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Today’s News Headlines

- Neutrl pauses NUSD operations amid reserve concerns
- Securitize shares plunge after $21.7M Q2 loss
- Ondo integrates tokenized STRC into Saturn
- EtherFi migrates Cash card backend to Aave
- Trezor shipping partner breach exposes customer data
- Tether completes first full financial audit
- Attackers drain $25.6M across multiple assets

TL;DR

• Ethereum’s next upgrade, Glamsterdam (targeting Q4 2026), could triple mainnet block capacity — and reset gas fees structurally lower.

• That means gas-gated strategies — active LP rebalancing, tight-margin looping, frequent position management — could pencil out on mainnet again. Rough threshold to watch: strategies that need under ~$15/tx start becoming viable, versus $50+ today.

• A second major change, ePBS, brings block-builder auctions on-chain, cutting reliance on a handful of opaque relay companies and making MEV more transparent.

• Also landing: ETH transfers up to 71% cheaper, larger smart contracts, and 4x faster LST withdrawal queues.

• What to watch: public testnets (expected in the coming months) and whether validators actually vote block capacity upward after activation — the fee relief depends on it.

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What is Glamsterdam?

For years, gas costs have quietly priced retail LPs and active strategy runners out of Ethereum mainnet. Rebalancing weekly, running tight-margin loops, managing smaller positions — all of it made more sense on an L2 once mainnet gas ate the returns. Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, is aimed directly at reversing that.

Glamsterdam is widely seen as the most significant Ethereum change since the Merge in 2022. It’s two upgrades combined — “Gloas” (consensus layer) and “Amsterdam” (execution layer) — and unlike recent forks such as Dencun and Fusaka, which focused on making L2S cheaper, this one rebuilds Ethereum mainnet itself.

Q4 2026 is the official target per the Ethereum Foundation’s roadmap. The feature set is locked, and testing is underway, though Ethereum upgrades tend to run late — early 2027 remains realistic.

What’s included — and what it means for you

Glamsterdam bundles roughly ten improvement proposals (EIPs), but two flagship changes define the upgrade. Everything else supports them.

Triple the capacity (Block-Level Access Lists)

Ethereum processes transactions one at a time — not from lack of computing power, but because it doesn’t know in advance which transactions might touch the same data. It’s a supermarket with one checkout lane because nobody knows what’s in anyone’s cart until they reach the front.

Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) fix this by having every block carry a manifest of which accounts and storage each transaction will touch. Once the network knows what’s in every cart, non-overlapping transactions can process simultaneously. Today’s blocks are capped at 60 million gas; developers are testing at 150 million and targeting 200 million — more than 3x today’s throughput.

For DeFi, this is the change with the most upside for LPs and gas-sensitive strategies. If capacity triples over the following year, mainnet fees could reset structurally lower — reviving smaller LP positions, frequent rebalancing, tighter-margin looping, and active management that only whales can currently afford.

It also narrows the cost gap with L2s, signaling Ethereum wants to compete on L1 capacity again rather than treating mainnet purely as a rollup settlement layer.

Two catches:

• The fork itself doesn’t raise the gas limit — validators vote it up gradually after activation as the network proves it can handle the load, so fee relief arrives over months, not on launch day.

• And parallel processing only helps when transactions don’t overlap — a hundred people swapping in the same hot pool still queue behind each other.

A fairer path from your wallet to the chain (ePBS)

Most users never see this: validators don’t actually build the blocks they propose. About 90% of Ethereum blocks are assembled by specialized “builder” firms — the MEV industry. Between validators and builders sits a middleman called a relay. Relays aren’t part of the Ethereum protocol; nobody elected them.

A handful of them handle nearly all blocks, and a relay can quietly leave a transaction out of a block with no recourse — which is exactly how sanctioned transactions have been filtered from parts of the network before.

Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) brings this whole arrangement inside the protocol and removes the middleman. Builders become official on-chain participants. Their bids for the right to build each block are signed and visible to everyone.

Payment is automatic: if a builder wins a bid and fails to deliver the block, the validator keeps the payment, and the builder eats the loss — no trusted intermediary holding anyone’s money. A rotating committee of 512 validators checks every slot to confirm that the block was delivered on time.

For DeFi users, this means transaction inclusion no longer depends on the private policies of two or three relay companies — the censorship pressure point that’s worried Ethereum users for years loses its structural foothold.

For active traders, the builder bidding war becomes publicly visible for the first time, which means better data on execution quality, and possibly some margin competed back toward users as better inclusion or pricing — though how much is one of the genuinely open questions post-launch.

There’s also a subtle structural change: builders get about nine seconds to broadcast their blocks instead of two. That breathing room is what makes bigger blocks physically practical, but it also slightly reshapes the last-moment bidding dynamics that high-frequency strategies live in — worth its own study if you run latency-sensitive strategies.

Two caveats:

• ePBS makes the MEV industry accountable, not extinct — sandwich attacks don’t disappear.

• And validators can still take direct bids the old way, so relays may fade gradually rather than vanish overnight. Triple the capacity (Block-Level Access Lists)

Also worth knowing

A handful of smaller changes round out the upgrade:

• ETH transfers get up to 71% cheaper at activation, while storage costs rise as computation gets cheaper — protocols with hardcoded gas assumptions should get reviewed before the fork.

• Smart contracts can be nearly 3x larger, easing the need for multi-contract workarounds in complex DeFi protocols.

• LST exit capacity quadruples — withdrawal queues that stretch for weeks during stress events should clear far faster, reducing the discount stETH/rETH can trade at when queues back up.

• Two anticipated features — faster block times and FOCIL (a stronger anti-censorship mechanism) — were deferred to the next upgrade, Hegotá.

What’s not in it

Two anticipated features were deferred to the next upgrade (Hegotá): faster block times — the 12-second slot stays — and FOCIL, the strongest proposed anti-censorship mechanism. Glamsterdam substantially improves the censorship picture; it doesn’t finish the job. And don’t expect faster trade confirmations from this fork.

Timeline and what to watch

Development has been on track since Fusaka shipped on mainnet in December 2025. The feature set locked on June 17, 2026, fixing the core bundle at roughly ten EIPs — from that point, the question stopped being “what’s in it” and became “when.” The official roadmap still lists Q4 2026, with testing currently underway at 2.5x today’s block capacity.

Next up: public testnets, historically a two-to-four-month process, followed by a mainnet date announced a few weeks out. Given that Fusaka itself slipped several months past early estimates, slippage into early 2027 wouldn’t be surprising. Treat it this way: the changes are certain, the quarter is probable, the exact date is unknown.

The bottom line

No action is required from wallet holders today — no migrations, no token swaps, and anyone claiming otherwise ahead of a major fork is running a scam.

But for LPs and strategy runners, now is a reasonable time to revisit which mainnet strategies were shelved purely on gas grounds, and at what fee level they’d pencil again.

The real test comes after activation: whether validators actually vote capacity up, and whether fees fall as much as the upgrade promises. We’ll be watching both closely.

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This Week’s Farming News:

• Pendle launches Ecosystem USDC vault on Morpho, co-curated with Wintermute, distributing 7,500 PENDLE weekly across PT-reUSD, PT-sUSDS, and PT-USDG positions.

• Pendle launched PT Looping incentives — extra 2% APY on top of fixed PT yield through August 27, capped per pool. Existing loopers since July 16 get a retroactive 3% APY bonus.

• Solstice launched strcUSX on Solana, splitting STRC’s ~12% dividend into a senior tranche (~7% target, paid first) and a junior first-loss tranche (~20% target).

• OnRe USDC Vault cap increases to $30M on Solana, offering 7.2% APY including ONyc rewards and 3x OnRe points.

• Mezzanine launches "Tranche Anything" to tokenize any yield product into tranched markets, not just its own vault.

• Tangent Finance highlights Stake DAO's sUSG/reUSD pool offering 27.46% APR (10.44% base + 17.02% $CRV) among stablecoin pools.

Farming Benchmarks:

Unincentivized stablecoin lending is still averaging 3–5% (Aave USDC led last check at 3.47%). Fixed-rate PT benchmarks span 3–7% (USDG ~3.03%, USDS ~5.25%, AUSD ~6.73%). Every farm below beats that baseline — some by 4–5x. When a rate looks too good relative to this range, that gap is usually the incentive/emissions component, not organic yield — check the breakdown in each card.

Earn up to 15% Stables and >5%on ETH:

StakeDAO – OUSD/crvUSD LP –19% APR(Ethereum – Boosted Curve LP)

Curve pool pairing OUSD (Origin Protocol’s yield-bearing stablecoin) with crvUSD, boosted via StakeDAO’s veCRV lock. The headline 19% is almost entirely CRV emissions — organic trading fees contribute just 0.10%. This is the highest APR in the letter, but it’s also attached to the smallest pool by far.

Risk — High ⚠️
Underlying TVL is $3.73K — this is an extremely thin pool. Any meaningful deposit becomes a large share of the pool, and exiting could move the price against you. 99.6% of the yield is CRV emissions, which can taper sharply if gauge votes shift — there is essentially no organic yield floor here. OUSD itself carries its own strategy and smart contract risk. Treat this as a small, speculative allocation only.

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Pendle – LP sUSDe –11.67% APY(Monad – Pendle LP)

An LP position (not the fixed PT) in Pendle’s sUSDe market on Monad. sUSDe is Ethena’s yield-bearing synthetic dollar, combining yield from staked ETH and Ethena’s basis strategy. LPs earn trading fees from PT/YT swap activity plus the underlying sUSDe yield — this is meaningfully more liquid than the OUSD pool above, with $15.46M in AMM liquidity.

Risk - Medium ⚠️ LP yield is variable and will compress as the Oct 22 maturity approaches and PT/YT trading activity slows. sUSDe’s yield has shifted post-Q1-2026 toward more lending/RWA sourcing and less pure basis trade, generally more stable but lower-yielding at the margin. Pendle AMM mechanics behave differently from a standard LP — review how impermanent loss works in this specific pool type before entering. Monad network risk applies. Pendle smart contract risk applies.

StakeDAO – ETH+/WETH LP – 5% APR (Ethereum – Boosted Curve LP)

Curve pool pairing ETH+ with WETH, boosted via StakeDAO. This is the deepest, most established pool in the letter — $9.81M underlying TVL with $3.09M currently deposited through StakeDAO. The lowest headline rate here, but also the lowest risk by a wide margin.

ETH+ is Reserve Protocol’s ETH index token, 100% backed by a diversified basket of five ETH liquid staking tokens: 50.07% wstETH (Lido), 23.50% weETH (Ether.fi), 14.96% sfrxETH (Frax), 6.47% ETHx (Stader), and 5.00% rETH (Rocket Pool), with a 2.34% blended staking yield and a 9% Staked RSR overcollateralization buffer.

Risk — Lower
All five underlying collaterals are ETH-pegged LSTs, so ETH+ tracks ETH closely and impermanent loss against WETH is minimal in normal conditions. The diversification across five LSTs actually reduces single-protocol risk versus holding one LST directly — but it also means you inherit a slice of smart contract risk from all five (Lido, Ether.fi, Frax, Stader, Rocket Pool), plus Reserve’s own index layer. The 9% Staked RSR buffer provides a first-loss cushion if any collateral underperforms. Roughly 30% of the yield (1.63% of 5.53%) is organic trading fees, the rest CRV emissions. Curve and StakeDAO smart contract risk applies.

Today’s News Headlines:

- Hyperliquid adds automated token holder payouts
- Hyperliquid invests $29M for US expansion
- xStocks expands tokenized equities into HyperEVM
- Gnosis proposes Ethereum rollup transition
- Solana narrowly avoids transaction finality halt

Curated Yields, Airdrop Opportunities, TVL Tracking Across Different Protocols + Full Archive of Past Letters

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Your Weekly Airdrop-Farming Alpha is Here!

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This week’s airdrop recap:

Today’s news summaries are at the end

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Airdrop Claims 🪂:

Solstice Finance ($SLX) — Season 2 Claim & Vesting Choice

Solana yield layer offering USX (stablecoin) and eUSX (yield-bearing version from delta-neutral strategies), backed by Deus X Capital and Galaxy Digital. Season 2 Flares points have concluded — claims and vesting registration are live now.

You choose between two vesting paths: 6-month (faster unlock, but requires maintaining your Season 2 TVL baseline) or 9-month (no TVL requirement, longer unlock, applied automatically if you don’t choose). Selection window closes around August 18 — miss it and you default to the 9-month plan. Small claim fee (~$1); very small allocations may not be claimable.

Season 3 is already live for anyone who wants to keep earning — same core mechanics through December 1, 2026.

Official link: claim.solstice.finance/flow?season=s2.

⚠️ 6-month vesting can be forfeited if TVL drops below the required baseline — understand the commitment before choosing. Delta-neutral YieldVault strategies carry execution risk despite the “institutional-grade” framing. $SLX price volatility and unlock-related sell pressure apply. Geo-restrictions may exist. Only use official claim.solstice.finance and app.solstice.finance.

Airdrop News/Updates

Saturn Credit ($USDat) — Season 1 Wrapped, Season 2 Live

Digital credit protocol issuing USDat and yield-bearing sUSDat, backed by exposure to Strategy’s STRC. Season 1 Gravity Points concluded (snapshot ~August 8) — final allocations publish this week on the app. 1M+ Gravity holders get a 20% Orbital boost once confirmed.

Season 2 Orbital Points is live, running ~4 months or until $1B TVL. Highest multipliers on Curve LP, Pendle LP/YT, and PancakeSwap active-range LPs — double points currently live on Monad Pendle markets. Check standing at app.saturn.credit.

Official link: app.saturn.credit

⚠️ No token launched — the foundation has only indicated it “may” allocate up to 5% of a future governance token to Gravity participants, contingent on a successful launch that isn’t guaranteed. Yield depends on $STRC/MicroStrategy dividend health. Not available to US or EU/EEA users. Unstaking queues can constrain exit liquidity. Points carry no guaranteed monetary value.

Arc — Circle’s L1, Mainnet September 16

Circle’s institutional L1 uses USDC as native gas with sub-second finality — backed by an exceptional validator lineup (BlackRock, Visa, DTCC, Mastercard) and a $222M presale at $3B FDV led by a16z. Public testnet is live with 100+ builders on private mainnet. Public Mainnet launches September 16.

No open retail points program — this is a heavily institutional-tilted launch. What you can actually do is participate in the testnet for potential future consideration, and claim any available Arc Pass (Founder/Builder Passes, automatically airdropped, claimable until mainnet) before September 16.

Official blog link: https://www.arc.io/pressroom/circle-announces-founding-validator-cohort-and-major-integrations-for-arc-ahead-of-september-16-mainnet-launch

⚠️ Farming surface for retail users is thin given the institutional focus — treat any potential community allocation as speculative and low-probability. Token already had a large private presale (740M tokens at $0.30) — public tokenomics and community distribution details not fully released. Mainnet is still ~5 weeks out with execution risk remaining.

⚠️DISCLAIMER NOTICE⚠️ A note before the next section:

• New protocols often carry the most attractive airdrop odds, early TVL, thin points competition, and generous multipliers. But that same immaturity is exactly what makes them risky.

• Smart-contract exploits, depegs, insolvent yield strategies, and outright project failure happen disproportionately in a protocol’s first 3–6 months (we’ve seen it play out with Dango and others in this very letter). Nothing here has a multi-year track record.

• Treat every entry below as capital at risk, not “free points”. Size positions like you could lose them entirely, and never deposit more than you’re fully prepared to write off.

New Opportunities:

Nado — Weekly Cash Rewards + Points on Ink L2

CLOB DEX on Ink (Kraken’s L2) unifying spot, perps, and money markets under one margin account for high capital efficiency, built by a team with Kraken and Vertex Protocol roots.

Two reward streams live simultaneously: a weekly $100K USDT0 cash pool ($50K unlocked from week start, another $50K scaling with platform volume) split proportionally by maker/taker volume and open interest, plus an ongoing Season 2 points program (open access, no invite needed) earned via trading, NLP vault deposits, referrals, and xStocks collateral multipliers.

No native $NADO token confirmed — points are oriented toward the broader Ink ecosystem airdrop. Onboard at app.nado.xyz, bridge to Ink, and focus on maker volume plus maintaining open interest to capture both the cash pool and points efficiently.

Official link: app.nado.xyz

⚠️ ⚠️ Perp trading carries real leverage and liquidation risk. Points-to-token conversion mechanics and size aren’t fully public — this is positioning for a broader Ink ecosystem airdrop, not a confirmed Nado token. Cash pool’s second $50K only unlocks with high platform volume, so individual share can dilute if volume spikes without your participation scaling proportionally. Ink L2 smart-contract risk applies.

Arcus — Confirmed Token, No Details Yet

Self-custodial DEX built by the dYdX Labs team in partnership with Robinhood Crypto, running on Robinhood Chain. Live spot trading of tokenized equities (TSLA, NVDA, etc.) at 0% fees, plus perps up to 50x currently in beta with waitlist rollout. ~$18-20M TVL with real organic volume ($94.5M perps + $40.8M spot in one recent week).

The dYdX Foundation confirmed Arcus will have its own token, separate from $DYDX, with an allocation reserved for the dYdX community. No ticker, supply, or TGE date announced yet.

Position now: trade spot Stock Tokens at app.arcus.xyz (spot volume counts toward perps waitlist rank, backdated), and join the perps waitlist at waitlist.arcus.xyz — ranking factors include prior perps volume (dYdX, Hyperliquid, Lighter), referrals, and linking multiple wallets, including your dYdX v4 wallet.

Official link for waitlist: app.arcus.xyz

⚠️ ⚠️ Token details are completely unknown — size, mechanics, vesting, and TGE date all unconfirmed. Not available in the US, UK, Canada, and other restricted jurisdictions. Perps still gated in beta. Ignore any unofficial “Points Epoch” or “$ARC dashboard” posts — these are scams. Only use official app.arcus.xyz and waitlist.arcus.xyz.

Today’s News Headlines:

- InfiniFi launches institutional private credit product
- Vitalik outlines Ethereum’s new privacy roadmap
- Pear Protocol adds AI-powered trading tools
- LlamaRisk launches Aave V4, risk explorer
- tx XRPL bridge exploited, XRP reserves drained
- Harmony hit by unauthorized ONE token minting

NEW Promising Airdrops

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Today’s News Headlines:

- xStocks launches tokenized equities on Hyperliquid
- Maple completes first SYRUP token buyback
- Strategy pushes STRC toward $100 par
- Jupiter launches Smart Vaults on Solana
- Solomon Labs launches yield-bearing USDv
- Solstice launches tranching for STRC yield
- Resupply launches syrupUSDC lending market
- FX100 launches liquidation-protected perps testnet

Key Takeaways:

Regime — Neutral, with a split underneath.

Equities hit records after a weak jobs report. Capital came into crypto too — stablecoin supply expanded for the first time in two months and ETF flows posted their best week since April. But it landed in wrappers and yield, not price: bitcoin closed flat and lost relative ground for the fourth straight week. The money is arriving; it isn’t buying risk.

