of the Balancer Labs team comes weeks after crypto aggregator Step Finance announced its own shutdown following a January 31 hack that reportedly led to losses of between $26 million and $40 million from the protocol’s treasury.

 

Bunni, a decentralized liquidity protocol built on Uniswap V4, also shut down around October last year after suffering a hack that resulted in losses of about $8.4 million.

 

 

Resolv Labs’ stablecoin, USR, has lost its U.S. dollar peg following an exploit of the token’s contract that allowed attackers to mint millions of tokens.

 

The exploit, which occurred on March 22, 2026, resulted in the creation of 50 million unbacked USR tokens, prompting the team to temporarily pause the protocol’s functions to prevent “further malicious actions.”

 

 

According to YieldsandMore, which first reported the story, the attack began with a 100,000 USDC deposit by the attackers, ultimately causing USR to lose its dollar peg and fall to $0.01.

 

After minting the USR tokens, the attackers converted them into wrapped USR (wstUSR) to access deeper liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs). This allowed them to offload large amounts of wstUSR more gradually, reducing the risk of an immediate price crash of USR.

 

The next phase of the attack involved dumping and selling wstUSR tokens across multiple platforms, including KyberSwap and Velora. Using this method, the attackers swapped wstUSR for USDt and USDC, which were then aggressively converted into Ether (ETH).

 

Although the attack was first made public by the crypto research and analysis group YieldsandMore, the Resolv team was only able to pause the protocol three hours later.

 

“It took ResolvLabs three hours to pause its protocol. Roughly one hour of that delay came from the gap between submitting the multisig transaction and collecting the four required signatures to execute it,” YieldsandMore wrote on X.

 

While 50 million tokens were initially minted by the attackers, blockchain security company PeckShield reported that an additional 30 million USR tokens were later minted, bringing the total to approximately 80 million.

 

 

Price Action of USR in the Aftermath of the Exploit

The minting and dumping of USR tokens triggered a severe depeg, sending its price from $1 to roughly $0.02 to $0.05 within minutes, a decline of about 95 to 97%.

 

Although it briefly rebounded to between $0.14 and $0.20, USR is currently trading at $0.2773, according to data from CoinMarketCap at the time of publication. 

 

The USR depeg ranks among the most severe in recent history, second only to the collapse of Terra's TerraUSD (UST) in 2022, which fell from $1 to $0.02 and lost 98% of its value. Iron Finance also had its IRON stablecoin lose its dollar peg, dropping from $1 to about $0.05.

 

 

For most of the past decade, the conversation around artificial intelligence and crypto stayed largely theoretical. Two industries, both moving fast, both attracting enormous capital, but mostly running on parallel tracks. That started to change in late 2024, and by early 2026 the overlap had become hard to ignore. MoonPay, the crypto payments firm that built its name on fiat-to-crypto on-ramps, is now positioning itself as the financial infrastructure layer for a future where AI agents don't just analyze markets but actively participate in them.

 

On February 24, the company officially launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer built on top of MoonPay CLI, its developer-focused command-line interface. The product gives autonomous AI systems the ability to generate wallets, fund them through fiat on-ramps or crypto transfers, execute on-chain trades, and convert holdings back to fiat, all without requiring a human to approve each individual step. Less than three weeks later, on March 13, MoonPay followed up with a second announcement: a deep integration with Ledger, the hardware wallet maker, designed to let users sign off on AI-initiated transactions directly from a physical device.

 

MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright put it bluntly in the launch statement: "AI agents can reason, but they cannot act economically without capital infrastructure." The line is a bit pithy, but it captures the actual gap. Building a bot that can identify an arbitrage opportunity across three chains is a solved problem in 2026. Building one that can act on that opportunity, fund itself, execute the trade, and off-ramp the proceeds into a bank account without exposing private keys or requiring a human babysitter is not.

 

MoonPay Agents is designed to close that gap. The setup is relatively straightforward: a developer installs MoonPay CLI, a user completes a one-time KYC verification, funds a wallet, and grants the agent permission to transact within defined parameters. After that initial handshake, the agent can operate independently. Wallets are non-custodial and stored locally on the user's device using OS keychain encryption. Private keys never leave the machine. Spending limits and pre-execution transaction simulations serve as guardrails against runaway agents doing something unintended.

 

 

What Is Moonpay Agents?

The product ships with 54 tools across 17 categories, covering most of what a developer building a financially active agent would actually need. That includes real-time cross-chain swaps, recurring buy schedules, portfolio tracking, token discovery and analysis, multi-chain deposit links with automatic stablecoin conversion, fiat funding via virtual accounts that accept bank transfers, Apple Pay, Venmo, and PayPal, and the ability to off-ramp back to traditional currencies from the terminal.

 

Multi-chain coverage at launch spans Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Chain, Avalanche, TRON, and Bitcoin. Over 100 tokens are supported. Developers can also extend the platform with custom skills. The system is compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, and can be accessed via the CLI, a local Model Context Protocol server, or a web chat interface.

 

One detail that has caught the attention of developers in the agentic AI space is native x402 support. The x402 protocol, introduced by Coinbase in May 2025, revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code to enable machine-to-machine payments using stablecoins, with no API keys or subscriptions required. An agent simply pays for a resource or service at the time of access. MoonPay's inclusion of x402 compatibility positions MoonPay Agents within the emerging standard that Stripe, QuickNode (which extended x402 support across more than 80 chains), and a growing number of infrastructure providers have rallied around.

 

MoonPay Agents is not architected for one or two bots. The infrastructure is built to support thousands, eventually millions, of agents running concurrently across use cases that range from trading and portfolio management to gaming economies, commerce automation, and corporate treasury operations.

 

 

The Ledger Integration

MoonPay's solution was to bring Ledger into the loop. By integrating Ledger's Device Management Kit into the CLI wallet for MoonPay Agents, the company now allows every AI-generated transaction to be routed through a physical hardware device for approval. The agent constructs and proposes the transaction. The user confirms it on the Ledger. Private keys never touch the software layer at any point.

 

MoonPay says this makes the CLI wallet the first agent-focused wallet to support Ledger's secure signing through the Device Management Kit. Soto-Wright put the strategic framing plainly: "Autonomous agents will manage trillions in digital assets. But autonomy without security is reckless. We built MoonPay Agents with Ledger so intelligence can scale without surrendering control. The agent executes. The human stays in the loop."

 

Ledger's chief experience officer, Ian Rogers, acknowledged that the partnership reflects a real shift in what wallet infrastructure needs to support. "There is a new wave of CLI and agent-centric wallets emerging," he said, "and these will need Ledger security as a feature, too." It is a meaningful endorsement from a company whose entire value proposition is built on the premise that hardware is the only storage you can actually trust.

 

The model that results from the integration is structurally similar to two-factor authentication in traditional finance: the AI handles the analytical and execution work, but physical confirmation is required to release funds. Even a fully compromised software environment cannot move money without the physical Ledger device and its PIN.

 

 

What This Means for Developers

For developers building agents that need to touch money, the practical implications of MoonPay Agents are fairly direct. The product abstracts away most of the hard parts: custody, key management, fiat connectivity, cross-chain routing, compliance. A single CLI install and a one-time user verification is genuinely all that stands between a developer and an agent that can fund itself, trade across chains, and off-ramp back to a bank account.

 

The ability to add custom skills also matters. MoonPay Agents ships with 54 tools across 17 categories, but the open extension model means developers can build on top of the existing toolkit rather than working around its edges. That kind of extensibility is usually what determines whether a platform becomes a default or a footnote.

 

What remains to be seen is how the ecosystem grows around it. MoonPay has the infrastructure and the user base. The question now is whether developers building the next generation of agentic applications pick MoonPay Agents as their default financial layer, or whether a competitor, or a collection of open standards, fills that space instead.

 

 

A Structural Shift, Not a Feature Launch

It is worth stepping back from the product details for a moment to consider what MoonPay is actually doing here. This is not a company adding AI features to an existing payments product. It is a payments company making a deliberate bet that the financial system is about to acquire a new class of participant, one that is not human, that will require infrastructure designed specifically for machine-speed, machine-scale capital movement, and that will need to be anchored to compliant fiat rails if it is ever going to interact with the broader economy.

 

That bet is not obviously wrong. Stablecoin volumes are growing at rates that would have seemed implausible even two years ago. Agent tokens and AI-driven trading systems are proliferating faster than most infrastructure providers anticipated. The convergence of AI and crypto, long discussed in the abstract, is becoming a concrete engineering problem that real companies are being paid to solve.

 

MoonPay's move is a claim that it has already built most of what that future requires, and that the work of this moment is connecting those existing rails to the autonomous systems that will run on them. It is an ambitious claim. The next 18 months will do a lot to determine whether it holds up.

 

 

 

 

Something shifted in Washington on Friday, and the people who have been watching the CLARITY Act back and forth for months could feel it. Two key lawmakers, Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democrat Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, reached an agreement in principle on one of the most stubbornly contested provisions in the bill: stablecoin yield. It is the kind of deal that, when the details finally shake out, may well be remembered as the moment the United States stopped kicking the crypto regulatory can down the road.

 

The news broke late Friday and was first reported by Politico. Senator Alsobrooks confirmed it plainly. "Sen. Tillis and I do have an agreement in principle," she said. "We've come a long way. And I think what it will do is to allow us to protect innovation, but also gives us the opportunity to prevent widespread deposit flight." The White House's crypto executive director, Patrick Witt, called it a "major milestone" and added that more work remains, but that progress toward passing the CLARITY Act was now real and tangible.

 

Senator Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee's crypto subcommittee and has been one of the most tireless advocates for this legislation, marked the occasion in her own way. She posted a photo on X of a "yield" sign. No caption needed.

 

 

The Stablecoin Yield Standoff, Explained

For months, the stablecoin yield question was the immovable object blocking the CLARITY Act from getting its Senate Banking Committee hearing. 

 

The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Trump in July 2025, prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest directly to holders. The intent was to prevent stablecoins from functioning as de facto bank deposit accounts, which would put them in direct competition with traditional savings products and, as the American Bankers Association argued loudly, threaten deposit flows into community banks. The concern: if Coinbase or another platform could offer users 4% on their dollar-pegged tokens simply for holding them, why would anyone keep money in a checking account?

 

The problem is that the GENIUS Act only covered issuers. It left a gap for third-party platforms that might offer rewards to customers who hold stablecoins on their systems. The ABA saw this as a loophole and spent months in Washington lobbying to close it. Crypto companies, for their part, said those rewards programs were fundamentally different from deposit interest and should be allowed.

 

Section 404 of the Senate Banking Committee's draft tried to thread this needle. It prohibits digital asset service providers from paying interest or yield "solely in connection with the holding of a payment stablecoin," while explicitly allowing "activity-based" rewards tied to transactions, payments, platform use, loyalty programs, liquidity provision, and other behaviors. The distinction is real: a reward for moving money through a system is not the same thing as interest paid for parking money in one.

 

Senator Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican on the Banking Committee, captured the nuance at an ABA summit earlier this month: rewards cannot be simply about how much money sits in an account, but they might reasonably be tied to how active that account is. "We're trying to reflect that in the discussions," he said.

 

Lummis had suggested the final compromise would disallow anything that "sounds like banking product terminology" and bar rewards tied to the size of a user's balance. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose withdrawal of support in January helped torpedo a scheduled markup hearing, has been described by Lummis as "really pretty good about being willing to give on this issue."

 

 

From 99% to Done

The past week has been a rapid acceleration. As recently as Thursday, sources familiar with the situation described the stablecoin yield issue as being on the verge of resolution. A closed Senate Republican meeting on Wednesday, attended by White House crypto council director Patrick Witt, produced what Lummis told reporters afterward were significant breakthroughs, with "major light bulbs" switched on among the participants.

 

FinTech Weekly, which has closely tracked the legislative calendar, reported that stablecoin yield negotiations were "99% of the way to resolution" coming out of that meeting. The digital asset provisions of the bill more broadly were described as being in a "good place." The remaining friction, sources said, was not technical but political, specifically around whether community bank deregulation provisions might be attached to the CLARITY Act as part of a broader legislative trade.

 

Then came Friday's agreement. "We've come a long way," Alsobrooks told Politico, with a formality that understated just how much ground has been covered since January, when the scheduled markup hearing collapsed under the weight of over 100 proposed amendments and an industry revolt over the yield language.

 

 

What Comes Next and Why the Timeline Matters

An agreement on yield does not mean the CLARITY Act is done. Several other issues need resolution, decentralized finance remains a live debate, and the bill still needs to clear the Senate Banking Committee before it can go to a full Senate vote. After that, it must be reconciled with the version that passed the Senate Agriculture Committee in January. And before the President can sign it, that combined Senate text has to be reconciled with the House-passed version from July 2025. 