Where capital’s flowing — Into yield, not risk.

The dollars entering crypto went almost entirely into instruments that pay: tokenized treasuries and yield-bearing stablecoins grew double digits while USDT shrank. On-chain, the growth chains are running subsidized carry loops — Robinhood Chain and Monad both saw fresh USDe arrive to feed cheap borrowing against it.

What to watch — Wednesday’s July CPI.

The first inflation print since the jobs miss flipped the rate debate from “will they hike” to “might they pause.” A soft read cements the pause; a hot one revives it.

Biggest risk — The growth is rented.

Robinhood Chain and Monad’s inflows are incentive-funded carry trades, durable only while the Merkl budgets and Ethena’s basis yield hold. When the subsidy clock runs down, the capital can leave as fast as it arrived.

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1A. Traditional Macro

Crypto and equity comparison - BTC/NQ ratio

Bitcoin closed the week roughly flat while equities rallied hard, so the ratio fell again. This is the fourth straight week a risk-on catalyst has bypassed crypto: price didn’t drop; it simply held still through a move that lifted everything around it.

One number drove the week:

July payrolls fell 23,000 against a forecast of an 80,000 gain — the first monthly loss since February — with May and June revised down a combined 103,000, dropping the three-month average to about 20,000. The unemployment rate ticked to 4.1%, but because workers left the labor force.

Everything else followed from that print: net liquidity steadied at its 20-week average (+$14.53B), the 2-year yield slipped to 4.19% as September hike odds fell to ~42%, the dollar eased beneath its 20-week average, and equities read the weakness as good news — the S&P rose 3.6% to a record, the Nasdaq 5.2%. Bitcoin closed flat.

Verdict: A cracking labor market pulled yields and the dollar lower and sent equities to record highs on Fed-pause hopes — a clean risk-on week by every traditional measure. Bitcoin closed flat and lost ground on a relative basis.

1B. Crypto Capital On-Ramp

Total stablecoin supply + $879M(+0.29%)

The first weekly expansion after a two-month contraction that ran roughly $13.8B off the total. The outflows stopped the same week ETF flows turned and net liquidity steadied.

BTC and ETH Exchange Flows

Exchange reserves: BTC up, ETH still leaving. Bitcoin reserves rose to 2.718M as price recovered from ~$62.5K to $65.1K — coins moving toward exchanges as bids returned, the less constructive read.

Ethereum reserves fell to 15.12M while price rose to ~$1,924, holding below the 21-day EMA all month. The divergence flagged last week widened: ETH left exchanges as it climbed, BTC arrived on them.

ETF flows

ETF flows: strongest week since April. Spot Bitcoin ETFs drew $853.5M with inflows every session — more than the previous four weeks combined and a ~$915M swing from the prior week’s outflow.

Ethereum ETFs added ~$244M, a fifth straight positive week that reversed last issue’s deceleration, back to nine figures from under $30M. BlackRock’s IBIT and ETHA supplied about $896M of the combined $1.1B.

1C. Week-Ahead Catalysts

Wed, Aug 12 — July CPI. The dominant release; the first inflation read since the jobs miss reset the rate debate. A soft print cements the pause that drove last week’s records, a hot one revives the hike case.

Section 2 — Onchain Risk Regime

Individual Stablecoins Flows: the rotation into yield is now a weekly event

The two largest dollar gainers were both tokenized-treasury products — USYC (+$398.7M, +13.26%) and USDY (+$291.3M, +13.54%) — each growing double digits in a single week, joined by USDG (+17.85% over 30d) and GHO (+16.47% over 30d).

USDC grew $338.6M but only +0.47%, a function of size, not momentum. Against that, USDT — 60.88% of all supply — shrank $238.3M. Total supply expanded even as its largest component leaked: the entire net gain came from USDC and the yield-bearing names.

Aave / Sphere Rates : Funding Cooled, Credit Flat

Sphere’s borrow (4.21%) and supply (3.26%) APYs held. The funding benchmark fell 0.12pp to 4.58%, compressing the spread over borrow to 0.37pp from 1.87pp last week — the crowded-long premium from last issue came off sharply.

ETH/BTC Comparison Chart

The ratio closed above its 20-week average, which is levelling off after declining since February — the July reclaim has now held over a month, matching the exchange-reserve divergence above.

Verdict: The dollars entering crypto went almost entirely into instruments that pay. Perp funding cooled and lending rates held flat. Ether kept its edge over bitcoin. Capital is present, and positioning is calmer — but it is parking in yield rather than deploying into risk.

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Section 3 — Chain Comparison

3A. Stablecoin flows by chain

Robinhood Chain — Retail USDG Deposits Are Funding a Cheap USDe Loop

Stablecoin market cap: $582.5M | +$47.7M (7d) | +$282.8M (30d)

Robinhood Chain’s stablecoin base has nearly doubled in a month, and this week’s growth is led by USDe (+$39.0M to $253.4M) ahead of USDG (+$8.6M to $329.0M). The engine is Robinhood Earn, which surpassed $250M in USDG vault deposits just over one month after launch (Robinhood, August 7). Those deposits flow into the Steakhouse USDG vault on Morpho, where a Merkl campaign pays approximately 7% APR — 3.09% protocol yield plus 3.91% rewards, with 325 days of budget remaining (Merkl).

Supply arriving this fast keeps USDG borrowing cheap — 3.58% against USDe, 4.06% against syrupUSDG, and 2.75% against spUSDG, at 91.50% LLTV (Morpho markets) — making loops on all three collaterals attractive. $225.9M of USDG is drawn against USDe alone. That loop demand is what pulls USDe onto the chain, while the Earn program keeps replenishing the USDG that funds it.

Monad — Ethena’s Liquid Leverage Boost Tops Up the Incentive Stack

Monad’s headline growth understates roughly $100M of gross inflows into GHO (+$52.7M), USDe (+$36.9M), and USDC (+$7.5M), offset by rotation out of USDT (−$30.0M) and AUSD (−$28.6M). The base driver is the ongoing Aave incentive program, paying roughly 5.4–6% supply rewards across the major stablecoins via Merkl (Merkl) and carrying Aave past $500M in deposits on the chain (Aave, August 4). On August 5, Ethena added a 1% boost over the 4% base promotional rate for USDe collateralized on Aave — 5% APY in total, capped at $250M of USDe, and the highest Liquid Leverage rate on any chain (Ethena, August 5).

The boost is pulling in fresh USDe: from near zero a month ago to $49.2M today, $36.9M of it this week. GHO, the week’s largest contributor, is the borrow leg of the same trade — its circulation scales with borrowing on Aave’s Monad deployment and carries its own 5.81% supply reward.

Morph — Up 50% Week-Over-Week on USDC Alone

Morph is the smallest base but the fastest in relative terms, up roughly 50% week-over-week — entirely in USDC (+$10.2M to $23.4M; USDT flat at $7.1M).

The incentive program is still attracting new deposits at pace, and the concentration in USDC points to the destination: Gauntlet’s curated vaults went live on Morph on July 31, led by Gauntlet USDC Prime on Morpho, distributed to more than 125 million users through Bitget and Bitget Wallet (Gauntlet, July 31). Growth here should track the incentive budget and the Bitget funnel until the deposit base diversifies.

3B. Structural Shifts- Onchain Activity

Base vs Robinhood Chain: Who Is Taking What From Whom

Robinhood Chain is competing with Base for users and trading flow — not for capital. Five weeks after its July 1 mainnet launch, it has flipped Base in daily active users and printed $17.7B in 30-day DEX volume — 87% of Base’s $20.4B, and ahead of Base on many individual days. On every capital metric, however, Base is roughly ten times larger and did not shrink during the ramp: Base TVL rose 14% between July 1 and August 10 to $4.68B, its stablecoins held at $4.9B, and Morpho on Base crossed $5B in deposits.

Base’s slowdown is real, but it predates Robinhood: users have faded since the mid-2025 content-coin collapse, and TVL peaked in November 2025. The chain that actually paid for Robinhood’s rise is Arbitrum (−58% TVL YTD), which hosted — then lost — the stock-token franchise. Coinbase is still acting like the threat is real: a 7.02% USDC vault launched days after Robinhood’s 7% Earn campaign, and tokenized equities are now “imminent” on Base.

Head-to-Head Snapshot

TVL: No Cannibalization — the Donor Is Arbitrum

Base added roughly $560M of TVL during the exact five weeks Robinhood Chain built its first $479M — Robinhood’s capital came from Ethena bridge inflows and Paxos USDG minting, not Base outflows. Both chains run on the same credit engine: Morpho is 70% of Base’s TVL and, with Spark, 73% of Robinhood’s — expansion, not migration.

Robinhood’s version is a subsidized carry trade: Robinhood Earn pays ~7% on USDG via Steakhouse-curated Morpho vaults, borrowed at 86% utilization against USDe, syrupUSDG, and spUSDG collateral. Note DefiLlama excludes Robinhood’s tokenized stocks (~$30M) from chain TVL — the headline number is a stablecoin-lending number.

Stablecoins: A Two-Coin Carry Trade vs a $4.8B USDC Base

The stablecoin picture is the loop made visible: exactly two assets, with bridged Ethena USDe supplying 69% of the growth as the collateral leg to USDG’s borrowable leg — durable only as long as the subsidy and Ethena’s basis yield. Base’s $4.9B barely moved (+0.6% 30d), but its fastest-growing component is the same asset: USDe +44% in 30 days, pulled in by Coinbase’s rival vault. Ethena is supplying yield to both sides of this fight.

DEX and Perp Volume: The One Front Where Robinhood Actually Took Share

Volume is where competition has teeth: Robinhood reached parity in three weeks, passed Base in the week of July 20–26, and now regularly outranks it on 24-hour windows, while Base’s weekly volume fell 37% from its June average.

But July’s combined volume ($39B) exceeded June’s ($32B) — Robinhood grew the pie as much as it took share — and the flow it captured is ~75% memecoins (GMGN alone routed $1.45B in 30 days), the same low-loyalty churn Base already lost with its meme era. Base’s remaining flow is majors-led: cbBTC/WETH/USDC pools, Aerodrome at 52%. In perps, Base leads $5.93B to $701M over 30 days.

RWA and Tokenized Stocks: Big Narrative, Small Numbers — For Now

The category both companies are actually fighting over barely exists on either chain. Robinhood’s stock tokens sum to $28M — 1.2% of a $2.37B market led by Ondo, Binance’s bStocks, and Backed’s xStocks — and contribute ~9% of chain volume (~$30M/day); July’s “RWAs up 5x” headlines were mostly Maple syrupUSDG inflows. Base has none live, but Coinbase’s 1:1 share-backed product with dividend pass-through would out-spec Robinhood’s MiFID derivative wrappers the day it ships. The next two quarters decide whether Robinhood’s meme-and-subsidy traction converts into durable capital once the 7% program sunsets — and whether Base’s equity launch restarts its user growth. Today’s scoreboard: Base keeps the capital, Robinhood took the crowd, and tokenized equities are 99% up for grabs.

Section 4 — Project & Protocol Discovery

4A. Token Price Movers - Observations, not trade ideas.

CAP (+80%): USD deposits rose 68.59% since July 14, which Cap credits to institutions and neobanks depositing for yield. Both sides of the credit engine expanded through July: Aave listed stcUSD on MegaETH’s v3, and Flow Traders opened a credit line — diversifying the borrower base.

CVX (+29%), CRV (+18.9%), and RSUP(+18%)
The Curve complex moved together on Resupply Summer, a cross-protocol incentive campaign launched August 3 routing months of rewards through Curve’s Llamalend V2 markets, with Convex, Frax and Inverse all participating. Proposal 33 on August 5 raised RSUP borrowing rewards 33%. CVX has no standalone yield mechanism — it tracks Curve’s fee and TVL activity — so it moved with the ecosystem rather than on its own news.

PUMP (+37.8%). No identified catalyst this week; the move reads as continuation of the undervalued-versus-fees re-rating.

LISTA (+27.7%). Recurring, not new — same tokenized-equity collateral expansion and weekly buybacks as last week. Momentum, not a fresh catalyst.

4B. TVL Gainers — Ranked by absolute $ inflow.

Cap — Institutional Deposits, Reinforced by a Senior-Tranche Borrowing Layer

Cap’s growth is being driven by institutional deposit demand. cUSD deposits have risen 68.59% since July 14, which Cap credits to institutions and neobanks depositing into the protocol to fulfill their yield requirements (Cap, August 7). Both sides of the credit engine expanded through July: Aave listed stcUSD on MegaETH’s v3 instance, and Flow Traders began accessing a credit line through Cap — a diversification of the borrower and underwriting base that gives institutional depositors more places for their capital to earn.

A second, reinforcing driver is the borrowing layer forming on top of Cap’s senior tranche. TermMax allows users to borrow up to 500,000 USDC against Royco’s stcUSD senior tranche at 3% APY (TermMax, August 6), and Royco highlights that borrowing against Cap’s and Maple’s senior tranches is now cheaper than ever, improving capital efficiency (Royco, August 7). Holders of stcUSD can now access cheap liquidity without exiting their position, which makes the deposit base stickier and supports continued inflows. Cap’s institutional trajectory has independent support: the protocol is backed by Franklin Templeton and Susquehanna, has raised more than $63M, and its approved reserve assets include WisdomTree’s WTGXX, BlackRock’s BUIDL, and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI.

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This week in DeFi:

Circle's Arc mainnet launches September 16, with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, and Mastercard among its 11 founding validators. Ether.fi also made a major move, splitting weETH into pure liquid staking and launching weETHs to carry restaking exposure separately. On the risk side, Coldcard hardware wallet hack losses now top $114M, and a live BTCPay Server zero-day is draining Lightning nodes.

DeFi📈

• Circle is launching Arc mainnet September 16 with 11 founding validators including BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, and Mastercard.

  • The permissioned validator set enables institutional-grade stablecoin infrastructure across Ethereum, Binance, Near, and Noble.

• Ether.fi separates weETH into pure liquid staking and launches weETHs as a dedicated liquid restaking token powered by Symbiotic.

  • This simplifies the product by removing restaking exposure from weETH entirely.

• Term V2 launches on Ethereum, Plasma, Binance, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and Base with peer-to-peer fixed-rate market execution. Launch partners include Ether Fi, Falcon X, Pareto Credit, Pendle, and Tori Finance.

• Kamino launches Institutional Yield on Solana, connecting onchain capital with institutional credit markets through purpose-built vault infrastructure.

• Raydium launches Limit Orders on Solana, allowing trades to execute automatically when target prices are reached.

• Morpho introduces Multi-market Offer, allowing capital to be allocated across multiple markets simultaneously until matched.

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<Discover Yields on DeFi Saver> | Today in DeFi is Supported by DeFi Saver

Issues⚠️

• Bitcoin stolen from Coldcard hardware wallet hack now exceeds $114 million. The ongoing security breach highlights vulnerabilities in popular hardware wallet infrastructure.

• Users are reporting stuck withdrawals since July 26 as BitMart winds down, with one user claiming $10.1M frozen and support staff going silent.

  • Founder Sheldon broke silence days later, denying misappropriation or fleeing, and says the team is conducting asset reviews and considering third-party audits — but has not given a timeline for resuming withdrawals.

• BTCPay Server faces an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability draining Lightning node funds, with Foundation and Citadel21 already compromised despite ongoing patch efforts for version 2.4.2.

• Seamless DAO completed remediation for the USDC vault on Morpho’s Base deployment, contributing 190,925 USDC under SIP-51. The incident response addresses the USR exploit with an additional 190,897 USDC in recovery funds.

• A fake Wasabi Wallet drainer app appeared on the Apple App Store, with one victim already losing 6 BTC — the 27th wallet clone to reach the App Store this year. A fake Ledger app remains the worst offender at $9.3M stolen.

  • Always verify wallet apps through official links before downloading.

Stablecoins/RWA🪙

• Bond SuperApp launches pre-deposit campaign on Ethereum, Avalanche, and Linea with up to $10M in incentives from 0G Labs.

• Apyx launched on Solana, letting users stake apxUSD to mint apyUSD and earn real-time yield backed by Strategy’s STRC preferred equity — with points accruing toward the October 13 APYX TGE.

• Backpack Securities launches real stocks onchain via Solana, tokenizing U.S. brokerage shares for seamless ecosystem movement.

News🗞️

• Senate Leader Thune advanced the CLARITY Act toward a floor vote in September, marking a major legislative push for crypto market structure regulation.

• EIP-8361 proposes a tapered burn on staking rewards that fully offsets issuance around 50% staked ETH, capping the incentive for stake growth beyond that point.

  • Critics including Aave’s Stani Kulechov warn it could slash yields and disrupt DeFi protocols reliant on staking returns.

• Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Wallets, enabling stablecoin storage, service payments, and fund receipts natively across the web — bringing crypto payments infrastructure directly into internet plumbing.

• ai16z founder Shaw declared the token dead and the foundation winding down, following a Burwick lawsuit settlement that drained the treasury.

  • He said he never sold his holdings and will keep building the Eliza AI framework independently, without a token, citing burnout and community hostility.

• Mastercard is piloting its Crypto Credential compliance framework with Borderless.xyz to verify participants in cross-border stablecoin payments.

• Multipli launched its MULT token community sale via SONAR, Coinbase Echo’s onchain sale platform, with a pre-open registration phase now live at claim.multipli.fi.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- EtherFi split weETH into two distinct products
- Late Ondo Founder’s mother fights CEO legal control

TL;DR

• $116M drained from 5,200+ Coldcard wallets (Jul 30–Aug 3, 2026) — not phishing, not malware. A 5-year-old firmware bug silently disabled the device’s true random-number generator, making seeds guessable.

• Affected: any seed generated on-device between March 2021 and the July 31 patch. The patch doesn’t fix existing seeds — you have to generate a new one and move funds.

• This isn’t new: weak randomness has now cost crypto $15B+ over the past decade across multiple “unrelated” hacks.

• What actually protects you:

  1. Pick wallets by entropy architecture, or supply your own via dice rolls

  2. A phone only replaces a hardware wallet if it’s permanently air-gapped

  3. Multisig only works if the keys come from different vendors

  4. MPC removes the single-seed failure point entirely

• Do this now: if any seed in your setup was born on a Coldcard between March 2021–July 31, rotate it.

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<Discover Yields on DeFi Saver> | Today in DeFi is Supported by DeFi Saver

At 01:10 UTC on July 30, a wallet-draining operation unlike any before it began executing on the Bitcoin blockchain. Over the next 41 minutes, 1,082.65 BTC — about $70 million — moved out of 1,196 addresses. No phishing links, no malware, no devices touched. The victims were Coldcard users: owners of the hardware wallet built for, and marketed to, the most serious self-custody crowd in Bitcoin.

By August 3, four sweep waves had taken roughly 1,816 BTC — nearly $116 million — from more than 5,200 addresses, per Galaxy Research’s tracking, with victims literally racing the attackers with replace-by-fee transactions to rescue their own coins.

Strike CEO Jack Mallers called it “one of the most serious wallet security incidents Bitcoin has seen.” On-chain analyst James Check put it more personally: “I feel betrayed by something I trusted very deeply.”

The uncomfortable part: these users did everything right. They bought a respected hardware wallet, kept their seeds offline, never clicked anything. The flaw was in the one step nobody can see — the moment the device generated their seed phrase.

How the exploit happened

A quick refresher on what a seed phrase actually is. When a wallet is created, the device draws 128 or 256 bits of randomness — entropy — and encodes them as 12 or 24 words (BIP39). Those words are stretched into a master seed, and every private key and address the wallet will ever produce is derived deterministically from it. One random draw, at creation, secures everything forever. If that draw is truly random, a 2^128 keyspace means no computer on earth can find you. If it isn’t, nothing else about your setup matters.

Coldcard’s draw wasn’t. In a March 2021 firmware rewrite, a build configuration set the flag enabling the microcontroller’s hardware true-RNG to 0. A safety check in the code asked whether that flag existed — not whether it was actually switched on.

Since a flag set to zero still exists, the check passed, the compile-time error that should have screamed “get a HW TRNG plz” never fired, and seed generation silently fell through to a deterministic software generator called Yasmarang, seeded with little more than the device’s serial-style ID and its clock counters.

As Wizardsardine put it, the code that was supposed to mix physical noise into the seed “was in fact mixing two software PRNGs together.” The genuine hardware RNG sat in the firmware, compiled and unreachable, for five years.

The result was a keyspace an attacker can simply enumerate. Block’s engineering team — who published the definitive teardown — put older Mk2/Mk3 devices at roughly 2^16 to 2^40 possible seeds, and found that even on newer Mk4/Mk5/Q devices, where Coinkite initially claimed ~72 bits of protection from secure-element mixing, only 32 bits of that entropy actually survived into the final seed.

A 32-bit space can be cracked in hours on a single gaming GPU. So the attack needed no access to any device: regenerate every possible weak seed offline, derive the addresses, match them against the blockchain, and sweep everything funded — all at once, with robotic fingerprints like identical overpaid fees and no change outputs.

Who’s affected: essentially any seed generated on-device between March 2021 and the July 31 emergency firmware (Mk2/Mk3 on 4.0.1–4.1.9, Mk4/Mk5 before 5.6.0, Q before 1.5.0Q).

Safe: seeds created with 50+ dice rolls (Coldcard’s own dice feature mixed in user entropy — the users who took the paranoid path were saved), seeds imported from elsewhere, wallets with pre-2021 history, and funds behind a strong, unique BIP39 passphrase (though Coinkite advises even passphrase users to migrate when practical).

Critically, the firmware patch does not fix an existing seed — affected users must generate a fresh seed on patched firmware (or with dice) and move coins on-chain.

One caution on the discourse: Coinkite’s CEO has speculated that AI-assisted code review found the bug, and the “AI found it” framing is spreading. Nobody has demonstrated that. What’s undisputed is that a five-year-old logic error in widely viewable source went unnoticed by everyone — including Coinkite’s own AI-assisted reviews — until the money moved.

Ledger’s CTO used the same “reportedly” hedge — while noting his security team already runs LLM agents against its own products, with real CVEs to show for it. The honest summary: AI-assisted bug hunting is now table stakes on both sides of the fence; its role in this exploit remains unproven.

This keeps happening

Coldcard is the biggest hardware-wallet entropy failure, but weak randomness is arguably crypto’s most repeated catastrophic bug.

• In 2013, Android’s unseeded SecureRandom made early mobile Bitcoin wallets predictable.

• In 2022, the Profanity vanity-address tool’s 32-bit seed cost Wintermute ~$160M.

• Trust Wallet’s browser extension shipped 2^32 possible mnemonics in late 2022 (disclosed in 2023),

• and that same year the Milk Sad researchers showed Libbitcoin’s bx seed had the same 32-bit flaw — a rabbit hole that eventually revealed the 2020 draining of ~137,000 BTC from the LuBian mining pool — the DOJ later seized 127,271 of those coins, worth ~$15B, making it the largest weak-RNG loss in history.

• Three weeks before Coldcard, Coinspect disclosed “Ill Bloom” — five more wallet implementations with predictable recovery phrases, $5M+ already swept.

The pattern is always the same: the wallet looks perfectly normal for years, then an entire cohort is drained in minutes. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet summed it up this week: “A bad RNG is silent.

The output still looks random and passes casual inspection” — you find out when someone else does, on-chain. Which means the practical response isn’t “audit your firmware” — it’s structuring your custody so that no single RNG, vendor, or device can be a fatal point of failure.

Fix #1: hardware wallets, chosen on entropy architecture

Hardware wallets are still the right tool for keeping keys off internet-connected machines. Hardware wallets are dedicated signing devices where the keys never leave the device. What changes after Coldcard is how you choose and initialize them.

Favor devices where randomness doesn’t depend on one chip or one vendor’s code path. Trezor documents device-, host- and secure-element-sourced entropy plus a user-runnable entropy check, and markets the Safe 7’s Tropic Square TROPIC01 as the first auditable secure element. Keystone supports dice-generated seeds, and its post-exploit statement points users to the firmware source lines where its three TRNG sources are combined — though its secure-element firmware remains closed, so source review covers the application layer, not the whole stack. Bitcoin focused options like BitBox and SeedSigner go further, but aren’t well suited for DeFi.

For actively signing DeFi transactions, the practical field narrows to four, each with a real tradeoff.

• Ledger: the broadest chain and dApp coverage, but closed-source firmware — you’re trusting its certifications — and a customer-data history some buyers still weigh.

• Trezor: open firmware, EVM via Suite and MetaMask plus Solana on the Safe line, but USB-connected rather than air-gapped.

• Keystone: air-gapped QR signing that pairs with MetaMask, Rabby, Safe and Solflare, with the closed-secure-element caveat above.

• And GridPlus’s Lattice1: a large touchscreen aimed at decoding complex calldata — though note that the claim it would have caught a Bybit-style masked transaction is GridPlus’s own marketing.

Settle the entropy question first, then make sure the device actually speaks your chains — and pick the tradeoff you can live with.

Better yet, supply the entropy yourself. The guidance worth trusting here comes from parties other than the vendor that just got burned: security researchers were recommending dice-generated seeds within a day of the exploit, and Keystone’s post-exploit math thread lays out the numbers — at ~2.58 bits per roll, 50 rolls clears 128 bits (12-word security), while a genuine 256-bit, 24-word seed takes ~100 rolls; its latest firmware hides the 24-word option until 100 rolls are logged, so a 24-word phrase can’t quietly carry 12-word entropy. Even Coinkite’s own advisory concedes the point: its dice-roll users came through the exploit untouched.

Two caveats to keep you honest. Open source helped diagnose this bug in hours, but it didn’t prevent it — the flaw sat in viewable code for five years, so “open source” is necessary, not sufficient. And buy direct from the manufacturer, never marketplaces — pre-seeded and tampered devices remain a live scam.

One more shopping aid: on the night of August 3, BitBox posted four questions worth asking any manufacturer — where does the randomness come from, and how many independent sources feed it; can you verify the firmware on your device matches the published code (reproducible builds “prove the binary matches the source — it does not prove the source is correct,” which is precisely how Coldcard failed); who approves a change before it ships; and what does the process look like after a bug is found. Vendor content, sure — but the questions transfer to every device on this list.

Ledger’s response — 193K views and counting — champions the other school: certification over self-verification. Its seeds come from a hardware TRNG inside a certified secure element, evaluated under the German BSI’s AIS-31 methodology (PTG.2 certified), and “generating a biased or deterministic random number” sits as Threat #1 in its published security targets. In a longer essay, CTO Charles Guillemet defends keeping that layer closed-source — Coldcard’s bug sat in public code for five years, and “’open’ and ‘reviewed’ are not the same word” — which is, of course, exactly the tradeoff open-source advocates reject — and Ledger’s own record (the 2020 customer-data leak, the 2023 Recover backlash) is part of why “trust our certifications” lands badly with a slice of the market. Two schools, one test: entropy you can independently verify, or entropy independently certified. A wallet offering neither now has some explaining to do.

Fix #2: the dedicated phone:

Two weeks before the exploit, investigator ZachXBT argued that a dedicated iPhone offers better security than a hardware wallet. Post-Coldcard, part of that holds up and part of it needs a sharper edge — because “a phone” is really two very different security tiers, and the argument only lands once you say which one you mean.

Start by separating three things people blur together: how the seed is generated (entropy), where the key lives once it exists (custody), and whether the device that holds it ever touches a network (exposure). ZachXBT’s strongest ground is entropy. The claim gets shaky on exposure — and exposure is what decides whether a phone replaces a hardware wallet or merely beats your laptop.

It also helps to separate two jobs that a single wallet app often does at once: the signer (where the key is generated and lives) and the front-end (what builds, previews, and broadcasts the transaction). In a hot wallet, one app does both. In a cold setup, you split them across two devices — and that split is the whole game.

Option 1 — A connected phone: a hardened hot wallet, not a cold one

A dedicated phone that signs while online is a hot wallet. A far better one than an extension on your daily laptop — fewer apps, no sketchy sideloads, less to go wrong — but the key is reachable over the network the entire time it’s transacting. Malware, a malicious app update, an OS zero-day: any of them can, in principle, exfiltrate a key that lives on a connected device. Dedicating the phone shrinks the odds; it doesn’t close the pathway.

This is the tier Rabby lives in. Rabby is online by design — it fetches balances, runs its transaction simulation, and broadcasts, all of which need a network. Put a seed into Rabby mobile and it’s a hot wallet, no matter what mode the phone is in; you cannot make Rabby itself “air-gapped.”

If its a dedicated phone, rabby can be a very good hot wallet given the transaction simulation, but it’s still a hot wallet. Use this tier for spending-size DeFi funds or as a multisig signer, not your main funds.

Option 2 — An air-gapped phone: a real hardware-wallet substitute (one tier down)

Take a different phone permanently offline and turn it into a QR-code signer, and the calculus flips. The key sits on a device with no route to the outside world; even fully compromised, it can’t leak a secret it has no way to transmit. That’s genuine cold storage and a reasonable stand-in for a hardware wallet.

The concrete tool here is AirGap Vault: open source, installed on a spare offline phone, it holds the key and signs by QR. This is where the signer/front-end split pays off — AirGap Vault is the offline signer, and Rabby browser extension(or another online wallet) becomes the watch-only front-end you pair to it over QR. Rabby builds and previews the transaction, shows a QR, the Vault signs and returns a QR, Rabby broadcasts. The key never leaves the offline phone; Rabby never holds it. That’s the setup that earns the “hardware-wallet substitute” label.

“Reasonable,” not “identical.” A boutique signer keeps its key in a secure element as a non-exportable key and enforces the air-gap in hardware. A phone app keeps the seed as words in app storage, and the air-gap holds only as long as your discipline does — one “just this once” reconnection breaks it. So rank it honestly: dedicated air-gapped hardware (a Keystone runs this exact QR flow with a secure element) at the top, an air-gapped phone a solid step below, any connected phone a rung below that.

Where the seed comes from

Now the part the Coldcard story is actually about. When a mobile wallet generates your 12 or 24 words, the entropy should come from the operating system’s CSPRNG, continuously seeded by the phone’s hardware RNG — the most attacked, most audited randomness stack in consumer computing. Conditional on the app actually calling it, that’s better-reviewed randomness than any boutique wallet’s TRNG will ever get.

That condition is the whole game, and it’s exactly where wallets keep dying. Trust Wallet’s browser extension, Cake Wallet, Klever — each rolled its own randomness instead of calling the platform CSPRNG, and each shipped guessable seeds.

That’s Coldcard’s mistake in mobile form: not bad hardware, but code that bypassed the good randomness sitting right there. The lesson transfers cleanly — on a phone as on a hardware wallet, the only thing that matters is an open-source, audited key-generation path.

Which raises the obvious question: how do you check that? You’re not going to read the code. In practice “checkable” means four things stacked up — the source is public, independent firms have audited it, the store build is reproducible from that source (so the app you install matches the code that was audited), and it leans on standard BIP-39 libraries instead of home-rolled crypto.

The one consumer-facing tool that verifies the reproducibility piece is WalletScrutiny, which tracks whether a wallet’s published build actually matches its source. Check it before you trust an app with generation.

From there you have two ways to get a seed:

a. Generate on the phone, with a checkable app.

The strongest pick is AirGap Vault — not only open source, but it lets you fold in your own dice or coin entropy on top of the device RNG, which is the closest mobile equivalent to rolling dice on a Coldcard.

For an EVM hot wallet, Rabby mobile is now fully open source with public audits from Cure53, Least Authority, and SlowMist.

On the Bitcoin side: Nunchuk (multisig-first, air-gap friendly, and it ships verified reproducible builds — the gold standard), BlueWallet, Blockstream Green, or Phoenix for Lightning. MetaMask is the most-reviewed code in the space but its license isn’t strictly open — treat “open source” there with an asterisk. And skip Cake Wallet for generation; it’s patched, but it’s on the cautionary list above.

b. Generate the entropy elsewhere, then import.

If, post-Coldcard, you’d rather not trust any single device’s generation, produce the entropy externally — physical dice, or a separate air-gapped signer — compute the checksum offline, and import the finished BIP-39 phrase.

Both AirGap Vault and Rabby accept a BIP-39 import, but the security is opposite: import into AirGap Vault on the offline phone and the seed stays cold; import the same phrase into Rabby mobile and it’s now a hot wallet. Import to the signer, never to the front-end. And remember an import only moves a seed — it can’t fix one generated on a weak device.

What the secure element actually does

Modern phones ship a real secure element — Apple’s Secure Enclave, Google’s Titan M2 via StrongBox — which tempts people to assume a phone wallet holds keys the way a hardware wallet does. It half does, and the half it doesn’t is the one that matters.

The catch is the curve. The Secure Enclave and StrongBox only generate and hold keys on NIST P-256, while Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1. So a normal BIP-39 wallet’s signing key cannot live inside the enclave as a non-exportable key — wrong curve — and a seed phrase is exportable by design anyway.

What the enclave does instead is protect the seed at rest: the stored mnemonic is encrypted under a non-exportable key held in the secure element, so decryption is bound to that one physical phone and gated behind Face ID / fingerprint / passcode with hardware-enforced lockout.

That genuinely raises the bar against pulling your seed off a lost, stolen, or imaged device. What it can’t do is protect the key while the app is using it — at signing time the seed sits in ordinary memory, reachable by a compromised app or OS. So the secure element makes a phone’s storage hardware-grade; it does not make the phone a hardware wallet, which is exactly why a connected BIP-39 phone stays a hot wallet no matter how good its at-rest encryption is.

The only way to get the full benefit — a signing key born non-exportable and never exposed even during signing — is to skip the seed entirely. A passkey or enclave wallet uses the enclave’s native P-256 keys, so the key never exists as words at all. That’s arguably the strongest custody available on a stock phone, but the tradeoff cuts against everything else here: no seed phrase means no BIP-39 portability, so you can’t later import into Rabby, a Trezor, or a Ledger — you’re committed to that wallet’s own recovery model. A real option, but a different one.

And it’s why AirGap Vault‘s security doesn’t lean on the enclave at all: it comes from network isolation plus your own dice entropy. The secure element stops a seed being stolen at rest; the air-gap stops it being reachable while signing — and the second is the one that actually substitutes for a hardware wallet.

The device, and the discipline

The setup that makes any of this real is a dedicated phone, not your daily driver: a spare Pixel running GrapheneOS (Pixel 8 or newer; the 10-series gets updates into the 2030s — setup guide) or a recent iPhone in Lockdown Mode. Fresh account, wallet apps only, updates on, no SIM. Then pick your tier deliberately: airplane mode toggled on only to transactis Option 1 (hot — Rabby holds the key); permanently offline, signing by QR, is Option 2 (cold — AirGap Vault holds the key, Rabby just watches). One caveat if you go the iPhone route for active DeFi — Lockdown Mode can break WalletConnect, in-app dApp browsers, and some wallet features, so test before you move funds.

For the online front-end specifically, the criteria are different from the signer’s — here you want transaction preview and scam-flagging, not entropy transparency. On EVM, Rabby ships simulation and scam-flagging built in; Phantom, which acquired the Blowfish security engine, is the Solana incumbent; MetaMask and Zerion cover the most chains. Names will change; the criteria won’t — for a signer: open code, audited generation, reproducible builds, ideally your-own-entropy support. For a front-end: transaction preview.

Phone-specific hygiene is non-negotiable, and it’s where most real-world losses actually come from. Install only from official stores and check the developer name — fake “Sparrow Wallet” apps on Apple’s App Store are tied to $1.8M in stolen bitcoin, per a July lawsuit (Sparrow has no mobile app at all). Never screenshot a seed phrase — SparkKitty malware OCR-scans photo galleries on both iOS and Android. And keep seeds out of every cloud backup. On a modern phone the OS and the RNG are the strong parts. You are the attack surface.

Fix #3: multisig — with the caveat that matters now

The strongest post-exploit consensus is to stop depending on any single vendor. James Check now expects multisig to “become the default self-custody recommendation,” and Jameson Lopp‘s version is vendor diversification, since real firmware verification “is simply not feasible for 99.9%” of users. Multisig is how you get both: k-of-n keys, where compromising one key gets an attacker nothing.

But Coldcard added a footnote the industry now has to say out loud: multisig only helps if the keys are independent. A 2-of-3 built from three flawed Coldcards was three guessable keys. Unchained told clients to rotate any Coldcard-generated key in their vaults — the exposure was “most severe” for anyone with two.

The rule is diversity across devices, vendors, and locations: three keys on three different manufacturers’ hardware (or two hardware + one phone), stored in different places. And back up the wallet descriptor (the xpubs and script details) alongside every key — without it, even healthy seeds may not reconstruct a multisig wallet.

For a DeFi reader, the center of gravity is SAFE — and it’s worth spelling out why it’s considered the standard: live since 2019, $60B+ in assets secured across 58M+ deployed accounts and 400+ networks, with ten-plus audits and a formally verified core that gets re-audited before every release. No smart-contract wallet is more battle-tested.

Which is exactly why Bybit matters: $1.5B left a Safe multisig in February 2025 with the contracts working perfectly — every signer blind-signed what a compromised frontend showed them. Multisig distributes keys, not judgment. So the DeFi translation of the vendor-diversity rule: give your Safe’s signer keys different homes — one on a Ledger, one on a Keystone, one as a passkey — so no single vendor’s firmware or one compromised frontend habit owns the quorum.

• Squads fills the same role on Solana — $15B+ secured and the first formally verified program there.