 

But the clock is ticking here. Senate Majority Leader John Thune controls the floor calendar, and it is crowded. Unrelated fights, including the Republican voter-ID bill and ongoing debate over the situation in Iran, are competing for limited floor time. Haun Ventures CEO Katie Haun, in a CNBC interview Friday, put it directly: "The big question on the Clarity Act is, is Congress going to get a bill to the floor on time to vote?"

 

Lummis has said she expects a Banking Committee hearing in the latter half of April, after the Easter recess. Advocates have been hoping for a May resolution. Prediction markets are currently pricing the odds of the CLARITY Act being signed in 2026 at around 72%, according to FinTech Weekly. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described passage as a spring 2026 target. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has put the odds at 80 to 90%.

 

JPMorgan analysts have described CLARITY Act passage by midyear as a positive catalyst for digital assets, pointing to regulatory clarity, institutional scaling, and tokenization growth as the key drivers. The crypto industry committed nearly $150 million to the Fairshake political action committee in the current cycle and announced a $193 million war chest around the Agriculture Committee markup in January. The companies behind that spending are waiting.

 

 

What This All Means

The stakes of the CLARITY Act extend well beyond Senate procedure. Markets are waiting. Institutions that have been slowly building out crypto infrastructure, custody solutions, tokenized asset offerings, trading desks, need to know what the rules are before they can fully commit capital and resources. The SEC's interpretation helps, but as Atkins himself acknowledged, it is not a substitute for law.

 

The CLARITY Act, if signed, would give the CFTC clear jurisdiction over most digital asset spot markets, create a path to register exchanges and brokers, establish consumer protections with real enforcement teeth, and provide the kind of statutory framework that companies can build businesses around. It would, in the language of its Senate Banking Committee sponsors, establish the United States as the crypto capital of the world, not just by rhetoric but by law.

 

If the bill fails this year, the status quo continues. Crypto companies operate under regulatory uncertainty. The SEC retains broad discretion to treat digital assets as securities. Institutional adoption continues but without a clear statutory framework. And the crypto lobby, which has made clear it will treat failure as a political liability, turns its $193 million war chest into something that looks a lot more like electoral pressure.

 

Friday's agreement does not guarantee passage. It does something important though. It removes the single biggest substantive obstacle to moving forward. The stablecoin yield question, which derailed a January markup hearing and has consumed months of negotiations, now has a resolution in principle. The path ahead still has obstacles, but for the first time in a while, it looks like an actual path.

 

Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks just handed the crypto industry something it has been asking for since the last bull market: a credible signal that Washington is finally going to do its job. The deal is in principle, the details are not yet public, and there is still legislative work ahead. But after years of false starts, shelved bills, collapsed markup hearings, and agency standoffs, this is the moment the trajectory changed.

 

 

Tally, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance platform built on Ethereum, is shutting down after five years of operation in the crypto industry.

 

The decision, according to co-founder and CEO Dennison Bertram, was driven by a lack of sustainability in the decentralized governance tooling industry. Despite its success as a DAO governance platform, Bertram said Tally had not yet realized its original vision.

 

“We have spent years championing the DAO vision. But at some point, you have to accept the world as it is, not as you hoped it would be. The reality is that we can no longer build a viable business around this,” he said.

 

Bertram also said Tally will not move forward with its ICO plans, adding that the team was not confident it could fulfill any promises it would make to token holders if it sold them tokens.

 

Prior to the announcement, Tally had built a notable presence in the crypto space, including:

• Serving over one million users, with tens of millions of tokenholder addresses participating in governance through its platform.
• Processing more than $1 billion in crypto payments and, at one point, helping secure over $80 billion through systems it supported.
• Supporting hundreds of organizations on its governance platform, including Uniswap DAO, Arbitrum, zkSync, Wormhole, and EigenLayer.

 

Reflecting on these successes, as well as Tally’s ability to avoid major security incidents and navigate regulatory uncertainty under the previous SEC chair, Tally CEO Dennison Bertram said he was “incredibly proud” of what the team had accomplished.

 

Although the team will wind down operations by the end of the month, it is working with major partners to ensure its enterprise clients continue to be served and will keep its interface live until the transition is complete.

 

 

The Crypto Community Reacted

The announcement of Tally’s shutdown was met with disappointment across the crypto community, with some describing it as the “end of an era” and others recounting their experiences using the platform during the early days of Arbitrum and Uniswap governance.

 

“I still remember writing governance proposals for Uniswap on Tally back in 2021. Those were fun times. It’s disappointing that DAOs didn’t meet expectations. While stablecoins have achieved the strongest product-market fit in crypto, I still believe DAOs will ultimately get there, though perhaps not for another three to 10 years,” said Getty Hill, CEO of DeFi trading platform Oku Trade.

 

“Human labor coordination is one of the hardest problems. DAOs will need to evolve, and their applications must improve. The 2020–2021 era of DAO governance was a lot of fun,” he added.

 

 

Senator Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee and has spent the better part of two years shepherding the crypto industry's most ambitious legislative goal, walked into the Digital Chamber's DC Blockchain Summit and told a packed room what a lot of people in the industry had stopped expecting to hear.

"We think we've got it," she said. "We really are going to get it out of the banking committee in April."

That's a bigger deal than it might sound. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the comprehensive crypto framework that cleared the House in a 294-134 bipartisan vote back in July 2025, has been grinding through Senate committees ever since, chewing through months of negotiations, a January markup that collapsed hours before it was scheduled to begin, and a dispute over stablecoin yield that managed to put banking lobbyists, crypto firms, and Democratic senators all at odds simultaneously. For a while, it looked like the whole thing might just quietly die before the 2026 midterms swallowed the calendar.

Apparently not, if Lummis is certain on the new deal being made.

 

The Stablecoin Yield Fight, Explained
To understand how we got here, it helps to understand the fight that almost killed this bill. After the House passed its version, the Senate Banking Committee got to work on its own draft. In January 2026, committee staff released a 278-page bill that took a firm stance: digital asset service providers could not offer interest or yield to users simply for holding stablecoin balances, though rewards or activity-linked incentives were still on the table.

Banking groups hated the carve-out. The American Bankers Association lobbied hard against any yield provision, arguing that if crypto platforms could pay customers to hold stablecoins, those customers might pull deposits from community banks. Coinbase, meanwhile, had built a profitable stablecoin rewards program and wasn't eager to see it legislated away. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reportedly signaled opposition to an early compromise attempt, and within hours of the January 14 scheduled markup, committee leadership postponed it indefinitely.

That delay rattled markets, contributed to what analysts at CoinShares estimated as nearly $1 billion in crypto market outflows, and sent lobbyists back to their whiteboards.

The White House held at least three separate meetings over the following weeks to try to broker a deal. And now, Lummis says, a compromise has landed. Crypto platforms will not be able to offer rewards programs using language that sounds like banking products, whether that means using terms like "yield," "interest," or anything that ties payouts to how much a user holds rather than what they do.

"Anything that sounds like banking product terminology will not appear," Lummis said. She added that Armstrong had been "really pretty good about being willing to give on this issue," a notable shift from his earlier posture.

Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican on the committee, confirmed the trajectory in a video statement at the same event, saying Senators Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat, and Thom Tillis, a Republican, are in the final stages of the stablecoin talks alongside the White House. "Once they all sign off," Moreno said, it's "go time."

 

DeFi Disputes Quietly Shelved
DeFi was the other thing that kept lobbyists up at night. Decentralized finance protocols, which allow users to lend, borrow, and trade digital assets without going through a traditional intermediary, sit in a legal grey zone that both Democrats and Republicans approached with very different instincts.

Democrats wanted oversight that was on par with federally regulated financial firms. The crypto industry, somewhat predictably, wanted software developers and peer-to-peer activity protected from being treated as financial intermediaries. The House version of the bill had already tried to thread this needle by drawing a line between control and code: developers who publish or maintain software without directly handling customer funds would not be classified as financial intermediaries. Centralized entities that interact with DeFi protocols would face tailored requirements.

According to Lummis, those DeFi disagreements have been "put to bed." She didn't go into detail, but Senate Banking Committee materials describe the bill's approach as targeting control rather than code, and requiring risk management and cybersecurity standards for centralized intermediaries that touch DeFi, while leaving non-custodial software development out of scope.

 

The Ethics Problem Won't Go Away
Not everything is resolved. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who has been one of Lummis's most consistent bipartisan partners on crypto legislation over the years, made clear at the same summit that there is still a major outstanding demand from her caucus.

Democrats want the bill to include an explicit ban on senior government officials personally profiting from the crypto industry. The reasoning for this is not very subtle, especially in heated partisanship of Washington these days: President Donald Trump and his family are tied to World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform that launched a stablecoin last year, and Trump's crypto-linked ventures have given Democrats a consistent line of attack.

"It's very important that we include this," Gillibrand said on Wednesday, adding that no government official in Congress or the White House should "get rich off their position and their knowledge base." Including such a restriction, she argued, would "unlock many more votes" from Democrats.

Lummis has previously said she took a compromise ethics provision to the White House and was rebuffed. Trump administration officials have repeatedly stated that the president's family's participation in digital asset businesses does not represent an inappropriate conflict of interests. The practical read from lobbyists: Republicans are unlikely to pass language that targets the leader of their own party.

The House bill, for its part, does include language specifying that existing ethics statutes already bar members of Congress and senior executive branch officials from issuing digital commodities during their time in public service. Whether that satisfies Democrats in the Senate is another matter.

 

Where the Bill Stands Procedurally
The legislative path from here still has a few moving parts. The Senate Agriculture Committee cleared its version of a crypto market structure bill, the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act, in late January 2026. That bill covers the CFTC-related side of the regulatory picture, including commodity market oversight, exchange registration, and derivatives. It passed over the objections of Democratic members who tried and failed to push through a series of amendments.

The Senate Banking Committee bill, now expected to go through a markup in late April after the Easter recess, would handle the SEC-related provisions: investor protections, securities treatment of digital assets, and stablecoin regulation. Once it clears that committee, both Senate bills need to be reconciled and merged before heading to a full Senate floor vote. That combined version would then need to be aligned with the House-passed CLARITY Act before a single final bill could reach Trump's desk.

That's a lot of steps. Lummis, who announced in December that she will not seek re-election, seems acutely aware of the time pressure. "This may be our only chance to get market structure done," she posted on X on Wednesday. Moreno was even more pointed: "If we don't get the CLARITY Act passed by May, digital asset legislation will not pass for the foreseeable future."

The Senate's 2026 calendar is not working in the bill's favor. The midterm elections in November mean that floor time effectively closes for controversial legislation sometime around August, when lawmakers shift their attention to their races. A Senate majority that currently tilts Republican could flip to Democratic control after the vote, bringing new leadership to key committees and potentially shelving the bill for another cycle.

Making things more unpredictable, both parties are currently tangling over unrelated legislation and the U.S. involvement in the war in Iran, which threatens to consume floor time that crypto advocates would prefer to use for a market structure vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said as recently as last week that he did not expect the Banking Committee to pass the bill quickly. Whether that assessment holds is now up to the negotiators.

Prediction markets have priced the odds of the bill being signed into law in 2026 at around 72%, according to available data. JPMorgan analysts have described passage before midyear as a positive catalyst for digital assets, citing regulatory clarity, institutional scaling, and tokenization growth as key drivers. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has put his personal odds estimate even higher, at 80 to 90%.

Industry Money and Political Pressure
The stakes are reflected in the lobbying numbers. Total crypto industry lobbying expenditures topped $80 million in 2025. Fairshake, the industry's primary political action committee, had built a 2026 war chest of $193 million as of January, with Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz each contributing $24 to $25 million in the second half of last year alone. The day before the Senate Agriculture Committee's January markup, Fairshake made that announcement public.

For all the money, the legislative process has been messier than the industry hoped. A bill that many expected to be done before year-end 2025 is now racing a midterm election clock, dependent on a handful of senators reaching agreement on provisions they've been arguing about for months, and navigating a Senate floor schedule that no one fully controls.

Lummis, for her part, sounded more confident than she has in months. "We're going to have this thing done, come hell or high water, before the end of the year," she told the crowd in Washington.

Whether the rest of the Senate, the White House, and the clock agree with her is the only question left.

Six years in, Solana still can't quite shake the casino label. And honestly, it probably never will, at least not completely. The chain that gave the world the $TRUMP memecoin, the $LIBRA debacle, and a near-endless stream of cartoon animal tokens processed somewhere close to 30% of its average monthly DEX volume in 2025 through memecoin activity alone, according to Blockworks data. But now, with over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks already live on-chain through Ondo Finance, and Visa, PayPal, and WisdomTree all building on the network, Solana's identity crisis may be ending, not by ditching memecoins, but by absorbing institutional finance alongside them.