• On the Bitcoin side the tooling is mature and mostly free — Sparrow, Electrum, Nunchuk, Liana (timelocked recovery paths that double as inheritance) — with collaborative custody from Unchained or Casa at $250/yr and AnchorWatch adding Lloyd’s insurance for size.

Fix #4: MPC — no single dice roll to get wrong

MPC/TSS wallets take a different route to the same goal: the private key never exists whole, anywhere. Key shares are generated on separate devices or parties through distributed key generation, and signing happens as a threshold protocol between them.

What makes MPC interesting specifically after Coldcard is that DKG pools entropy from multiple independent RNGs — there is no single random draw whose failure dooms the wallet.

For individuals, Zengo is the long-running consumer example (2-of-2 shares, no seed phrase, and — by Zengo’s own count — no wallet breached since 2018; though its acquisition by eToro this April is a reminder that seedless recovery depends on the company’s continuity).

A DeFi caveat before you commit: Zengo’s chain support is curated — BTC, ETH, Solana, BNB, Tron and major tokens, not every EVM network — and dApp access runs through WalletConnect rather than a native extension flow, which reviewers still find second-best for complex DeFi.

Think of it as clean MPC custody for holdings, not a daily DeFi driver. Institutions default to Fireblocks, BitGo, Copper, or Anchorage. The tradeoffs are real: proprietary share formats, vendor-dependent recovery, and no on-chain visibility into the quorum policy.

And MPC has had its own Coldcard-style scares — Fireblocks’ BitForge disclosures found share-extraction flaws across 15+ providers in 2023. The math was fine; implementations weren’t. Sound familiar?

The habits that catch everything else

A computer that does one thing. Infostealer malware is industrial now — one dump reported in January 2026 exposed 149 million records, much of it hunting seeds and wallet files. A cheap laptop used only for crypto — ideally on Linux, ideally air-gapped running Sparrow or Electrum offline with PSBTs crossing by QR or microSD — removes your browsing life from your signing life. Download wallets only from canonical sites and verify signatures.

Read before you sign. Verify the full receive address on your device’s screen — not the first and last four characters. Address poisoning (dusting your history with lookalike addresses) took $68M in one WBTC transfer in 2024 and $50M in USDT last December; never copy an address out of transaction history. On EVM, refuse blind signing: use wallets with built-in simulation (Rabby ships it natively; MetaMask’s screening runs on Blockaid), prefer hardware that decodes calldata via the ERC-7730 clear-signing standard, and treat any signature request you don’t understand as hostile — permit-style signatures accounted for 38% of the losses in 2025’s million-dollar-plus phishing cases. Sweep your approvals at revoke.cash periodically. Test-send before large transfers.

And the quiet ones. Seed backups on metal, never in a photo, note app, or password manager. Consider a BIP39 passphrase — exposed Coldcard seeds behind strong passphrases stayed out of attackers’ reach. Do a full recovery drill before funding a wallet. Keep holdings private: wrench attacks hit a record ~70 incidents in 2025 per Jameson Lopp’s public tracker, and ship hardware wallets to a pickup point — Ledger’s 2020 address leak still fuels doorstep extortion. On exchanges: hardware-key 2FA and time-delayed withdrawal allowlists.

The takeaway

Three of the worst security failures of this cycle each broke a different link: Coldcard broke key generation, Bybit broke transaction verification, BitForge broke MPC implementation. No wallet, chain, or company removes trust — every architecture just relocates it. The only strategy that addresses all three is layering and diversification: entropy you contributed, keys on hardware from different vendors, signatures you can actually read, and machines that do one job.

If you do nothing else this week: check whether any seed in your setup was born on a Coldcard between March 2021 and July 31, 2026 — including keys inside multisigs — and if so, rotate it. The attackers already have the list.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Arc Mainnet confirmed for September 16 launch
- Sen. John Kennedy calls for an immediate Senate vote on the CLARITY Act
- Cloudflare launches native crypto wallets
- ai16z founder winds down token
- Mastercard pilots stablecoin compliance framework

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This Week’s Farming News:

• Resupply executes Proposal 33, increasing borrowing rewards in RSUP by 33% by routing 6.25% weekly emissions from the concluded Retention Program to borrowers.

• Aave's Monad market offers USDe collateral a 1% yield boost on top of Ethena's promotional rewards for a total of 5% APY.

• Curve Finance activates CRV rewards on 3 new Llamalend v2 gauges with instant claim via Stake DAO deposits.

• Term launches RockawayX Tori USDC Ecosystem Vault on Ethereum, lending USDC against trUSD, strUSD, and PT tokens.

• Tangent Finance launches cbBTC/WBTC lending market on Ethereum with CRV incentives, allowing borrowing against Curve LP tokens while keeping rewards.

• Hylo opens XP farming on all Solana LP pairs containing hyUSD on Meteora, earning 5 XP per day per 1 hyUSD staked.

• Felix Protocol offers 12.09% APY on USDT0 deposits on Hyperliquid L1, driven by strong borrow demand across kHYPE, HYPE, UBTC, and wstHYPE markets.

• Curvance launches the Agua Global Carry Vault on Monad via Reservoir, introducing aguaUSDCgc as a yield-bearing USDC market position

Farming Benchmarks:

Average Lending APY on proven stablecoins: 3 - 5%

Unincentivized. Yields are still holding in the 3–5% range. Aave USDC was this week’s standout, up 29bp to 3.47%, while sUSDe and syrupUSDC gave back the most ground (-15bp, -11bp). Ondo’s USDY remains the steadiest name on the board, flat for a second straight week.

Fixed Rate benchmark: 3 - 7%

Fixed-rate (PT) benchmarks range 4–7%:
USDG at 3.03%, down from last week’s 3.27%
USDS at 5.25% - slight change from last week’s 5.23%
and AUSD at 6.73% (slightly up from last week’s 6.51%

Earn Up to 15% Stables and >5%on ETH:

StakeDAO – Llamalend wstETH crvUSD Lending – 15.% APR (Ethereum – Boosted lending)

Lend crvUSD into Curve’s Llamalend market where borrowers post wstETH as collateral, boosted via StakeDAO’s veCRV lock (2.50x) on top of the base Curve lending rate. On the base (unboosted) Curve app, net supply APY shows 7.11% (30-day average 9.66%), and StakeDAO’s boost pushes it to the current 15.74% APR shown on their vault. Underlying TVL is $1.37M with total deposits on StakeDAO’s side still very small ($22.56) — this looks like a fresh, thinly-deposited strategy.

Risk — Medium ⚠️
The historical rate chart tells an important story: current APY on the base market has fallen sharply to 0.19%, down from a 1M average of 2.46% and 1Y average of 4.12% — this rate is genuinely volatile and swings with wstETH borrowing demand.

The StakeDAO boosted figure (15.74%) reflects a snapshot and can move just as much as the base rate does. With only $22.56 currently deposited through StakeDAO, this vault has essentially no track record yet — you’d be an early depositor.

Available liquidity on the base market is $570.26K against $1.52M total, which is reasonable, but confirm current conditions before entering given how much the rate has moved recently. Curve, Llamalend, and StakeDAO smart contract risk applies.

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Aerodrome – Slipstream USDC/USDT LP – Up to 11% APR(Base – Concentrated LP)

A concentrated liquidity (CLMM) position on Aerodrome’s Slipstream on Base, pairing USDC and USDT. Unlike a standard stable pool, this requires setting a price range — tighter ranges earn more fees per dollar deployed but need more active management, since the position stops earning if the price moves outside your range. At the tightest ±0.01% range, current APR was showing ~3.91%; wider ranges or Autopilot mode can push toward the 11% ceiling depending on volume and range selection.

Risk - Medium ⚠️ This is not passive — CLMM positions require monitoring and occasional rebalancing as price drifts, or the position falls out of range and stops earning fees entirely. The actual APR you get depends heavily on the range you choose; the 11% figure is not guaranteed at every setting. USDT counterparty risk (centralized issuer) applies. Aerodrome and Base smart contract/network risk applies. More hands-on than the other picks this week.

IPOR – TAU cbETH Dynamic Looping –5.7%+ 3% APY + IPOR Points(Base – Leveraged loop)

IPOR’s automated TAU strategy loops cbETH (Coinbase’s liquid staking token) across Aave v3 Core, Euler v2, Clearstar Fusion, and Morpho on Base, dynamically rebalancing to optimize the spread without manual management.

Current spot APY is 5.74%, with the position also earning IPOR points as a bonus on top. Aave v3 Core is the dominant allocation (93.5%: $37.2M assets at 2.37%, $32.9M liabilities at 1.95%), with smaller slices in Euler and Morpho. Withdrawals are scheduled with a 12-hour delay rather than instantly.

⚠️ The 30-day performance chart shows real spikes and dips rather than a flat rate — expect variability. The 12-hour withdrawal delay means you can’t exit instantly in a fast-moving market. cbETH is Coinbase’s LST, carrying centralized issuer risk on top of standard smart contract risk. IPOR’s dynamic strategy adds a contract layer managing the loop across four separate protocols (Aave, Euler, Clearstar, Morpho) — more moving parts than a single-protocol loop. Base network risk applies.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Term V2 expands fixed-rate lending
- Kamino launches institutional yield vaults
- Ethereum proposes staking reward changes
- Latest EIP attracts debate and controversy
- Raydium adds limit orders
- Morpho introduces multi-market offers
- Apyx launches on Solana
- Bond SuperApp launches pre-deposit campaign

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Airdrop Claims 🪂:

Cap Labs ($CAP) — Homestead Stabledrop

Cap Labs is a private credit protocol where deposits mint cUSD, stakeable as stcUSD for yield. Homestead points program ended July 23 — no new season planned. This is a claim, not a farm.

Eligible if you held Pendle YT positions without matching PTs and took losses. Claim at stabledrop.caplabslimited.com, open 90 days, closes November 1, 2026. No vesting.

Note: plain cUSD holders and LP providers are generally excluded — check eligibility carefully.

Official link: cap.app

⚠️ Final size was smaller than earlier expectations, and eligibility is narrow. Standard credit protocol risk applies to the underlying platform. Claims close November 1 — don’t miss it.

GRVT ($GRVT) — TGE Complete

Hybrid derivatives exchange on ZKsync, TGE completed July 30. 280M $GRVT airdrop pool (28% of supply). Chosen multiplier plan (1x immediate, 2x/4x deferred) determines release — tranches over 12 months, 30-day claim window each.

Check allocation and claim at grvt.io. Appeals open if you believe there’s an error.

⚠️ Vested over 12 months, not immediately liquid. New token volatility expected. Some community pushback on allocation size.

⚠️DISCLAIMER NOTICE⚠️ A note before the next section:

• New protocols often carry the most attractive airdrop odds, early TVL, thin points competition, and generous multipliers. But that same immaturity is exactly what makes them risky.

• Smart-contract exploits, depegs, insolvent yield strategies, and outright project failure happen disproportionately in a protocol’s first 3–6 months (we’ve seen it play out with Dango and others in this very letter). Nothing here has a multi-year track record.

• Treat every entry below as capital-at-risk, not “free points”. Size positions like you could lose them entirely, and never deposit more than you’re fully prepared to write off.

Airdrop News/Updates

Apyx ($APYX) — Season 2 Snapshot ~10 Weeks Remaining

Dividend-backed stablecoin protocol issuing apxUSD/apyUSD, collateralized by preferred equity like Strategy’s $STRC(which is also a risk if STRC depegs). Season 2 Pips run until the October 11 snapshot; TGE October 13. 6% of supply allocated this season (11% combined with Season 1). 1 point = 1 point, no changes.

Earn Pips by holding apxUSD/apyUSD, Pendle YT/PT/LP positions (usually highest multipliers), or providing liquidity.

Check current rates at app.apyx.fi/rewards.

⚠️ apxUSD backing depends on $STRC/MicroStrategy dividend health — a prolonged BTC downturn can weaken this and pressure the peg. Yield is variable. Capital is at risk while farming, not free points.

Saturn Credit ($USDat) — Double Points on Monad Pendle

Structured digital credit protocol issuing USDat and yield-bearing sUSDat, backed primarily by Strategy’s $STRC preferred equity(which is also a risk if STRC depegs). Double points live now on the January 14, 2027 USDat/sUSDat Pendle markets on Monad. Gravity Points (Season 1) ends August 8 or at $500M TVL — potential up to 5% governance token allocation if a token launches. Orbital Points (Season 2) starts right after.

Highest multipliers typically on Pendle YT/LP positions (20–38x range). Check current rates in the Gravity/Orbital docs. Not available to US, EEA, or other restricted users.

Official link: app.saturn.credit

⚠️ No token or TGE confirmed — allocation is only potential. Yield depends on $STRC/MicroStrategy dividend health. sUSDat unstaking has a days-long queue. Geo-restricted access.

Tria ($TRIA) — August Summerfest 2x Points

Tria is a self-custodial neo-finance app combining Visa card spending (150+ countries, 130M+ merchants), perp trading via Hyperliquid and Decibel integrations, and yield — all from one cross-chain balance. Backed by $12M in funding with Polygon, Wintermute, and Polychain among participants. $TRIA is already live (TGE February 2026); this is ongoing Season 3 rewards, not a pre-TGE points farm.

• Points are earned through real usage: card spend (1–1.5 pts per $1 depending on tier), trading volume, and referrals (10% of eligible activity).

• August Summerfest runs through August 31 — 2x points on eligible card spend and trading, plus 2x cashback caps, applied automatically with no opt-in.

• Points accumulate toward Mystery Boxes at milestones, opening monthly starting end of August.

Download Tria on Mobile from the link in their X bio

⚠️ Points value is undefined until Mystery Boxes open — no fixed conversion rate. This requires genuine spending or trading activity with associated fees, not passive capital deposit. KYC typically required for card issuance. Standard self-custodial and app smart-contract risk applies. Time-limited campaign ends August 31.

New Opportunities:

Resupply ($RSUP) — Resupply Summer Incentives

Resupply, a subDAO of Convex Finance and Yearn Finance, lets you supply yield-bearing stablecoin collateral (Curve LlamaLend, Fraxlend) to borrow reUSD while collateral keeps earning underlying yield. “Resupply Summer” just launched three new LlamaLend v2 markets — sfrxUSD (Frax), sDOLA (Inverse), syrupUSDC (Maple) — alongside a multi-round Convex rewards campaign (started round 128) to grow TVL and borrowing.

This is post-TGE emissions farming, not a points-to-airdrop play — $RSUP is already live. Supply the new collateral types, borrow reUSD, and earn underlying yield plus RSUP emissions.

Stake RSUP for a share of protocol revenue (paid in reUSD) plus governance power, or deposit reUSD into the Insurance Pool for additional RSUP and revenue share. Check resupply.finance for current rates on the new markets.

Official link: resupply.finance

⚠️ Resupply suffered a ~$9.6M exploit in June 2025 — recovered with treasury and Yearn/Convex support, but the history is real and worth weighing. reUSD carries peg risk despite redemption mechanisms. RSUP has no max supply — ongoing inflation can dilute value over time. Incentive APR is variable and campaign-dependent. Leverage/liquidation risk exists on stable-stable loops even if lower than volatile-asset positions. Small, volatile token market cap means position sizing matters.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Cap opens Homestead stabledrop claims
- Apyx snapshot set for October 11
- BlackRock launches tokenized money funds
- Coldcard hack losses approaching $114M
- Reya removes platform deposit fees

Key Takeaways:

Crypto broke from equities on a self-custody scare.

Bitcoin fell 3% and closed below its 20-week average while stocks finished higher, after a hardware wallet exploit pushed coins back onto exchanges. Capital flows weakened as net liquidity fell 1.55%, ETF flows were negative, and stablecoin supply shrank by $2.79B, the largest decline since June.

Monad led stablecoin inflows despite the broader outflows.

The pull is a live incentive program paying up to 9.14% on stablecoin deposits into Aave, with one lending pool alone absorbing $115M. Mantle posted a smaller gain of $50.9M (+9.6%) on a similar mechanism, with different terms. The chain-by-chain breakdown, in Section 3.

Uniswap’s daily protocol revenue jumped >6x in three days.

The July 27 expansion of the fee switch to v4 pools pushed 30-day protocol fees up 133.5%, while Aerodrome, PancakeSwap, and Curve all saw fee declines. The increase came mainly from the fee-switch rollout rather than higher trading volume.

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DeFi Token Price Movers - Observations, not trade ideas.

Cap (CAP). No clear catalyst emerged this week. The move appears to be a continued recovery from July’s Stabledrop controversy, which reduced rewards and excluded several participant groups. At a roughly $44M market cap, the price action looks more like a repricing than a reaction to new developments.

Turtle (TURTLE). Turtle directs deposits into a third-party delta-neutral vault advertising 10–20% APY on USDT and USDC with a 30-day lockup. The yield claims have not been independently verified. With a $6.8M market cap and around $1.1M daily volume, liquidity remains a key consideration.

Ethena (ENA). USDe expanded to Robinhood Chain and Monad, assets on Robinhood Chain surpassed $200M, and the Coinbase USDe vault exceeded $250M. Ethena also removed mint/redeem fees for eligible users and reported over $750M in cumulative rewards generated since launch.

Lista DAO (LISTA). Lista expanded support for tokenized-equity collateral and continued weekly LISTA buybacks.

Pump.fun (PUMP). No confirmed catalyst emerged during the week. Features often cited as drivers, including the USDC trading pair and multichain expansion, launched earlier in 2026. The move appears to reflect a market re-rating rather than a specific new development.

1A. Traditional Macro

Liquidity contracted for the 2nd consecutive week.

FRED:WALCL-(FRED:RRPONTSYD+FRED:WTREGEN)

The driver is scheduled- Treasury estimated $671 billion of privately held net marketable borrowing for July–September, assuming a $950 billion end-September TGA balance. Every dollar into the TGA drains reserves one-for-one, so this isn’t a market-driven wobble — it’s a funding calendar. The drain has weeks left to run regardless of what happens at the September meeting.

BTC/NQ ratio - Equities and bitcoin split on the week.

Bitcoin traded down as the hawkish Fed hold met the September hike debate. That evening, an attacker drained roughly 594 BTC from around 500 wallets in a 25-minute sweep, all secured by Coldcard devices whose firmware had bypassed its own random number generator since March 2021.

Big Tech earnings did the rest, with the four hyperscalers guiding to $720–745 billion of 2026 capital spending. By Friday the premium was rebuilding: Brent recovered above $88 after fresh US strikes on Iranian targets. Equities held their gains, yet Bitcoin struggled from crypto-native issues

Brent and WTI each fell more than 7% on Monday, July 27, after the US paused strikes on Iran and Tehran said it had halted retaliatory action — a de-escalation that cut the inflation input equities had been pricing.

1B. Crypto Capital On-Ramp

Total stablecoin supply 7d change (WoW)

Stablecoins lost $2.788B is the largest weekly contraction since June 8 (−$3.654B), and the run since June 1 totals roughly −$13.8B across ten weeks with only three positive prints.