In January 2026, Ondo Finance pushed more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs onto Solana. Not synthetic proxies, not wrapped derivatives, but actual securities, backed 1:1 by shares held with U.S.-registered broker-dealers, accessible on-chain 24 hours a day, five days a week for minting and redemption, and transferable around the clock

 

A month later, WisdomTree followed with its full suite of regulated tokenized funds. Visa confirmed U.S. banks were settling transactions with it over Solana in USDC. Worldpay said it would let merchants settle in USDG on the same network. PayPal positioned PYUSD on Solana for faster, cheaper commerce flows.

 

The memecoin chain is becoming something else. Or rather...and this is the more accurate framing, it's becoming something more.

 

 

A Sixth Birthday, a Changed Ecosystem
Solana launched in March 2020, built on a proof-of-history consensus mechanism that promised transaction throughput orders of magnitude faster than Ethereum at the time. Its early years were defined by the NFT boom, DeFi summer spillover, and a catastrophic near-death experience when the FTX collapse in late 2022 wiped out a major backer and sent SOL's price into the floor.

The recovery was messy and improbable, fueled partly by a genuine developer community and partly by retail investors who found Solana's low fees and fast finality well-suited to trading junk tokens at high velocity.

 

By 2024 and into 2025, the memecoin supercycle reached its apex on Solana. The pump.fun launchpad became the chain's most-used application by fee revenue for stretches of time. Hundreds of tokens named after pets, politicians, and pop culture references launched and died there every week.

So when institutions started showing up with serious capital and serious products, the natural question was: why here?

 

 

Ondo's Gamble
Ondo Finance's expansion to Solana appears to be a structural argument about where capital markets are going.

The company, which became the largest real-world asset issuer on Solana by asset count with the January launch, brought its Global Markets platform to the network after testing it on Ethereum and BNB Chain. The catalog covers technology and growth stocks, blue-chip equities, broad-market and sector ETFs, and commodity-linked products. 

Under Ondo's structure, token holders get economic exposure to publicly traded securities, including dividends, but do not hold direct shareholder rights in the underlying companies. The actual stocks and any cash in transit sit with U.S.-registered broker-dealers. The blockchain handles the movement layer: how tokens transfer, how positions clear, how compliance rules travel with the asset rather than being enforced at the application level.

The execution numbers that preceded the launch are worth noting. Before going live, Ondo ran tests showing $500,000 in tokenized Google shares trading on-chain with just 0.03% slippage and pricing that matched traditional exchange-traded equivalents. Total transaction costs for large trades came in under $102, a figure that compares favorably to conventional brokerage costs at similar volumes.

Ian De Bode, president of Ondo Finance, put it directly when the Solana expansion went live: liquidity depth and asset selection from existing versions of tokenized stocks had remained limited, and Ondo's model was designed to address that gap by bringing liquidity inherited from traditional exchange venues into an on-chain catalog.

Tokenized equities existed before Ondo's Solana launch, but they were thinly traded, narrowly available, and difficult to discover for the average crypto-native user. Ondo's integration with Jupiter, Solana's primary DEX aggregator, changed the distribution equation. Suddenly, the same wallets and interfaces people were using to buy memecoins could also pull up tokenized Apple or tokenized SPY.

 

 

The Institutional Path Becomes Clearer
WisdomTree's move a week after Ondo's launch was in some ways even more revealing about how institutional finance is thinking about Solana.

The New York-based asset manager extended its full suite of regulated tokenized funds to Solana through its WisdomTree Connect institutional platform and its WisdomTree Prime retail app.

 

That means money market, equity, fixed-income, alternatives, and asset allocation products are now natively mintable on the network.

Maredith Hannon, WisdomTree's head of business development for digital assets, framed the move as a direct response to Solana's technical characteristics: high transaction speeds and the ability to meet growing crypto-native demand while maintaining the regulatory standards institutions expect. Nick Ducoff of the Solana Foundation noted that RWAs on the network had already surpassed $1 billion before WisdomTree's arrival, and that the asset manager's expansion reflected both demand for tokenized RWAs and Solana's demonstrated ability to support that demand at scale.

What WisdomTree's entry signals, beyond the product itself, is that the 'sterile environment' theory of institutional adoption was wrong. Traditional finance did not wait for Solana to become culturally palatable before moving in. The infrastructure made sense regardless of what else was happening on the network, and the institutional clients accessing these funds through WisdomTree Connect are unlikely to lose sleep over what else is trading at the same time in the same ecosystem.

 

 

Payments, Stablecoins, and the Scale Argument
The tokenized securities story makes more sense when you look at what the payments data was already showing heading into early 2026.

In February 2026, Solana processed more than $650 billion in stablecoin transactions, more than double its previous monthly record, according to figures cited in the network's payments report. Stablecoin supply on Solana exceeded $15 billion. These are the type of money-like flows at a scale that makes the 'financial rail' framing not just plausible but arguably already accurate.

Visa is settling with U.S. banks in USDC over Solana. Worldpay is building merchant settlement in USDG on the same network. PayPal has positioned PYUSD on Solana specifically for commerce use cases, much faster and cheaper than alternative rails. Citi and PwC have been exploring the tokenization of bills of exchange for trade finance using Solana infrastructure.

None of these companies needed Solana's memecoin reputation to disappear before they could act. They needed speed, cost efficiency, and liquidity, things the network already provides at scale.

 

 

The Numbers Behind the Narrative
A few data points help ground what's actually happening against the broader tokenization landscape.

Ethereum still leads the on-chain RWA market by a significant margin, holding around $15.6 billion in tokenized asset value excluding stablecoins, according to RWA.xyz data. Solana sat at roughly $1.84 billion, with BNB Chain between the two at approximately $2.95 billion.

But the relevant number may not be total asset value so much as distribution. RWA.xyz shows about 91.6% of Solana's tokenized asset value, approximately $1.68 billion of the $1.84 billion, in distributed, portable on-chain form. Monthly RWA transfer volume on the network exceeded $2 billion. For context, the entire tokenized stocks category across all chains carries a market cap of around $1.08 billion, with monthly transfer volume of roughly $2.3 billion. Ondo alone holds about $644 million of that, representing roughly 60% platform market share.