Compare February through May: almost every week positive, including +$3.5B and +$2.9B in March. The on-ramp flipped from expansion to contraction in June, and this week is the sharpest leg of it.

BTC and ETH Exchange Flows

Bitcoin exchange reserves reversed higher, rising roughly 14,800 BTC from their July 28 low to 2.717M BTC and moving back above the 21-day EMA after a month-long decline. The move coincided with the Coldcard exploit, which has reportedly drained 1,367 BTC (~$89M) from more than 4,500 addresses through a firmware vulnerability affecting wallet seed generation.

The reserve increase is typically interpreted as rising sell-side pressure. However, the Coldcard incident may be distorting the signal, as some holders could be moving funds onto exchanges or into alternative custody solutions to reduce self-custody risk rather than to sell. The result is a near-term rise in exchange balances, but with less certainty than usual about how much represents actual liquidation intent.

Ethereum reserves moved the other way, falling from 15.55M on July 5 to 15.08M — roughly 470k ETH, near $870M — in a continuous month-long decline.

ETF flows

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $61.53M in net outflows for the week while Ethereum ETFs added $10M, extending ETH’s streak to four weeks. Weekly ETH inflows have decelerated from $105M in mid-July and $103.9M the following week to under $30M.

1C. Week-Ahead Catalysts

Monday, Aug 3, 3:00pm ET — Treasury financing estimates.
Updates the Q3 borrowing figure and the end-September TGA target. Higher targets mean a deeper reserve drain than the $671B already flagged.

Wednesday, Aug 5, 8:30am ET — Quarterly Refunding Announcement.
Most relevant release for onchain liquidity. A bills-heavy mix routes the borrowing through money market funds and leaves bank reserves largely intact. A coupon-heavy mix drains them. Bill supply also competes directly with stablecoin issuers, who are among the largest T-bill buyers, so the outcome feeds straight back into the supply contraction in 1B.

Section 2 — Onchain Risk Regime

Individual Stablecoins Flows

USDC fell $1.49B (−2.03%) and USDT fell $1.07B (−0.58%), together accounting for 91% of the week’s $2.84B contraction. Both figures exceed their own 30-day declines, meaning each was flat to higher through late July before reversing in a single week. USDC fell at 3.5x USDT’s percentage rate: deployment capital left faster than parked capital.

Behind them, USD1 shed $137M (−3.32%), RLUSD $120M (−7.58%), USDe $99M (−2.48%), and USDS $79M (−1.20%). USDS is down 16.11% over 30 days and USDe 12.76%.

The gainers ran the other way, all yield-bearing or treasury-backed. USDG added $121M (+3.74%, +16.91% over 30d), BUIDL $49M (+1.85%, +19.79%), AUSD $34M (+15.04%, +38.17%), and USDGO $5M (+27.70% over 30d).

Aave / Sphere Rates

Sphere’s 1W average stablecoin borrow APY held at 4.15% and supply APY at 3.18%. The funding benchmark rose 0.13pp to 6.02%, widening the spread over borrow to 1.87pp. Traders paid more to hold leveraged perp exposure while the cost and yield of onchain credit stayed still.

Verdict: Dollar liquidity left the two largest stablecoins at the fastest weekly pace of the quarter and rotated into treasury-backed tokens paying more than onchain lending. Perp funding rose while borrow rates stood still.

Section 3 — Chain Comparison

3A. Stablecoin flows by chain

Monad: +$72M (+12%) to $629.5M

Monad recorded the most meaningful stablecoin inflow this week, extending a trend driven by Aave V3’s July launch and ongoing incentive programs. Incentives remain heavily concentrated on stablecoin lending rather than ETH, supporting strategies such as syrupUSDC carry trades and Ethena leverage loops.

The key distinction is that a meaningful portion of capital has also flowed into Valos’ RWA-backed lending product, now the chain’s largest incentivized pool, making part of the inflow more durable than a typical yield farm.

Robinhood Chain: +$53.6M (+14%) to $535M

Stablecoin growth continues to be driven by Robinhood Earn, which pays up to 7% on USDG and routes deposits into Morpho vaults.

The data shows that capital is primarily being deployed into yield-bearing stablecoins such as USDe, syrupUSDG, and spUSDG, while tokenized equities remain negligible. The dominant trade remains stablecoin looping, with retail deposits supplying funding and leveraged users capturing the spread.

Mantle: +$50.9M (+9.87%) to $578M

Mantle’s weekly inflow accounted for almost all of its monthly growth. The inflow reflects a combination of expanding RWA activity and Aave incentive programs.

Notably, one of the main reward programs specifically targets leveraged positions rather than passive lenders, helping sustain demand for stablecoin borrowing and leverage loops. The result is a stablecoin inflow supported by both long-term RWA growth and shorter-term incentive-driven activity.

3B. Structural Shifts from Onchain Activity

Uniswap: Fee Growth, Fee Switch, and Market Share Gains

UNI is up 26.5% over the past 30 days, driven by three factors: accelerating fee growth, the July 27 fee-switch expansion, and rising DEX market share. Uniswap generated $96.3M in 30-day fees (+133.5%) while major competitors saw fee declines.

Combined V3/V4 market share increased from 35.4% in December to 53.8%, making Uniswap the dominant DEX by volume.

Driver one: the fee inflection

Fee growth remains the core driver. Uniswap processed $52B in 30-day volume, with Robinhood Chain emerging as the main growth engine. Despite holding only a fraction of Ethereum's TVL, Robinhood Chain generated the majority of protocol fees thanks to higher-fee assets such as tokenized equities, USDG pairs, and memecoins.

Driver two: the switch — fees become revenue

The fee switch is a phased program. UNIfication passed 25 December 2025 — 100M UNI burned, Ethereum’s switch live — and five chains followed by June 2026.

The July expansion completed Proposals 100 (v4 fees) and 99 (Robinhood Chain) passed near-unanimously and went live 27 July, directing one-sixth of swap fees to TokenJar contracts claimable only by burning UNI

Driver two: the switch — fees become revenue

Market share continues to consolidate. Uniswap's gains came largely at the expense of Curve, PancakeSwap, and smaller DEXs, while Robinhood Chain remains heavily dependent on Uniswap, which processes over 96% of the chain's DEX volume. This concentration has been a major contributor to recent fee growth.

Driver three: consolidation

Market share continues to consolidate. Uniswap's gains came largely at the expense of Curve, PancakeSwap, and smaller DEXs, while Robinhood Chain remains heavily dependent on Uniswap, which processes over 96% of the chain's DEX volume. This concentration has been a major contributor to recent fee growth.

Valuation: cheapest on fees

Valuation remains the key bull argument. UNI trades at roughly 2.2× annualized fees, the lowest multiple among major DEX tokens despite being the only platform delivering meaningful fee growth. The investment case depends on whether post-switch revenue can remain above current levels rather than reverting toward pre-expansion averages.

Catalysts to monitor: daily protocol revenue after the fee-switch rollout, Robinhood Chain trading activity, LP migration between v3 and v4 pools, Uniswap’s market-share trend, and the sustainability of fee generation from Robinhood Chain.

Section 4. This Week’s Protocol Standouts (TVL Gainers - Ranked by absolute $ inflow.)

Emerging On-Chain Allocators & Yield Infrastructure

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A Week in one Paragraph:

Security dominated this week — Coldcard’s firmware flaw drained $89M+ across 4,500+ Bitcoin wallets, and Metronome’s msUSD is sitting 27% below peg after months of undetected oracle exploitation. Uniswap turned on its fee switch across V4 and Robinhood Chain pools, 1inch launched Aqua to let LPs back multiple positions from a single wallet balance, and Reflect brought universal tranching to Solana — all signs DeFi infrastructure is getting more capital-efficient.

• Warning ⚠️: If you’re on a Coldcard Mk3 with firmware 4.0.1–5.0.3 and no passphrase or multisig, move your funds now.

DeFi 📈 %

• Uniswap activated its fee switch across all V4 pools and top Robinhood Chain V3 pools, routing up to 25-33% of swap fees from LPs to the protocol for UNI token burns.

• Uniswap launched Earn, letting users deposit USDC, USDT, or ETH directly in the Uniswap app to earn yield with no lock-ups — powered by Morpho and curated by Gauntlet.

• 1inch launched Aqua, a shared liquidity layer where LPs back multiple positions from a single wallet balance without depositing tokens into pools.

• Reflect launched a universal tranching layer on Solana, letting users split any yield-bearing asset into a protected senior tranche (lower yield, loss protection) and a leveraged junior tranche (higher yield, first-loss risk) — launching soon with one of DeFi’s largest issuers.

• Sushi Launch goes live on Robinhood chain as a native token launch layer paired with tokenized real-world assets and Stock Tokens.

• Jupiter launches Spot V2 on Solana, merging Swap and Terminal into a unified trading interface. The redesign enables users to discover and execute trades without switching tools.

• Aave is deprecating 50 low-adoption assets and winding down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos — affecting $98.1M in supply and $15.6M in debt, less than 0.4% of total TVL.

  • Existing users can exit at their own pace.

• Stacks activated PoX-5, laying groundwork for Bitcoin Staking. All staked STX unlocked and must be restaked before Bitcoin block 962,050 to keep earning BTC in the first PoX-5 cycle.

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Issues⚠️

• COLDCARD hardware wallet attacks have compromised 4,500+ addresses with losses exceeding $89 million. A vulnerability in Coldcard's firmware allowed an attacker to reconstruct seeds offline — some devices used a predictable software-based generator tied to chip serial numbers and clock data instead of true hardware randomness.

  • Bitcoin users are to immediately verify wallet integrity and review address generation security on affected devices.

• Ebisu is shutting down, citing failure to scale ebUSD liquidity enough to support meaningful borrowing. No EBISU token or airdrop will launch. Frontend closes October 30

  • Users should close Troves and withdraw funds now.

• SiloDAO filed a coordinated recovery claim with Stream Finance on behalf of all lenders exposed to xUSD and xBTC, totaling over $31.6M in stablecoin claims plus 272.70 BTC.b.

  • Eligible lenders don’t need to file individually, as claims are calculated from a November 7, 2025 snapshot and viewable at here

• SK Hynix perps flash crashed 20% to $900 on Hyperliquid before rebounding. Trade.xyz confirmed the oracle worked as designed, which tracks a real Korean pre-market trade.

  • The team is issuing a one-time discretionary payout to affected users and improving its tail-event pricing.

• Coldcard disclosed a critical vulnerability in Mk3 devices — seeds generated on firmware 4.0.1 through 5.0.3 used low-entropy random number generation, and attackers have already exploited it, moving 1,324 UTXOs from dormant single-sig wallets.

  • If you generated a seed on a Mk3 in that firmware range without a passphrase, dice rolls, or multisig, move funds immediately to an unaffected device (Mk4, Q, Mk5).

• Wemix suffers $6.25M security breach after contract owner privileges were compromised, resulting in unauthorized token minting and transfers requiring immediate remediation.

Depegs 🪙 ⚠

• Metronome’s msUSD is trading around $0.73, ~27% below peg. The team disclosed that its synthetic swap module is underbacked by ~6,367 msETH and ~4.57M msUSD — they claimed that the depeg is due to stale Chainlink feeds exploited by MEV bots over several months, undetected while the team investigated other causes.

  • Metronome claims treasury positions can cover up to a 30% depeg.

• Altura’s wind-down hit another obstacle — the UK bank account holding £16.4M ($21M) earmarked for USDT purchases and user redemptions has been frozen pending a bank review.

  • Community chats are paused while the team waits for the bank to respond. AVLT dropped 70% on the news.

Stablecoins/RWA🪙

• Ondo launched the Ondo Network — execution infrastructure combining TEE enclaves for private high-speed execution, decentralized attestors for verifiability, and blockchains for settlement. #opportunity

• AUTO is now live on Kamino — a Solana RWA backed by near-prime US auto loans, originated by Agora Data and issued by Hastra. #opportunity

• Solstice launches Season 3 on Solana with 5,500+ funded users earning Flares for YieldVault positions and upcoming strcUSX.

  • Solstice Season 2 closed; S2 Flares (reward points) are now locked and determine SLX token allocation share.

News🗞️

• Strategy reported an $8.22B net loss in Q2 2026 from unrealized BTC losses, but still grew holdings to 843,775 BTC (+25% YTD) and raised $17.06B via ATM offerings.

  • STRC’s dividend was hiked to 12% to defend its price, partly funded by $218.4M in BTC sales — with board authorization for up to $1.25B more if needed.

• Strategy repurchased 288,930 STRC shares for $25M at $86.52 average, signaling it will be a regular buyer below $100 with $975M remaining in its buyback program.

  • Repurchases will be funded outside the USD Reserve, including potential MSTR and BTC sales.

• Galaxy and K3 Capital launch institutional credit lending vault on Monad via YieldApp, using AUSD stablecoins with independent verification by Accountable.

• US Senate Majority Leader John Thune prioritizes the Clarity Act for passage before August recess, signaling potential regulatory progress for crypto.

• Multisig.software launched a self-custody timelocked multisig vault with a programmable onchain blueprint — letting individuals and protocols add time delays to wallet transactions as a security layer, inspired by the vulnerabilities exposed by exploits like Drift’s $285M loss.

• Agave 4.2 upgrades Solana validator client with 90% rent reduction, 3.3x larger transaction capacity, and 200ms slot times. The release includes Alpenglow, the largest protocol change in Solana’s history, improving network throughput and cost efficiency for all validators.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Metronome msUSD depegs to $0.80
- Aave deprecates 50 low-usage assets
- Hastra’s AUTO launches on Kamino
- Stacks activates PoX-5 upgrade
- IPOR launches WBTC carry strategy
- Coldcard discloses critical seed vulnerability
- Silo DAO files recovery claim with Stream

TL:DR:

• Fixed-rate lending finally landed on Base. Morpho Midnight, Tenor, and TermMax all let you lock in a rate for a set term — no more watching it drift while you sleep.

• Every major money market — Aave, Compound, Morpho Blue — reprices your rate every block. Fine for idle cash, brutal for a loop or carry trade, since rates spike exactly when everyone’s rushing for the exit.

• Right now there’s a reward program paying double-digit APR just to lend USDC — but it’s on a countdown. There’s also a rarer setup where you can borrow against your own collateral for less than that collateral is earning you.

• These loans have a maturity date. Miss it, and you get liquidated even if your position was perfectly healthy.

• Anyone running a leveraged or looped trade, sitting on yield-bearing collateral, or with an opinion on where rates go from here.

  ---

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Fixed-Rate Lending in DeFi: Tenor, Morpho Midnight & TermMax

Every major DeFi money market — Aave, Compound, Morpho Blue — shares the same quirk: your interest rate re-prices every block. That’s fine for parking idle capital. It’s terrible for anything that depends on a spread, because variable rates spike at exactly the moment everyone else is unwinding, and your profitable loop becomes a losing one overnight.

TradFi solved this centuries ago with fixed-term, fixed-rate debt — the zero-coupon bond. This month, that primitive finally arrived on Base in earnest. On 21 July 2026, Morpho launched Midnight, its fixed-rate, fixed-term protocol, with Tenor — a startup founded by ex-Morpho, Notional and Google engineers, seeded by Variant and Coinbase Ventures — as the trading venue on top.

To bootstrap liquidity, Tenor is paying lenders MORPHO rewards that were quoting around 16% APR at the time of writing. Meanwhile TermMax, a fixed-rate AMM live since 2024, runs 77 markets across 8 chains — including a Base market that lets you borrow USDC against sUSDe at a rate locked below sUSDe’s own yield.

This guide covers how these protocols actually work, when fixed rate is the right tool, the yield opportunities live right now, and the ways people lose money here.

How it works

The shared primitive

Strip away the branding and all three protocols sell the same object: a zero-coupon bond. A fixed-rate loan is a claim on exactly 1 unit of the loan token (say, 1 USDC) at a set maturity date, bought today at a discount. The rate is the discount:

rate over the term = 1 / price − 1

Pay $0.9967 today for $1.00 in 32 days and you’ve locked ~3.8% annualised. That one formula is the entire mechanism; orderbooks, AMMs and token tickers are just machinery for discovering the price. Two consequences follow directly, and they explain almost every rule below: the loan ends — at maturity the debt is due in full, and a borrower who does nothing gets liquidated even if the position is healthy; and exiting early means selling the bond — you can only leave before maturity by selling your position at whatever the market rate is then, taking a mark-to-market gain or loss.

Morpho Midnight — the settlement layer

Midnight is Morpho’s fixed-rate protocol, launched on Base alongside (not replacing) the variable-rate Morpho Blue.

Each market is isolated and immutable: one loan token, one maturity date, a fixed set of accepted collaterals each with its own LLTV and oracle. Lenders hold credit units — a claim on one loan token at maturity; borrowers hold debt units — an obligation to repay one. Units with the same maturity are fungible regardless of when the position was opened, which is what keeps liquidity concentrated instead of fragmented.

Price discovery happens through an offer book: makers sign offers off-chain (price and size), takers settle them on-chain atomically. Crucially, makers don’t lock capital while quoting — funds only move at settlement — so a lender can earn variable yield on Morpho Blue while simultaneously quoting a fixed rate on Midnight.

Two protocol fees exist: a settlement fee paid by the taker (capped around 50bp annualised) and a continuous fee paid by lenders (capped at 1% annualised, fixed at your entry rate). Midnight shipped deliberately minimal: no lender vaults, no auto-rollover, no SDK yet. That’s why you use it through Tenor.

Tenor — the trading layer

Tenor is neither a fork of Midnight nor just a frontend — it’s a periphery protocol: its own contracts wrapped around Midnight’s core, settling on the same liquidity. Three markets are live on Base — cbBTC/USDC, WETH/USDC, cbETH/WETH — on four-week renewal cycles with initial terms up to about five months. Tenor charges no fees of its own.

What Tenor adds is the practical toolkit. An orderbook UX with 0.25% rate ticks, market and limit orders, and a router that fills across multiple offers in one transaction. “Earn while you wait”: a resting lend offer parks your capital in a Morpho Vault V2 earning the variable Blue rate, then converts atomically into the fixed position the instant a borrower takes your offer — you’re never idle.

And auto-renewal, the only maturity autopilot among the three protocols: opt in, set a maximum rate, and independent keepers roll your position at maturity via a Dutch auction (the rate offered to keepers ramps from 0% toward your max over roughly a day, so competition usually settles it near market). If no fixed offer clears under your max, the position falls back to a variable-rate Blue market rather than being liquidated.

TermMax — the fixed-rate AMM

TermMax is unrelated to the Morpho stack: a standalone protocol live since 2024, roughly $34M TVL across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, BSC and four other chains.

Three tokens explain the whole system. FT is the zero-coupon bond — an ERC-20 redeeming 1:1 for the debt token at maturity. XT is the interest leg (1 FT + 1 XT = 1 debt token; XT expires worthless). GT is an NFT wrapping a borrower’s position: collateral locked, debt owed.