Those figures suggest the assets that are on Solana are actually moving and not sitting idle in wallets. This is a huge distintion when evaluating whether tokenization on the network is functional infrastructure or performative positioning.

Part of what makes the institutional push on Solana legible is that the regulatory environment shifted in a meaningful way in early 2026.

On March 5, the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and OCC jointly stated that eligible tokenized securities should receive the same capital treatment as non-tokenized equivalents. For years, one of the institutional barriers to holding tokenized assets was the regulatory uncertainty around capital requirements. Banks considering tokenized securities as part of their balance sheet couldn't get a clear read on whether doing so would attract punitive capital charges relative to holding the conventional version of the same instrument.

The SEC's decision to grant special relief allowing intraday trading in tokenized shares of WisdomTree's money market fund points in the same direction. 

 

 

The $2 Trillion Horizon
The projections for tokenized assets are substantial, and they come from sources that aren't in the habit of WAGMI, moon-shot hype.

McKinsey's base case puts tokenized asset value at roughly $2 trillion by 2030, with a range running from $1 trillion to $4 trillion depending on adoption pace. BCG has estimated that tokenized fund AUM alone could exceed $600 billion by the same date. Citi's stablecoin outlook, published in early 2025, projected $1.9 trillion in base-case stablecoin issuance by 2030 and a bull case of $4 trillion, with potential transaction activity hitting between $100 trillion and $200 trillion.

These projections share a common assumption: blockchains transition from being primarily an asset class (something to invest in) to being market infrastructure (something to run finance through). If that transition happens at anything like the projected scale, the networks with the most liquid, most accessible, and most developer-friendly infrastructure stand to capture a disproportionate share of the flow.

Solana's combination of throughput, low fees, and a large existing retail user base that's already comfortable navigating on-chain interfaces makes it a serious contender for that infrastructure role. The 3.2 million daily active users that Solana was citing around the time of the Ondo launch aren't a demographic institutions typically associate with capital markets access. And that may be the whole point.

 

 

What This Means for Solana
On one end, you have high-velocity, high-risk memecoin trading, the casino slot machine that gave the network its reputation. On the other end, you have regulated, compliance-embedded tokenized securities and institutional payment rails. And it seem that the two ends don't appear to be in direct conflict with each other. They use the same settlement layer, pay the same validators, and contribute to the same liquidity depth.

Whether that coexistence holds as institutional volume grows is an open question. There are scenarios where the reputational bleed from high-profile memecoin controversies creates friction for institutional deployment. There are also scenarios where the retail liquidity generated by the casino side of the network ends up being exactly the kind of distribution depth that makes tokenized equities viable in a way they haven't been elsewhere.

For now, the market appears to be betting on the latter. The capital allocation decisions of Ondo, WisdomTree, Visa, Worldpay, PayPal, and Citi, all happening in just a span of a couple months, represent a pretty explicit vote of confidence in the coexistence model.

Solana turned six this month. It's survived an exchange collapse that should have killed it, rebuilt a developer ecosystem that most people wrote off, and navigated a memecoin supercycle that burnished and tarnished its reputation in roughly equal measure.

The tokenized stocks development isn't a pivot or rebrand...it's more of an expansion. The network didn't stop being what it was to become something new, it added a whole other layer on top of an already messy, active, genuinely liquid base. That's not the way institutional infrastructure is supposed to develop, according to the conventional playbook.

But the conventional playbook was written before $650 billion in monthly stablecoin volume was possible on a chain that also hosts a token called $BONK. 

 

Mastercard has agreed to acquire BVNK, the London-based stablecoin infrastructure company, for up to $1.8 billion in a deal that includes $300 million in contingent payments tied to future performance milestones. The agreement, announced Tuesday morning, is expected to close before the end of 2026, pending regulatory approvals.

The deal is the latest and largest chapter in a stablecoin acquisition frenzy that has gripped traditional finance and crypto alike, and it carries a backstory messier than most. BVNK didn't end up at Mastercard's door by accident. It got there after a months-long bidding war with Coinbase, exclusivity agreements, a very public deal collapse, and a detour that briefly had Mastercard chasing a different company entirely.

 

The Road to This Deal Was Anything But Clean
Back in October 2025, Fortune reported that both Mastercard and Coinbase had separately held advanced acquisition talks with BVNK, with the price tag floating somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion. At the time, Coinbase looked like the clear front-runner. Three sources familiar with the matter told Fortune that the crypto exchange had the inside track, and by late October, BVNK had entered into exclusivity with Coinbase, meaning the startup legally couldn't entertain other offers.

It seemed like a done deal. Then it wasn't.

In November, Coinbase and BVNK quietly called off talks. The deal had gotten as far as due diligence and exclusivity before the two sides parted ways. Coinbase issued a carefully worded non-statement about "continuously seeking opportunities to expand on our mission," and BVNK was suddenly back on the market.

Meanwhile, after losing out to Coinbase in the first round, Mastercard had pivoted and was reported to be in serious discussions to acquire Zerohash, a Chicago-based crypto infrastructure firm, for somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. That deal apparently didn't close either, and Mastercard eventually circled back to the startup it had wanted all along.

The result is the deal announced today: Mastercard gets BVNK for a price that, at $1.8 billion, comes in below the $2 billion Coinbase had been pursuing and meaningfully below the top of the original $2.5 billion range. Whether that represents a discount, a reflection of changed market conditions, or simply the realities of a second negotiation is hard to say. But for a company that was valued at around $750 million as recently as mid-2025, it is still a remarkable outcome.

 

Who is BVNK and Why Does It Matter
Founded in 2021 by Chris Harmse, Jesse Bernson-Struthers, and Donald Jackson, BVNK was built with a specific problem in mind: enterprises wanted to use stablecoins, but the plumbing didn't exist to make that happen at scale. The company's pitch was never about building a consumer wallet or launching its own token. It was about becoming the invisible layer that lets other financial businesses actually move money using stablecoins.

The platform operates across more than 130 countries and supports payments on all major blockchain networks. Its customers include Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes, and a growing list of enterprise clients that process real commercial volume. In its own end-of-year review published in January 2026, BVNK said it was processing $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payment volume, up 2.3x from the prior year, across 2.8 million transactions. A year before that, its volumes were reported at roughly $12 billion when Visa was announced as an investor.