A lender deposits 1,000 USDC at 5% for a year and immediately receives 1,050 FT — principal plus the entire term’s interest, minted upfront — redeemable for 1,050 USDC at maturity, or sellable early on the AMM at the prevailing rate.

A borrower locks collateral into a GT and mints FT against it; the whole term’s interest is fixed into the debt from the first second — no accrual, no rate resets. Early repayment carries no penalty, and there’s a useful trick: since debt is denominated in FT, buying discounted FT off the market and repaying with those is cheaper than repaying at par. Quotes come instantly from a Uniswap-V3-style AMM whose liquidity is concentrated in rate space by curators and vaults, rather than from a counterparty search.

TermMax’s real edge is yield-bearing collateral: it’s the only venue of the three accepting Pendle PTs, sUSDe, LSTs and RWAs, with a one-click Leverager that flash-loans the debt token, buys collateral, and wraps the whole loop into a single atomic transaction. One caveat: fees are front-loaded on top of the quoted APR (borrow fee ≈ [6%×10% + rate×3%] × days/365, charged on the full borrowed amount), which matters at leverage — the math below accounts for it.

Why it matters — when to use fixed rate

Carry trades. If you borrow at X to earn Y, the trade is the spread — and on variable-rate venues, X blows out precisely when markets stress and everyone unwinds together. Fixing the borrow leg converts a fragile trade into arithmetic. This is the missing piece looping strategies always had.

Known cost of funds. Borrowing against BTC or ETH without selling — for taxes, expenses, or redeployment — at a rate you know for the entire term, immune to utilisation spikes.

A view on rates. If you think yields are heading down, lending fixed at today’s rate for the longest available term is a directional trade you simply cannot express in a variable pool, where your rate falls with everyone else’s.

Incentives. New fixed-rate venues pay you to show up. Tenor is distributing MORPHO to lenders; TermMax runs an XP program ahead of its token (vault deposits earn 30x, lending FT 15x, leveraged positions only 2x — worth knowing if the airdrop is part of your thesis).

If none of these apply — you’re just parking stables with no rate view — a variable vault remains simpler, deeper and more liquid.

Yield highlights

1. Lend USDC on Tenor and farm MORPHO — the headline opportunity. Tenor distributes 4,000 MORPHO per week to lenders (50% to cbBTC/USDC, 25% each to the other two markets) via Merkl, and the app was quoting ~16.6% APR for a resting offer in cbBTC/USDC.

The rules: matched positions earn a 2x multiplier, resting offers 1x — but a resting offer qualifies only if “Earn while you wait” is on and its rate sits at or below the market’s cap (5% for both USDC markets, 2% for cbETH/WETH).

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Trade.xyz covers losses from SK Hynix flash crash
- Hastra expands into auto loans
- BRIX launches FX carry trades
- Reflect launches yield tranching on Solana
- Orca adds LP auto-compounding
- Jupiter launches Spot V2
- Senate prioritizes Clarity Act passage

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This Week’s Farming News:

• Reflect launched a universal tranching layer on Solana — split any yield-bearing asset into a protected or leveraged tranche, launching soon with a major DeFi issuer.

• Axis Origin Vault launches on Ethereum with a $50M initial cap, powered by Upshift, accepting USDT, USDC, or USDx deposits.

• Hastra launches AUTO on Solana backed by U.S. auto loans, bringing near-prime consumer lending yield onchain for the first time.

• Pareto Credit launches institutional yield on Solana via Nest Credit, offering exposure to FalconX Global prime brokerage lending.

• fxSAVE leads the Stable Yields leaderboard with 8.59% APY on USDC across Ethereum.

• Pendle offers PT-AUSD at 6.67% fixed APY on Monad, with native AUSD yield at 3.5%. AUSD supply on Monad reached $118M (up 65% in 30 days)

• 1inch commits 10M 1INCH and 500k USDC to Aqua LP rewards across 80+ markets over three months via Merkl.

• World Liberty Fi USD1 campaign runs through Aug 7 on Binance, offering up to 5.56% APR on USD1 holdings.

• Makina Finance launches Senior Royco USDC Machine on Ethereum, deploying capital exclusively into Senior tranches across Royco Dawn markets.

• Hylo enables XP rewards on all Meteora LP pools paired with hyUSD stablecoin on Solana.

• Jupiter Lend‘s Earn Vaults now offer over 5% APY on JUICED and jlUSDC yield-bearing receipt tokens.

Farming Benchmarks:

Average Lending APY on proven stablecoins: 3 - 5%

Unincentivized Lending yields on proven stablecoins are holding in the 3–5% APY range. Aave USDT lending sits at the low end (2.7%), while Maple’s Syrup USDC leads at 5.07%. Institutional products — Ondo’s USDY strong at the 3.5% level.

Fixed Rate benchmark: 4 - 7%

Fixed-rate (PT) benchmarks range 4–7%: USDG at 3.27%, USDS at 5.5% slightly down from last week’s 5.5%), and AUSD at 6.51% (slightly down from last week’s 6.86%)

Earn Up to 12% on USD Stablecoin Farms:

StakeDAO – USD3/sUSDe LP – USD3 + sUSDe –11.21% APR(Ethereum – Boosted Curve LP)

Curve stable pool pairing USD3 (3Jane’s diversified stablecoin, backed by a mix of SMB loan receivables, crypto money markets, and consumer credit lines) with sUSDe (Ethena’s yield-bearing stablecoin). Boosted via StakeDAO’s collective veCRV lock (1.74x) — no personal CRV lock needed. Notably, 3.50% of the yield is genuine trading fees, not just emissions — a healthier ratio than most incentivized pools this week.

Risk — Medium ⚠️ USD3 is Reserve Protocol’s basket-backed stablecoin, diversified across multiple underlying stables and yield sources rather than a single collateral type — its peg depends on that basket holding value collectively.

sUSDe carries residual Ethena risk, though its yield now leans more on lending/RWAs than basis trading post the Q1 2026 pivot. 7.71% of the yield is CRV emissions and can taper if gauge voting shifts. Curve and StakeDAO smart contract risk applies.

Pendle – PT reUSD (USDC) – reUSD –11% Fixed APR(Ethereum – Pendle PT)

Pendle Principal Token on reUSD — buy at a discount today and redeem 1 USDC at maturity, locking in a fixed 11% APR. reUSD earns the greater of risk-free rate +250bps or Ethena basis yield +250bps, with off-chain deployment to reinsurance surplus notes. Instant redemption on reUSD is a genuine advantage over most PTs.

Risk — Medium ⚠️ PT price can fall before maturity if implied yields rise — only matters if you sell early rather than holding to maturity. reUSD’s yield floor is partly tied to Ethena’s basis conditions, so sUSDe market stress feeds into what reUSD earns. Standard reUSD depeg risk applies given its off-chain reinsurance exposure. Pendle smart contract risk applies.

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Kamino – Steakhouse USDG High Yield – USDG –7.4% APY(Solana – Lending vault)

Lend USDG — Paxos’s regulated, fiat-backed stablecoin from the Global Dollar Network — into Steakhouse Financial’s curated high-yield vault on Kamino. Steakhouse is one of the most reputable curators in DeFi, known for conservative parameter-setting on Morpho and now extending that reputation to Solana via Kamino. This is a straightforward lending position with a fully regulated stablecoin as the underlying asset.

The vault is a slightly higher lending strategy allocating across highly liquid Kamino markets: Maple Market (2.5%), SOL/BTC Market (64%), Prime Market (26.3%), and a small JLP slice. $112.49M supplied against $101.98M borrowed. 0% management fee, 5% performance fee. Live since September 2025.

Risk — Low/Medium⚠️ Utilization is high at 90.65% — meaning available liquidity is thin relative to deposits, so large withdrawals may face a queue and rates can swing quickly. 3.71% of the yield is incentives, so the sustainable base is closer to the ~4% underlying market APYs. The largest allocation (45%) sits in Maple Market, which carries off-chain institutional credit exposure, and the SOL/BTC market adds volatile collateral. PYUSD itself is one of the cleanest stables available. Kamino and Sentora smart contract risk applies, plus Solana network risk.

Curated Yields, Airdrop Opportunities, TVL Tracking Across Different Protocols + Full Archive of Past Letters

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Today’s News Headlines:

- 1inch launches Aqua liquidity layer
- Ondo launches Ondo Network
- Multisig launches timelocked vaults
- Altura redemption funds frozen by bank
- Strategy buys back $25M of STRC shares

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Airdrop Claims 🪂:

Paradex ($DIME) — TAP Claim (~1 Week Left)

Zero-fee perps/options/spot DEX with ZK-encrypted trading on its own L2, incubated by Paradigm. TAP claim (1% of $DIME to affiliates/referrals) closes ~August 4 — check app.paradex.trade/referrals/tap if you have referral history. Main genesis airdrop (~25% supply) already distributed in March.

Ongoing — XP Season 3: 4M XP weekly among ~3–4k active wallets, earned via trading volume, OI time, maker activity, and referrals. Zero-fee trading makes it low-friction to farm, but no confirmed token allocation tied to it yet.

Official link: app.paradex.trade

⚠️ TAP claim matters if you have affiliate/referral history — otherwise ignore. Season 3 XP has no confirmed token allocation — currently a loyalty metric with possible future value. $DIME has traded soft since TGE (~$0.01, well below March ATH). Leverage on perps/options carries liquidation risk. Only use official app.paradex.trade.

Lombard Finance ($BARD) — Season 3 Lux Claim

Bitcoin liquid staking protocol backed by Polychain Capital ($16M seed), with Franklin Templeton and OKX also participating. Season 3 Lux Points (18 March – 23 July, now closed) allocated 1% of $BARD supply to active LBTC/BTC.b deployers — passive holding didn’t count this round.

Claims are open now at claim.lombard.finance across Ethereum, Sui, and Solana wallets. Minimum claim reported around 15 $BARD. Unclaimed tokens typically return to the ecosystem fund after ~90 days.

For ongoing yield without waiting for a new season: some products like Bitcoin Earn now pay liquid $BARD rewards every 8 hours via Merkl instead of season-end distributions.

Official link: claim.lombard.finance

⚠️ This is a claim window, not a new farming opportunity — Season 3 is closed to new participants. No Season 4 announced yet. $BARD has seen significant drawdown from ATH (~$0.11–0.13 currently, ~$40M market cap). Bridge and multi-chain smart-contract risk applies across supported networks. Missed claims are permanently lost after ~90 days. Only use the official claim.lombard.finance.

⚠️DISCLAIMER NOTICE⚠️ A note before the next section:

• New protocols often carry the most attractive airdrop odds, early TVL, thin points competition, and generous multipliers. But that same immaturity is exactly what makes them risky.

• Smart-contract exploits, depegs, insolvent yield strategies, and outright project failure happen disproportionately in a protocol’s first 3–6 months (we’ve seen it play out with Dango and others in this very letter). Nothing here has a multi-year track record.

• Treat every entry below as capital-at-risk, not “free points”. Size positions like you could lose them entirely, and never deposit more than you’re fully prepared to write off.

Airdrop Updates & Opportunities

Ondo Perps — Ondo Points Live

Perpetual futures platform for U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodities with up to 20x leverage, powered by Ondo Finance’s RWA infrastructure. Distinctive feature: tokenized Ondo Stocks (SPYon, QQQon, etc.) can be used as productive collateral for positions. Available to non-US users only.

Ondo Points program is live, managed by the Ondo Foundation — 5M fixed points distributed weekly, weighted by trading volume and open interest. First distribution already occurred based on activity since June 2.

Check your balance at app.ondoperps.xyz/points. On top of points, weekly USDC trading reward pools are running (~$150–175K recently, with allocations to specific markets like GOOGL and TSLA), plus a 10% referral fee share.

Points are a separate Ondo Foundation loyalty mechanism (not a dedicated Perps token) redeemable in periodic claim windows — no fixed conversion rate confirmed. The fixed weekly pool means earlier consistent activity captures a larger relative share before more traders join.

Official link: ondoperps.xyz

⚠️ Standard perp risks apply — 20x leverage on equities/commodities means small adverse moves trigger liquidation quickly. Not available in the US, Panama, or other restricted jurisdictions. Points have no confirmed conversion rate or guaranteed token allocation — value depends entirely on future Foundation claim windows. Platform is relatively new with liquidity still developing versus established perp venues. Treat points as a bonus on top of actual trading P&L, not the primary reason to trade.

SushiSwap Perps ($SUSHI) — Season 1 Ends July 31

Sushi Perps (v2, powered by Hyperliquid) Season 1 points program closes July 31 — only ~3 days left. Points earned from perp trading volume convert proportionally into $SUSHI post-deadline. 8 tiers with multipliers — reaching a higher tier retroactively applies that multiplier to all points earned during the entire season, so a late volume push can still meaningfully boost your total. Early traders retain a lasting multiplier advantage.

Check your current tier and points at sushi.com/perps immediately. If you already trade perps or can run volume without heavy losses, this is the last window to maximize final points and push into a higher tier before the deadline.

⚠️ Extremely short window — not worth starting from zero with large size unless you have a low-cost or profitable strategy already. Perp trading carries leverage and liquidation risk. Exact $SUSHI allocation size for Season 1 hasn’t been detailed publicly beyond “points convert into $SUSHI.” Expect high competition in the final days as volume chases the deadline. Watch @SushiSwap for the official snapshot/claim announcement after July 31.

Urgent — Not an Airdrop, Withdrawal Warning ⚠️

Dango — Project Shutting Down ⚠

No token was ever launched, and the previously teased $DNG TGE (which had a live points program feeding into a rumored ~50% community allocation) will not happen. All points farming is cancelled — nothing converts, nothing claims.

If you have any funds, positions, or vault deposits on Dango, act now:

1. Close positions and withdraw immediately — don’t wait for the rush.

2. Trading halts Wednesday, July 29, 12:00 UTC — remaining positions force-close at oracle price, DLP vaults unlock, balances convert to USDC in spot accounts.

3. Full L1 shutdown is Wednesday, August 13, 12:00 UTC — any deposits still remaining after this get refunded to your original Ethereum deposit address.

NEW Promising Airdrops

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Uniswap activates fee switch
- Curve proposes new syrupUSDC market
- Galaxy launches Monad AUSD credit vault
- Wemix suffers $6.25M breach

Key Takeaways:

Crypto outperformed equities through geopolitical tension.

Crypto notched a fourth straight week of relative strength even as renewed strikes spiked oil and yields. Underneath, USDT and USDC both grew for the first time in a month and funding dropped back below the borrow rate — the crowded-long setup cleared while price rose, meaning this leg was bought on spot, not levered.

Solana led all chains with a $1.19B stablecoin inflow

New regulated issuance drove it — Anchorage’s USDGO crossed $1B in five months — and the dollars didn’t sit idle: Loopscale (11%+ lending) and Exponent absorbed them into looping venues, minting-then-leveraging inside Solana’s yield stack. The chain-by-chain breakdown, in Section 3.

Ondo secured SEC and FINRA authorization to sell tokenized stocks to US investors.

Its broker-dealer can now bring the largest tokenized securities platform ($20B+ cumulative volume) to the one market it was locked out of, landing the same week tokenized holders passed one million. What else moved, in Section 4.

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1A. Traditional Macro

Oil round-tripped a war scare, and that whipsawed rates. Through last week, renewed US-Iran strikes and Houthi tanker attacks pushed Brent above $100 intraweek — its highest since the June peace deal — dragging the 2-year to ~4.33% and the 10-year near a 2026 peak as an energy-driven inflation scare took hold.

Then it reversed: strikes paused into the weekend, and oil plunged Monday, with Brent back to ~$92 and WTI to ~$85, roughly 5% lower on the day. Prices remain well below the war’s ~$120 peak, and a risk premium is still embedded, but the acute phase eased as fast as it flared.

US 2Y yield

US 2Y yields closed near 4.33%, their highest level since early 2025, after a sharp selloff driven largely by the oil spike. The 2Y briefly reached 4.37%, the 10Y approached 4.7%, and the 30Y touched 5.19%. Similar moves were seen globally as investors priced in higher energy-driven inflation.

However, much of that repricing was tied to an oil shock that has already started to reverse, with Brent falling back toward $92. As a result, the latest yield levels may overstate current macro pressure, especially if oil continues to decline heading into the Fed meeting.

BTC/NQ ratio

BTC/NQ ratio: a fourth consecutive week of crypto outperforming equities. IMPROVING. The standout, and increasingly hard to dismiss as noise. Four straight weeks of relative strength through a period in which liquidity contracted, yields hit multi-year highs, and the dollar firmed. Whatever is bidding crypto is not coming from the macro backdrop.

The weekly close was risk-negative: e 2Y yield hit cycle highs, but largely driven by a temporary oil scare that is already fading.

The key takeaway is that rates caused most of the pressure and are also the most likely factor to reverse if oil keeps falling. Meanwhile, crypto remained resilient, outperforming equities for a fourth straight week despite the macro volatility.

Token Price Movers - Observations, not trade ideas.

Liquity – LQTY . Liquity’s BOLD stablecoin grows and yields across BOLD-based products move above 10% APR. The key development is that Liquity V2 directs protocol revenue back into the BOLD ecosystem, creating a closer link between borrowing activity, protocol revenue, and stablecoin yields; recent strength in LQTY may reflect growing market attention to that dynamic rather than the yield alone.

Ondo — ONDO . Ondo’s SEC-registered broker-dealer, Oasis Pro Markets, secured authorization to offer tokenized equities and funds to US investors under SEC and FINRA oversight. Ondo Stocks is already the largest tokenized securities platform, with $20B+ in cumulative volume, and the US was the missing market. Landed in a week tokenized holders passed one million and BNY moved toward 24/7 tokenized Treasury settlement. post

Fluid — FLUID Launched Liquidity as a Service on July 23, managing DEX liquidity for stablecoin and RWA issuers using its own capital, with no inventory or impermanent loss for the issuer. A day later, a governance proposal appeared for a partnership with AGI3, the digital-asset arm of Dubai’s Kinetic Group, which would build permissioned institutional markets on Fluid and see Kinetic buy up to 10% of FLUID supply. Note it hasn’t passed governance yet. LaaS

1inch — 1INCH Teased a product where tokens stay in the user’s wallet until a swap fills. No date or specs yet, so this is anticipation pricing.4B. TVL Gainers ($50M+ filter)

1B. Crypto Capital On-Ramp

Total stablecoin supply 7d change (level + WoW)

Total stablecoin supply: +$0.171B (+0.05%). FLAT. A marginal return to inflow after last week’s $1.17B contraction, but the number is small enough to read as neutral. The base has now alternated between positive and negative prints for six straight weeks without establishing a direction.

Weekly ETF flows - Ethereum outpaced Bitcoin, for a second straight week.

Spot ETFs took in $103.8M on Ethereum against $33.9M on Bitcoin for July 20–26, with Solana flat. Ethereum drawing three times Bitcoin’s inflow is rare, and two consecutive weeks of it is the part worth flagging. For most of 2026 the ETF complex has been a Bitcoin story with Ethereum as an afterthought, usually negative. That has now inverted.