One third of that volume now comes from the U.S. market alone, where BVNK launched operations at the start of 2025 and scaled from essentially zero to $10 billion in annualized volume by year end. The company opened two San Francisco offices and a New York outpost in just twelve months.

The investor roster reads like a who's who of institutions that have come around to stablecoins as strategic infrastructure rather than speculative technology. Haun Ventures led BVNK's $50 million Series Bin December 2024. Coinbase Ventures participated. Tiger Global was already in. And then Visa Ventures and Citi Ventures both made strategic investments, a signal that even the largest incumbent financial networks were willing to bet on the startup they might otherwise consider a competitive threat.

Bernson-Struthers described BVNK as the "global leader" in stablecoin infrastructure in a December 2024 interview, citing the company's banking relationships and financial licenses as the harder-to-replicate moat. That licensing infrastructure, built out painstakingly across multiple jurisdictions including full U.S. state-level coverage and comprehensive EU authorization, is likely a substantial part of what Mastercard is paying for.

 

What Mastercard Is Actually Buying
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's Chief Product Officer, put it plainly in the company's announcement Tuesday: "We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services, be it with stablecoins or tokenized deposits. We want to support them and their customers with a best in class, highly compliant, interoperable offering that brings the benefits of tokenized money to the real world."

That framing says a lot about how Mastercard is positioning this acquisition. The company isn't buying BVNK because it thinks stablecoins will replace its core business. It's buying BVNK because it wants to be the network that connects stablecoin rails to everything else, the way it currently connects card networks to merchants and banks around the world.

The logic is straightforward, if you squint at it. Mastercard's entire business model is built on being the trusted intermediary between different financial systems. Stablecoins create new rails that, without an orchestration layer, are isolated from the broader financial system. BVNK's core product is precisely that orchestration layer: the infrastructure that lets money move fluidly between dollars, stablecoins, blockchains, and traditional bank accounts. Mastercard plugs that into its global network and, theoretically, becomes the interoperability layer for the next generation of payments.

Lambert added that adding on-chain rails to Mastercard's network "will support speed and programmability for virtually every type of transaction," pointing to use cases beyond just consumer payments including capital markets, treasury management, B2B transactions, and cross-border remittances. That's a broader canvas than most people associate with stablecoins today, but it reflects where the industry is headed.

Mastercard cited a Boston Consulting Group figure showing digital currency payment use cases hit at least $350 billion in volume in 2025. The company also pointed to the growing regulatory clarity around digital currencies in multiple jurisdictions as a catalyst for financial institutions and fintechs that are now looking to build stablecoin-enabled payment products for their own customers.

 

The Stablecoin Acquisition Parade
This is the latest in a series of major acquisitions that have reshaped how the payments industry thinks about stablecoin infrastructure.

The deal that started the current wave was Stripe's acquisition of Bridge, another stablecoin infrastructure startup, for $1.1 billion. That deal closed in early 2025 and set a new benchmark for what stablecoin infrastructure could fetch. BVNK's volumes at the time of Bridge's acquisition were already significantly larger, which is part of why the bidding quickly escalated into the multi-billion dollar range.

Since then, MoonPay acquired Iron, stablecoin M&A activity has continued to accelerate, and the market cap of all stablecoins combined crossed $300 billion. Circle's IPO on the NYSE in June 2025 added further legitimacy and brought mainstream investor attention to the sector. The U.S. GENIUS Act, signed by President Trump in July 2025, provided the regulatory framework that large institutions had been waiting for before fully committing to stablecoin strategies.

That legislative clarity changed the calculus for traditional finance almost overnight. JPMorgan launched its JPMD deposit tokens. Citigroup announced a Citi stablecoin. Banks that had previously treated stablecoins as a fringe curiosity started treating them as product lines they needed to support.

For a payments network like Mastercard, the pressure is acute. The company's stock was reportedly hit when the GENIUS Act passed, with investors worried that stablecoins could erode the interchange fee model that underpins Mastercard's revenue. Buying BVNK is, in part, a direct response to that concern. Rather than cede the stablecoin payments market to crypto-native competitors or fintech newcomers, Mastercard is acquiring the infrastructure to own a piece ofit.

 

A Telling U-Turn on Stablecoins
There is a certain irony in today's announcement. As recently as July 2025, Raj Seshadri, Mastercard's chief commercial payments officer, told analysts on an earnings call that the company expected most payment flows to "begin and end in fiat," and that stablecoins would be "just one more currency for some specific use cases." That is a significant shift in tone from announcing a near-$2 billion acquisition to get into the middle of those flows.

To be fair, Mastercard's position has been nuanced. The company has been quietly building its crypto infrastructure for years, having acquired blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace back in 2021. It later shut down many of CipherTrace's key products, suggesting that early acquisition didn't pan out as planned. The company also joined a consortium focused on stablecoin technology alongside Robinhood and K:raken, and launched its Crypto Partner Program to foster collaboration in the space.

But the BVNK deal is a different order of magnitude. This is not a defensive data play or a consortium membership. This is Mastercard paying top dollar for the most battle-tested stablecoin infrastructure business in the world and betting that the orchestration layer between fiat and on-chain money will be one of the most valuable positions in payments over the next decade.

What Happens Next
The deal is expected to close by end of 2026, and both companies will presumably spend the intervening months navigating regulatory reviews across multiple jurisdictions. Given BVNK's existing licenses in the U.S. and EU and Mastercard's regulatory relationships globally, the path to approval is probably cleaner than it might be for a crypto-native acquirer.
 
The more interesting question is how BVNK's existing enterprise clients will react. Worldpay, Deel, Flywire and others built integrations with an independent infrastructure provider. Being absorbed into one of the world's largest payments networks changes the dynamic. Mastercard will need to make the case that the independence and product velocity those customers rely on will survive the acquisition intact.

And then there is the competitive landscape. Stripe now has Bridge. Mastercard will have BVNK. Coinbase, having walked away from the deal, will presumably continue building or find another infrastructure target. PayPal, which just announced the expansion of its own stablecoin PYUSD to 70 markets worldwide, is clearly not sitting still either. The scramble for position in the stablecoin payments stack is only getting more crowded, and today's announcement is more an acceleration of that competition than a resolution of it.

For BVNK's founders, who built the company from scratch in 2021 into a $1.8 billion exit in under five years, it is an extraordinary outcome. For Mastercard, it is a significant bet that the future of payments runs on both rails at once, fiat and on-chain, and that the company that controls the bridge between them will be in a very strong position. 