1C. Week-Ahead Catalysts

FOMC decision, July 28–29. The dominant event, and one of the least predictable meetings in years. The committee is roughly split, markets price a ~36% chance of a hike, and Warsh has given no forward guidance about which way he leans. Because there is no guidance to anchor expectations, the reaction function is unusually wide in both directions, and the press conference matters as much as the decision.

PCE inflation, end of week. The Fed’s preferred gauge, landing days after the decision. June CPI came in cool, but this print starts to capture the renewed energy move, making it the first real test of whether the oil shock is feeding into core inflation.

Section 2 — Onchain Risk Regime

IIndividual Stablecoins Flows

The transactional giants turned positive.

USDT added $227.8M and USDC $186.5M, the first week both have grown together in over a month. Against 30-day context the turn is early rather than established, with USDT still down $1.80B and USDC $187M on the month, but the direction changed and they led the table.

USDGO extended its run, up $106.9M (+10.68%), now +46.2% over 30 days and the fastest-growing dollar in the set for a fourth straight week. USDG added $77.8M (+13.0% on the month) as the Global Dollar rail keeps compounding, and YLDS jumped 7.26%.

The Treasury-yield tier kept draining, and the 30-day numbers are severe. USDtb fell $99.7M on the week, down 58.4% over 30 days. USDS shed $52.0M, down 17.5% on the month. USDe is off 11.0% and USYC 4.1% over the same window. PYUSD posted the largest single weekly outflow at $214.7M.

The composition: Capital is leaving parked, conservative yield instruments and showing up in transactional dollars, which is what deployable capital looks like ahead of being put to work.

Aave / Sphere Rates

Funding dropped to 4.06%, down 0.15% on the week, and is now below the 4.28% borrow rate for the first time in over a month (supply 3.19%, borrow 4.19%). This is the cleanest positive shift in the section.

Funding has run above borrow since late June, which we flagged repeatedly as crowded-long positioning and a reason not to chase. That condition has now cleared, and it cleared while price was rising.

Falling funding into a rising market means the move is being driven by spot demand rather than leveraged longs paying up to hold positions.

ETHBTC vs 20W MA

A fifth consecutive green weekly candle, and the ratio has now cleared its 20-week moving average. After spending three weeks testing the line, ETHBTC has pushed through it, the first sustained reclaim since the downtrend began in the spring.

This is the strongest the ratio has looked all year, and it is not an isolated chart signal. Ethereum ETF inflows outpaced Bitcoin’s three to one this week and last. Institutional allocation, spot accumulation, and relative price strength are now aligned. Since ETHBTC functions as the risk-appetite gauge for the broader alt complex, a confirmed break above the MA is the level that historically opens room for alts to move.

Verdict: Onchain regime — RISK-ON.

Three things changed this week, all in the same direction. Funding reset below borrow, clearing the crowded-long condition that had capped the setup for a month. Transactional dollars turned positive while conservative yield instruments kept draining, which is capital repositioning to be deployed. And ETHBTC broke its 20-week moving average on the fifth straight green week, with ETF and exchange-flow data confirming it.

Section 3 — Chain Comparison

3A. Stablecoin flows by chain — table with 7d flow, 7d %, 30d %

Solana — +$1.19B (+7.54% 7d, +9.47% 30d), to $16.93B

The largest absolute stablecoin inflow this week. The story was two-sided: regulated supply growth and leveraged on-chain demand.

On the supply side, USDGO surpassed $1B in circulation just five months after launching on Solana, while Circle and Tether were largely inactive. This continues Solana’s diversification away from USDC dominance and toward a broader stablecoin mix.

On the demand side, new capital was actively absorbed by yield venues rather than sitting idle. Loopscale — Solana’s fastest-growing fixed-rate lending protocol and Exponent — Solana’s leading fixed-yield and yield-tokenization venue, continued attracting deposits through fixed-yield and looping strategies, reinforcing demand for stablecoin liquidity.

What to watch: Whether USDGO continues gaining share from USDC and whether stablecoin TVL on Loopscale and Exponent keeps expanding. Continued growth would confirm demand is structural rather than incentive-driven.

Robinhood Chain — +$89.8M (+22.82% 7d), to $483.1M stablecoin supply

The second-largest stablecoin inflow came almost entirely from one trade: the Morpho/Ethena USDG lending stack.

Most new supply flowed into a Steakhouse-curated USDG vault on Morpho, supported by Ethena liquidity and Maple’s institutional-credit infrastructure. Despite attention on tokenized equities, lending and looping activity remains the primary driver of both stablecoin growth and TVL.

The setup has attracted capital quickly, but the flow remains concentrated in a single yield structure rather than a diversified ecosystem.

What to watch: Whether Morpho/Ethena TVL continues growing after initial incentives fade. The key durability test is the yield stack, not tokenized-stock adoption.

3B. Structural Shifts - RWA & Institutional DeFi

Key takeaways

• TVL growth is overwhelmingly the Morpho/Ethena lending vault and looping demand — lending & asset management is ~81% of protocol TVL.

• Tokenized-stock contribution remains minimal — roughly 4% of TVL and ~9% of DEX volume, despite the attention.

• The chain’s value is in app-level trading, not base-layer usage; the launchpad lead rotated from Noxa to Pons.RWA perpetuals surpassed crypto perpetuals on Hyperliquid for the first time, driven almost entirely by a single operator focused on tokenized equities. While the milestone is notable, it does not yet represent broad-based market adoption.

Tokenized-equity market cap and transfer volume both reached record levels, while institutional infrastructure continues to move from pilots into production. DTCC processed its first live tokenized securities trades, major exchanges expanded tokenized-stock offerings, and Ondo secured broker-dealer authorization while growing revenue faster than deposits.

The week’s counterexample was Goldfinch’s wind-down, highlighting that private-credit risk still matters. The lesson is that collateral quality, duration, and transparency matter more than headline yields.

What to watch: Whether tokenized-equity activity expands beyond a single operator and whether revenue growth across RWA protocols continues to outpace TVL growth.

Robinhood Chain — Structural Shift

The market narrative remains ahead of reality.

Approximately 80% of TVL sits in lending and asset-management protocols, primarily Morpho and Ethena. Tokenized equities account for only a small share of both TVL and trading activity, while memecoins continue to dominate DEX volume.

What stands out is where value accrues. Despite strong chain activity, application-layer businesses are capturing significantly more revenue than the base layer itself. The recent shift from Noxa to Pons as the leading launchpad reinforces that user attention is concentrating around trading venues rather than infrastructure.

What to watch: Whether tokenized-stock activity grows into a meaningful share of TVL and volume. Until then, Robinhood Chain should be viewed primarily as a lending-and-looping ecosystem with a high-velocity trading front end.

Additional Signals

• Fake World Assets (FWA): One of Ethereum’s fastest-growing contract clusters, but emissions end August 4, making it an attention trade rather than a durable yield opportunity.

• Pendle Boros: Funding-rate markets continue gaining traction, with volume up more than 3x YTD and fixed arbitrage yields reportedly around 18–21%.

• S&P Pantera Index: Signals growing institutional preference for revenue-generating crypto assets, with protocol revenue now a primary screening metric.

Section 4 — Project & Protocol Discovery

Upshift — +$58.2M (+25.8% 7d), to $283.5M · Yield / vault infrastructure

Upshift is the cleanest story in the cohort, and its model is worth stating plainly because it explains the quality of the flow. Rather than pooling deposits, Upshift operates a curated vault marketplace: dedicated vaults are built around each client’s asset mix and risk parameters, run by vetted curators, with positions returned as receipt tokens held in segregated custody rather than rehypothecated.

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DeFi📈

• Fluid rebranded as the “Liquidity Layer for All Finance,” opening institutional curation markets with Bitwise as the first curator ($500M drawn in two months), and announcing a Solana DEX in final audit, fixed-rate borrowing, DEX v2, and Liquidity-as-a-Service — all built on a track record of zero user funds lost across two years live.

• Re Protocol joined Fluid’s rebranded ecosystem with boosted incentives — 20x Re points for reUSD/USDT LPs and 5x for reUSD collateral positions on Fluid.

• Derive teased V3 targeting September — adding options vaults for passive yield, faster architecture, and programmable infrastructure to its existing options platform.

• Covenant launched the first tranched DEX LP position on Monad, in partnership with Balancer and Neverland — splitting LP positions into a yield (senior) coin and a leverage (junior) coin, allowing up to 5x leveraged LP exposure.

• Aave Labs is proposing a consumer-focused app that removes wallet setup and gas complexity, making DeFi accessible to mainstream users — currently in draft pending community feedback.

• Hylo launched xBTC, a 3x leveraged BTC token on Solana designed to be held like a regular token — no margin accounts or active position management required, with liquidation resistance built in. 0% minting fee this week.

• 1inch co-founder is launching a new project called Second Tier (tier.xyz), with no activities live yet but early attention given the team background.

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Wind Downs⌛️:

• Dango is shutting down, citing cash constraints, legal delays, and adverse market conditions since its April launch. Trading halts July 29 with all positions closed at oracle price, and the Dango L1 blockchain goes offline August 13 — all funds will be returned as USDC.

• Odos, a DeFi aggregator, is shutting down — app goes read-only July 27 and all services end July 30. Users with social/email-created wallets should export their keys or transfer assets before then. The ODOS token and DAO remain independent of the company.

• Movement Labs filed for bankruptcy after a market maker dumped 66M MOVE tokens, collapsing the project. The remaining team split off as Move Industries.

• Hinkal Protocol begins returning funds to recovery-process participants across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon. All returns are expected to be completed by Wednesday, July 22, with full fund reimbursement.

• Storj Labs filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to restructure legacy debt while keeping services running. The company raised ~$35M, including a $30M 2017 token sale. Customer operations remain uninterrupted during restructuring.

Issues⚠️

• AFX bridge on Arbitrum drained of $24.1M via valid validator signatures, not a smart contract bug. The attacker exploited the original validator set deployed May 12, 2026, pointing to compromised off-chain signing infrastructure.

• VerusCoin’s Ethereum bridge suffered a $7.5M exploit through forged proof submission, bypassing bridge verification in the submitImports() function.

• Allbridge halted operations after a $1.65 million flash loan exploit on Solana’s USDC/USDT pool, with attackers bridging stolen assets to Ethereum and leaving LPs urgently needing to withdraw funds.

• Flash.Trade detected an unauthorized $98K withdrawal and paused trading as a precaution. All user funds are safe and the team will cover the loss.

• TripleAHQ’s wallets were drained of over $9.7M in crypto across multiple chains, marking a significant security breach in the DeFi ecosystem.

• Balance Coin, an algorithmic stablecoin backed by bitcoin collateral, crashed 99% to $0.0014 after an attacker manipulated its oracle to submit a fake low BTC price

• Zilliqa disclosed a critical Ledger app vulnerability present since 2019 — a nonce generation bug allows private key recovery from on-chain signatures.

  • Any account with ~5 or more native Zilliqa transactions signed via Ledger should be considered compromised. Native transactions are suspended pending a remediation plan. EVM wallets are unaffected.

Stablecoins/RWA🪙

• Hylo launched eHYUSD, a delta-neutral yield-bearing stablecoin that earns from every Hylo Leveraged Token — rebranded from sHYUSD with a $15M initial cap and a 30-day Genesis Boost Event offering up to 25% XP boost for holders.

Privacy🔓

• Zama launched Confidential RFQ in private beta — an onchain swap venue where your trade size, direction, and asset stay encrypted, protecting you from MEV and frontrunning. Public launch is September; waitlist is open.

Perps DEX📉📈

• Ondo Perpetuals drops 5M Ondo Points weekly with multiple earning paths: referral fees (10%), $175K USDC trader rewards, and $25K allocated to $GOOGL/$TSLA trading.

• Arcus launches perps trading on Robinhood Chain with 50% taker fee discounts during beta.

• Cascade resolves security incident after affected parties cooperated to return drained CLS funds. Retrieved assets are now secured in multisig address 0x8074583b0f9cfa345405320119d4b6937c152304.

News🗞️

• The CLARITY Act is headed for a full Senate floor vote, establishing a federal framework that splits digital asset oversight between the CFTC (commodities) and SEC (securities) with consumer protections and AML rules.

• SEC Commissioner Peirce warned that DeFi vaults and onchain lending strategies may fall under securities laws depending on how they’re managed, urging curators and protocol operators to engage with the SEC before enforcement.

• White House agrees to ethics provisions in the CLARITY Act market structure bill, removing a key legislative obstacle and triggering a Bitcoin surge above $66,000 on optimism around pro-crypto regulatory clarity.

• Telegram founder Pavel Durov confirms native Gram wallet rollout this summer with non-custodial self-custody for 1 billion+ users.

• BitMEX is shutting down on September 23, 2026, ending an 11-year operation. Users are urged to close positions and withdraw funds — all assets remain safe during the transition.

• BitMart is shutting down — new registrations and deposits suspended July 26, all trading ends August 26, and the platform fully closes January 31, 2027. Users are urged to withdraw funds as soon as possible.

For sponsorships, questions, or news tips, reach us at: support@todayindefi.com

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Today’s News Headlines:

- CLARITY Act Heads to Senate Floor
- Odos shuts down aggregator operations July 30
- BitMEX to cease operations in September
- Zilliqa discloses critical Ledger wallet vulnerability
- Axis opens institutional arbitrage vault onchain
- Zama launches encrypted trading venue beta
- VerusCoin bridge exploited for $7.5M
- Aave V4 deployment proposed for Tempo
- Covenant launches leveraged LP vaults on Monad

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1. The big idea: getting paid to take on an obligation

If you hold crypto, you can just sit on it and hope it goes up. Covered calls and cash-secured puts are a different approach: you agree in advance to buy or sell at a specific price, and someone pays you cash today for that promise. That payment is called the premium, and it is the “yield” these products advertise.

The key thing to understand — and the part the marketing hides — is that you are the seller (the “writer”) of an option. You are not buying insurance; you are selling it. When Binance, OKX, or Bybit call these products “Sell High” and “Buy Low,” what you are actually doing under the hood is selling a call option and selling a put option, respectively. Understanding that you are short an option is the single most important mental model in this whole guide, because it tells you exactly how you make money (time passing, calm markets) and exactly how you get hurt (sharp moves against you).

There are two building blocks:

• Covered call — you own the crypto and sell someone the right to buy it from you at a higher price. You get paid to cap your upside.

• Cash-secured put — you hold stablecoins and sell someone the right to sell crypto to you at a lower price. You get paid to agree to buy the dip.

Both are income strategies, and both are what traders call “short volatility”: you collect a steady premium and quietly profit when nothing dramatic happens, in exchange for taking the pain when the market makes a big, fast move.

2. Options in five minutes

You already understand wallets, spot, perps, and funding rates. Options add a few new primitives:

• Call option — the right (not obligation) to buy an asset at a set price.

• Put option — the right to sell at a set price.

• Strike price — the agreed price at which the buy/sell can happen.

• Expiry/maturity — the date the option settles. Most crypto options are European-style (they can only be exercised at expiry, not before) and cash-settled (the difference is paid in cash rather than moving the actual coin).

• Premium — the price of the option. The buyer pays it; the seller (you) receives it and keeps it no matter what.

• Moneyness — an option is out-of-the-money (OTM) if exercising it would make no sense right now, at-the-money (ATM) near the current price, and in-the-money (ITM) if it already has intrinsic value. Option sellers generally sell OTM options.

• Assignment — when the option you sold finishes ITM and you are forced to honor your obligation (sell your coin, or buy the coin).

Why crypto premiums are so juicy: the price of an option rises with implied volatility (IV) — the market’s expectation of how much the asset will move. Crypto is far more volatile than stocks, so crypto option premiums (and therefore the headline yields on these products) are much higher than anything in traditional finance. That is not free money: the yield is high precisely because the thing you are insuring against — a violent price move — happens more often in crypto.

3. Covered calls: earn yield on crypto you already hold

A covered call means you hold the underlying asset and sell an out-of-the-money call against it. It’s “covered” because if you get assigned, you already own the coin to deliver — you’re not caught short.

Suppose BTC trades at $100,000 and you own 1 BTC. You sell a 1-week call with a $105,000 strike (5% above spot) and collect a $1,200 premium (~1.2% of your position for the week).

Who it’s for: someone who is neutral-to-mildly-bullish and genuinely willing to sell at the strike. The premium is your consolation for giving away the explosive upside.

The catch: your upside is capped, and you still eat the downside on the coin you hold (the premium is only a thin cushion). Covered calls underperform simply holding in a screaming bull market — this is exactly why Binance warns that its BTC Yield product “may underperform a direct holding of BTC, particularly in strongly rising markets.”

Where to do it

The simplest on-chain route is a packaged product: you choose the price you’d be happy to sell at and a short expiry, and the protocol writes the call and pays you the premium.

• Rysk Finance lets you sell a covered call on ETH, BTC or HYPE directly to competing market makers — you pick the strike and expiry, and the premium lands in your wallet upfront (in USDT0). Non-custodial, on HyperEVM.

• Prodigy.Fi offers “Sell High” dual-currency vaults on Base and Berachain: choose the target price and a short tenor and earn a fixed, quoted yield. Positions are fully collateralized, with no leverage and no liquidations.

You can also do this yourself on an options exchange — Derive on-chain, or Deribit — by writing the call from the full option chain, which gives you more control at the cost of more hands-on management (see Section 8). Whichever venue you use, the two dials that decide your yield and your odds of assignment — the strike and the expiry — work the same way, and Sections 5 and 6 cover how to set them.

4. Cash-secured puts: get paid to wait to buy the dip

A cash-secured put is the mirror image. You set aside stablecoins and sell an out-of-the-money put. It’s “cash-secured” because you’re holding enough cash to actually buy the coin if you’re assigned.

BTC trades at $100,000. You’d be happy to buy at $95,000. You set aside $95,000 in stablecoins and sell a 1-week put with a $95,000 strike, collecting an $1,100 premium (~1.16% for the week).

Who it’s for: someone who wants to accumulate a coin at a lower price and is happy to be paid while waiting.

The catch: when you get assigned, it’s usually because the market is falling — so you buy right as things look worst, and the price can keep dropping well below your strike.

Where to do it

The packaged route mirrors the covered call. You choose the price you’d be happy to buy at and a short expiry, and the protocol writes the put and pays you the premium up front.

• Rysk lets you sell a cash-secured put by depositing stablecoins and naming your strike and expiry, with the premium paid to your wallet immediately (HyperEVM and Ethereum, non-custodial).

• Prodigy.Fi offers “Buy Low” dual-currency vaults on Base and Berachain: set the price you’d buy at and a tenor, and earn a fixed yield whether or not you end up assigned.

Or write the put yourself on Derive or Deribit for full control over strike and expiry (see Section 8). Either way, how to choose that strike and expiry is covered in Sections 5 and 6.