 

Whether that bet pays off depends on whether stablecoin payment volumes continue their current trajectory or whether the technology hits the kind of adoption ceiling that has frustrated crypto advocates before.

The contingent $300 million in the deal structure suggests both sides are hedging a little on that question. Which, all things considered, is probably the right instinct.

 

 

A crypto user has lost millions of dollars to slippage and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bots while performing a swap involving the decentralized finance protocol Aave.

 

The user whose Binance wallet was funded attempted to swap $50.4 million in USDT for the AAVE token using the decentralized exchange aggregator CoW Protocol and the decentralized exchange SushiSwap.

 

Since DEXs like SushiSwap use automated market makers (AMMs) that set token prices based on trading activity, the user was warned about the potential for high slippage.

 

“Given the unusually large size of the single order, the Aave interface, like most trading interfaces, warned the user about extraordinary slippage and required confirmation via a checkbox,” Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder, said.

 

The user ignored the warning and proceeded with the swap, receiving only 327 AAVE tokens from the $50.4 million transaction. Due to extreme slippage, the user effectively paid about $154,000 per AAVE, far above the market price of $114.

 

“The user confirmed the warning on their mobile device and proceeded with the swap, accepting the high slippage, which ultimately resulted in receiving only 324 AAVE in return,” Stani added. 

 

Reacting to the incident, CoW Protocol, the DEX aggregator used for the swap, said on its X account, “Despite clear warnings that showed the user they would lose nearly all of the value of their transaction, and despite needing to explicitly opt into the trade after seeing the warning, the user chose to proceed with their swap.”

 

 

The MEV Bot Sandwich Attack

In addition to the massive slippage loss, the user also lost nearly $10 million to MEV bots. Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bots monitor pending blockchain transactions and exploit them for profit. 

 

These bots typically execute a sandwich attack: they buy a token before a user places a large order, driving up the token’s price. Once the user buys at this inflated price, the bots immediately sell, profiting from the transaction.

 

MEV bots, spotting the pending USDt-to-AAVE swap, borrowed $29 million in wrapped ether (WETH) from Morph, used the funds to buy AAVE on Bancor, and then sold the AAVE tokens at an inflated price on Sushiswap before the swap was executed, netting $9.9 million in profit.

 

 

Compensation Plans

To compensate the user for the huge loss, Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder, said Aave would return $600,000 in transaction fees collected from the transaction. CoW Protocol also said it would refund any fees collected from the transaction back to the user.

 

 

The Dubai edition of the Token2049 event has been postponed due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

 

In a recent press release this Friday, the organizers of TOKEN2049, one of the world's largest crypto conferences, announced the rescheduling of this year's Token2049 Dubai event. Originally set for April 29 to 30 in Dubai, the conference will now take place on April 21 to 22, 2027.

 

Image credit: Token2049

 

According to the announcement, the decision was made considering the impact the ongoing Middle East conflict could have on the safety, international travel, and logistics of attendees planning to participate in this year’s event.

 

"We know this is disappointing news for many of you who have already made plans, and we don't take that lightly. Preparations for the event were progressing strongly. However, ensuring the global crypto industry can gather safely, and at the scale and quality that define TOKEN2049, remains our top priority," said the organizers.

 

What is Token2049?

TOKEN2049 is one of the largest global crypto conferences that brings together founders, investors, developers, companies, and policymakers from across the crypto industry.

 

Starting as a small industry conference in Asia in 2018, Token2049 has grown into one of the most influential gatherings in crypto, attracting thousands of attendees to its two events: Token2049 Dubai, usually held in April or May, and Token2049 Singapore, held around September or October.

 

 

What Happens at Token2049

At Token2049, investors, developers, and founders connect to discuss the crypto industry and current trends. Regulators, banks, and major institutions also attend to explore bridging the gap between Traditional Finance (TradFi) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

 

Token2049 also serves as a launchpad for startups to pitch their ideas and projects to investors. Competitions like NEXUS, which allow startups to showcase what they are building, are usually hosted during Token2049, presenting a big opportunity for builders to connect with investors from over 160 countries.

 

In similar news, The Open Network (TON) Foundation has also cancelled its TON Gateway Dubai conference, which was originally scheduled to be held in May 2026. The cancellation was also due to the ongoing conflict in the region.

 

 

 

Kast, a stablecoin payments company, has raised $80 million in a Series A funding round co-led by QED Investors and Left Lane Capital, bringing its valuation to $600 million.

 

According to the team, the funding will be used to accelerate Kast’s global expansion across North America, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as to expand the company’s workforce, licensing, and product development efforts.

 

 

What Kast is Building

Kast is a stablecoin-powered neobank founded in 2024 by Daniel Bertoli, an ex-partner at Quona Capital, and Raagulan Pathy, a former executive at Circle Internet Financial, the company behind the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin.

 

To reduce the delays and high costs often associated with international remittances through traditional banking systems, Kast is building a blockchain-based platform that uses stablecoins as its settlement layer. 

 

According to the team, “Our end game is clear: to become the leading neobank for the stablecoin economy, serving both users and businesses.” 

 

To ensure that users and businesses of all sizes are catered to, Kast has built a platform that allows users to create digital dollar accounts. These accounts enable users to store dollars digitally, send money globally, and receive international payments. As a result, users do not need a U.S. bank account to hold dollars digitally. 

 

Since its launch in 2024, Kast has achieved a number of impressive milestones, including:

- Reaching over 1 million users on its platform.

- Processing about $5 billion in transaction volume to date.

- Enabling users to send money to more than 190 countries. 

 

This funding marks Kast’s second fundraising round, months after the company raised $10 million in December 2024 in a round led by HongShan Capital Group and Peak XV Partners.

 

 

The Surge of Stablecoins in Institutional Remittances

With a market cap of over $300 billion, stablecoins have seen a remarkable increase in institutional use for cross-border payments. 

 

According to a stablecoin report, enterprise cross-border stablecoin transaction volume grew threefold year over year in 2025, with 25% of corporates now using stablecoins for supply-chain payments, particularly for trade settlement, treasury transfers, and gig-economy payouts. 

 

This increased adoption is due to the very fast settlement times of stablecoins, usually less than 24 hours, a sharp contrast from traditional banking systems, which often take days.

 

Based on current adoption trends, stablecoins are projected to capture 10 to 15% of global cross-border payments by 2030, with their annual settlements reaching approximately $5 trillion by the end of this year.