The Wheel: combining the two

A popular systematic loop ties these together. You sell cash-secured puts until you get assigned and end up holding the coin. Then you switch to selling covered calls against that coin until it gets called away, leaving you back in cash. Then you sell puts again. Round and round — hence “the wheel.” It’s just covered calls and cash-secured puts run back-to-back, and every leg collects premium.

5. Choosing your strike price

Strike selection is the main dial you control, and it’s a single, unavoidable trade-off: more premium versus more risk of assignment.

• Strike far from spot (deep OTM): smaller premium, but a lower chance of being assigned — for a covered call that means more room to enjoy the coin’s rise; for a put, a bigger discount before you’re forced to buy.

• Strike close to spot (near ATM): fat premium, but a high chance of assignment. You’re getting paid more precisely because you’re more likely to have to sell your coin (or buy the dip).

Delta as a cheat code: an option’s delta doubles as a rough estimate of the probability it finishes in-the-money. A call with 0.25 delta has roughly a 25% chance of being assigned. Income sellers often live in the ~0.15–0.30 delta zone — meaningful premium, but assignment only maybe 1 in 4 or 1 in 6 times. Packaged products that hide the Greeks just show you a target price and an APR instead; the same trade-off is still there, you just read it off the yield.

The honest question to ask yourself:

• For a covered call: “At what price would I genuinely be happy to sell this coin?” Sell the call there. If you’d hate to part with it below $120k, don’t sell a $105k call for a bit of extra yield.

• For a cash-secured put: “At what price would I genuinely be happy to buy?” Sell the put there. Assignment should feel like a win, not a trap.

Don’t get hypnotized by APR. A near-ATM weekly that shows 120% APR is advertising how likely you are to get assigned. High yield is compensation for high risk, every single time.

6. Choosing your maturity (expiry / tenor)

The second dial is how far out you sell. Crypto venues span everything from 1-day to multi-month.

• Short-dated (1–7 days) — the norm for packaged dual-currency vaults and short-dated on-chain products. Premium decays fast in your favor (see theta below), annualized yields look enormous, and you reset your view often. The costs: you make a decision every few days, and you’re more exposed to a sudden move right near expiry (”gamma risk”).

• Longer-dated (weeks to months) — available on Deribit, Derive, and Rysk. Bigger absolute premium up front, far less babysitting, but your capital is committed longer and the price has more time to wander through your strike.

Absolute vs annualized: a 1%-a-week premium annualizes to something eye-watering (~50–70%+), but only if you successfully roll it ~52 times a year and never get run over. Two bad assignments can erase months of premium. Judge these products on a full-cycle basis, not on the best-week screenshot.

Watch the calendar: selling an option that expires right after a known catalyst (a major macro print, an unlock, a token launch) pays more because the risk is real. Don’t sell through an event unless you specifically want that bet.

7. The Greeks — and how price moves change what you sold

The “Greeks” measure how an option’s value responds to different forces. You don’t need the math, but as a seller you should know that you are short the option, so the signs flip relative to a buyer. Here’s what matters:

• Delta — sensitivity to the underlying price, and (handily) a proxy for assignment probability. This is the first-order effect: as spot moves toward your strike, the option you sold gains value and assignment gets more likely.

• Theta (your friend) — time decay. Every day that passes, an OTM option loses a little value. Since you sold it, that decay is your profit. Theta is the engine of the entire yield. It accelerates as expiry approaches, which is why sellers love short tenors.

• Vega (your enemy) — sensitivity to implied volatility. If IV spikes (panic, a violent move), the option you sold jumps in value — a mark-to-market loss for you, and a higher chance of assignment. You want calm or falling volatility. You are “short vega.”

• Gamma (the whipsaw) — how fast delta changes. Sellers are “short gamma,” which bites hardest near the strike close to expiry: a small price move can flip you from safe to assigned very quickly.

• Rho — sensitivity to interest rates. Minor for the short-dated crypto trades most of these products use; safe to mostly ignore.

How underlying price movement changes the value of the instrument you sold: remember that the “instrument” is an option you are short, so rising option value is bad for you (you’d have to pay more to buy it back, and you’re closer to assignment) while falling option value is good (it decays toward zero and you keep the full premium). This table sums up the forces:

In one sentence: you are rooting for boring, sideways, low-volatility markets and the steady passage of time; your enemy is a big, fast move — especially one that accelerates as expiry approaches.

8. Doing it yourself: options exchanges (the manual route)

The packaged products in Sections 3 and 4 are the easy on-ramp: pick a strike (or target price) and an expiry, and the protocol writes the option for you. If you want full control — any strike, any expiry, and the ability to roll or close whenever you like — you sell the option yourself on an options exchange. It’s more hands-on, but you set every parameter and can manage the position actively.

Derive (formerly Lyra) is the largest on-chain options exchange — a hybrid order-book-plus-AMM running on its own Optimism-stack L2 (Derive Chain). You pick any listed strike and expiry, sell the call or put, and post margin; options are European and USDC-settled, on BTC, ETH, SOL and HYPE. It’s non-custodial with no KYC (though the front-end geoblocks the US and Australia). If you want a middle ground between fully manual and fully packaged, Derive also runs automated yield vaults.

Rysk sits between packaged and manual: you still choose the strike and expiry, but you request a quote and market makers fill you, with the premium paid to your wallet upfront (in USDT0) on HyperEVM. It’s a good option if you want to name your own terms without babysitting an order book.

Deribit is the heavyweight if you want maximum liquidity: it is the dominant crypto options venue (consistently around 85%+ of global BTC options open interest), so pricing is tight and size is deep. You sell OTM calls or puts from the full chain; options are European and cash-settled. The trade-offs are that it is centralized and custodial, requires KYC, and restricts some jurisdictions (US clients now route in via Coinbase Financial Markets as of May 2026).

How a manual covered call actually goes: pick an expiry, choose an out-of-the-money strike (use delta as your guide — see Section 5), sell/write the call, and collect the premium immediately. At expiry it either expires worthless — you keep the premium and the coin, and can sell another — or it finishes in-the-money and you’re assigned, delivering the coin at the strike. A cash-secured put is the mirror: sell an OTM put, hold the stablecoins, and either keep the premium or get assigned and buy the coin. If you want to dodge an impending assignment, you “roll” — buy the option back and sell a new one further out in time or strike.

A note on centralized “Dual Investment” products

Centralized exchanges package these exact trades for retail. Binance, OKX, and Bybit all sell “Sell High” (covered-call) and “Buy Low” (cash-secured-put) products under a “Dual Investment” or “Dual Asset” label, and Binance recently launched a managed covered-call vault called BTC Yield. They’re liquid, need no wallet or gas, and are genuinely simple to use.

The catch is that they are custodial and KYC’d, geo-restricted (generally no US access), not principal-protected, and they often take a cut of the premium or limit which strikes and expiries you can choose — and you are still the option seller carrying exactly the risks this guide describes (capped upside on a call, buying a falling knife on a put). Because our focus is on-chain and self-custodial, we don’t cover them in depth here — but if you understand the DeFi versions above, you already understand these.

9. A practical checklist before you sell your first one

1. Only sell calls at a price you’d be happy to sell, and puts at a price you’d be happy to buy. If assignment would upset you, your strike is wrong.

2. Respect the asymmetry. These strategies win small and often, and lose big and rarely. Size positions so one bad week can’t wreck you.

3. Read the headline APR as a risk gauge, not a promise. Higher advertised yield = higher probability of assignment, always.

4. Vet the protocol. Prefer audited, battle-tested contracts and understand exactly where your collateral sits — several earlier DeFi option vaults suffered exploits or heavy losses. In DeFi the smart-contract risk is yours.

5. Know your custody model. On a centralized venue your coins sit with the operator (counterparty risk). On-chain they sit in a smart contract (contract/oracle risk). Pick your poison consciously.

6. Mind the fine print: not principal-protected, platform cuts of your premium, slippage tolerances, lock-ups, and no early exit on many packaged products.

7. Check access & taxes for your jurisdiction — KYC, geo-restrictions, and how premium income is taxed where you live.

8. Start small. Run one cycle end-to-end, ideally including one assignment, before scaling up. Assignment is a feature of these strategies, not a bug — but you want to feel it once while the stakes are low.

10. Glossary

• Premium — the cash you receive for selling the option; the “yield.”

• Strike — the agreed buy/sell price.

• Expiry / maturity / tenor — when the option settles / how long until it does.

• OTM / ATM / ITM — out-of / at- / in-the-money.

• Assignment — being forced to honor the option (sell your coin, or buy the coin).

• Implied volatility (IV) — the market’s expected movement; the main driver of premium.

• Short volatility — a position (like these) that profits from calm and loses from big moves.

• The Greeks — delta (price), theta (time), vega (volatility), gamma (rate of delta change), rho (rates).

• The Wheel — selling cash-secured puts until assigned, then covered calls until called away, repeatedly.

Educational content only — not financial advice, and not a recommendation of any protocol or venue. Selling options carries real risk of loss, including being forced to sell below market or buy above it. Details change quickly in crypto; verify current terms on each venue before trading. As of July 2026.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Ondo perps launch points program
- CLARITY Act advances to Senate floor vote
- AFX loses $24M in bridge exploit
- Movement Labs files for Chapter 11
- YieldBasis proposes $10M WBTC expansion
- Grass Stage 2 USDC claims go live
- 42DAO’s stablecoin collapses 99% after oracle exploit
- B²Network exploited for $3.86M on BNB Chain

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This Week’s Farming News:

• Apyx launches a new vault with Arkonix that deposits apxUSD and loops PT-apyUSD across Pendle and Morpho for amplified fixed yield.

• IPOR introduces the Base USDC Lending Optimizer by Clearstar Labs, allocating liquidity across Aave, Euler, and Morpho on Base with cbAsset market access.

• Aave V4 Prime Hub now offers 1% USDC rebates on borrow rates, paid in USDC, for borrowers using bluechip collateral at high factors.

• Liquity offers 10% APR on ETH deposits via the Liquity vault on Fusion (powered by IPOR), with ~330 ETH capacity remaining on Ethereum.

• Hylo launches xBTC on Solana, offering 3x leveraged BTC exposure as a liquidation-resistant token with 0% minting fees this week.

• Pendle is proposing to launch PT-AUSD on Aave V3.

• Saturn Credit allocates $5,000 in incentives to the Saturn Vault on Monad over two weeks, with potential increases based on borrow demand.

• Mezzanine is offering multiple ways to deploy USDC: mint liquid mzUSD, LP, or lend to earn points pre-launch.

• LoopScale adds $1M USDC liquidity to OnRe Loops on Solana, offering up to >20% APY on PT-ONyc and >10% APY on ONyc + 6x OnRe Points.

Farming Benchmarks:

Average Lending APY on proven stablecoins: 3 - 5%

Unincentivized Lending yields on proven stablecoins are holding in the 3–5% APY range. Aave USDC lending and Circle’s USYC sit at the low end (3.15%), while Maple’s Syrup USDC leads at 4.82%. Institutional products — Ondo’s USDY strong at the 3.5% level.

Fixed Rate benchmark: 4 - 7%

Fixed-rate (PT) benchmarks range 4–7%: USDG at 4.21%, USDS at 5.5%( up from last week’s 4.98%), and AUSD at 6.86% (also up from last week’s 6.68%)

Earn Up to 12% on USD Stablecoin Farms:

StakeDAO – USD3/scrvUSD LP – USD3 + scrvUSD – 12.11% APR (Ethereum – Boosted Curve LP)

Curve pool pairing USD3 with scrvUSD, boosted via StakeDAO’s collective veCRV lock (1.49x). USD3 is 3Jane’s yield-bearing stablecoin, backed by a diversified credit mix — roughly 57% SMB loan receivables, 30% crypto money markets (Aave), plus consumer installment loans and multi-chain credit lines.

scrvUSD is the savings version of crvUSD, accruing yield from Curve’s lending revenue. APR breaks down as 0.76% trading fees + 11.35% boosted CRV. TVL is $262.54K.

Risk — Medium ⚠️ ~94% of the APR is CRV emissions, so this is primarily an incentive farm — if gauge voting shifts, the rate compresses toward the sub-1% trading fee base. The 1.49x boost is on the lower end for StakeDAO, meaning less reward capture than pools with higher boosts. USD3’s credit-heavy backing carries real-world loan performance risk rather than on-chain collateral risk. TVL is thin at $262K — size entry and exit carefully. Curve and StakeDAO smart contract risk applies.

Euler – K3 Capital USDtb Vault – USDtb –10.68% APY(Ethereum – Lendin g

Lend USDtb — Ethena’s T-bill-backed stablecoin with reserves in BlackRock’s BUIDL fund — into K3 Capital’s Prime Market vault on Euler. Total supply APY is 10.68%: 3.45% base lending yield plus 7.23% in USDtb Merkl rewards (campaign ends July 24, 2026).

USDtb is one of the cleanest stables to lend — direct T-bill backing, no basis exposure. Borrowers post a mix of collateral, mostly weETH (63%) plus USDC, USDT, WETH, and WBTC. $468.96K total supply with $126.17K available liquidity.

Risk — Medium ⚠️ 7.23% of the yield is a Merkl reward ending July 24 — after that, the rate drops toward the 3.45% base. The dominant collateral is weETH (63% exposure), so an EtherFi/restaking issue or weETH depeg is the main collateral risk. Available liquidity is modest at $126K — larger exits may queue. K3 Capital is a smaller, newer curator. Euler smart contract risk applies.

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Kamino – Sentora PYUSD Vault – PYUSD – 7.53% APY (Solana – Lending vault)

Lend PYUSD — PayPal’s stablecoin, issued by Paxos Trust Company on behalf of PayPal under NYDFS regulation and backed 1:1 by cash and short-duration Treasuries — into Sentora’s Balanced-profile vault on Kamino. Supply APY is 7.53% (90-day average 6.45%), of which 3.71% comes from PYUSD incentives (~80K PYUSD distributed weekly).

The vault is a conservative lending strategy allocating across highly liquid Kamino markets: Maple Market (45%), SOL/BTC Market (28.3%), Prime Market (26.3%), and a small JLP slice. $112.49M supplied against $101.98M borrowed. 0% management fee, 5% performance fee. Live since September 2025.

Risk — Low/Medium⚠️ Utilization is high at 90.65% — meaning available liquidity is thin relative to deposits, so large withdrawals may face a queue and rates can swing quickly. 3.71% of the yield is incentives, so the sustainable base is closer to the ~4% underlying market APYs. The largest allocation (45%) sits in Maple Market, which carries off-chain institutional credit exposure, and the SOL/BTC market adds volatile collateral. PYUSD itself is one of the cleanest stables available. Kamino and Sentora smart contract risk applies, plus Solana network risk.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Fluid unveils expanded DeFi infrastructure roadmap
- Aave proposes consumer-friendly DeFi app
- Derive teases major V3 upgrade
- 1inch co-founder launches Second Tier
- CLARITY Act clears key legislative hurdle
- Telegram confirms native crypto wallet launch
- Re Protocol joins Fluid ecosystem expansion

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Airdrop Claims

GRVT ($GRVT) — TGE Delayed to July 30⚠️

TGE delayed from July 21 to July 30 to allow simultaneous launch across multiple exchanges — listings will be announced as agreements finalize. More exchanges from day one means better liquidity and price discovery, which is generally positive for token holders long-term.

No new action needed if you already chose your vesting option before the July 17 deadline. Just update the date and watch for exchange listing announcements.

⚠️ Another delay is testing community patience — some users are already rotating activity elsewhere. If you chose 1x immediate vesting, your tokens are simply pushed back 9 days. Nothing changes about your allocation or vesting choice.

Airdrop Registrations

Plasma One (XPL) — Core Tier Deadline Tomorrow

Last day to claim the Core tier is July 21. Core gives 3% base cashback + 5% on AI spend, reduced fees, a ChatGPT Go subscription, and priority support — accessible via annual subscription or locking XPL for 12 months, with promotional access available for eligible new users making qualifying deposits.

Claiming Core signals early committed usage, which often matters for retroactive or loyalty-based rewards. Download the Plasma One app, verify your account, and secure the tier before the cutoff.

Official link: plasma.org/download/TRLLNS

⚠️ Deadline is tomorrow — time-sensitive. Higher tiers require locking XPL for 12 months, creating illiquidity. XPL is already distributed and trading — this is a utility/cashback play, not a new airdrop. Cashback value depends on XPL price at redemption.

Airdrop Updates & Opportunities

Hylo (XP Points — Solana)

Hylo is a Solana-based dual-token protocol offering hyUSD (stablecoin backed by SOL LSTs) and xSOL/xBTC (leveraged exposure without liquidation risk). Audited by OtterSec and Accretion Labs with zero critical findings in the V2 audit.

Backed by Robot Ventures, Colosseum, and Solana Ventures. The XP points program runs in seasons with capital × time as the core mechanic — no obvious sybil exploits.

XP rates per dollar per day: xSOL/xBTC earns 20x (highest, prioritize this and enter at the right price), hyUSD and hyloSOL+ earn 5x, eHYUSD and hyloSOL earn 1x.

Crowns earned at tier milestones carry forward as permanent boost multipliers across seasons, compounding for long-term holders. Stack every active boost (currently 5% + 5% + 10% + 5% in private beta) and deploy Hylo assets across partner protocol integrations for extra XP on top.

Official link: hylo.so/leverage

⚠️ No confirmed $HYLO token or airdrop — points are speculative. hyUSD is backed by SOL LSTs meaning a sharp SOL drawdown directly pressures the collateral ratio. xSOL carries up to 4x leverage — absorbs all volatility and amplifies downside in crashes. Novel oracle-free pricing mechanism is untested in severe market stress. Short track record (~1 year). Only use official hylo.so domain.

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Markets.xyz — Boosted kPoints

Markets.xyz is Kinetiq’s 24/7 trading frontend on Hyperliquid (US500, QQQ, USTECH with up to 25x leverage) — live for months, not newly launched. kPoints Season 2 distributes 800K weekly (Thursdays, Tuesday snapshots) toward a final snapshot on September 29, distribution October 1.

Earn by staking HYPE → kHYPE → vkHYPE or trading perps on Markets, with boosted kPoints for MKTS listings. Referrals scale 1–15% of fees based on staked KNTQ.

Eligibility note: The genesis KNTQ airdrop required signing Foundation Terms by Nov 21, 2025 — that window is closed and locked some users out, so the next airdrops are probably going to have another limited registration period. Confirm your standing before farming heavily. The kPoints formula is kept deliberately private.

Download on mobile and farm: https://markets.xyz/mobile-app

⚠️ Incremental multiplier, not a standalone airdrop — only worthwhile if you’re already trading these markets. Perp trading carries liquidation risk. kPoints value is unconfirmed until any Kinetiq token event.

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Ledger wallet drains likely linked to malware
- Aurora recovers from brief outage
- Hinkal starts fund returns
- Staked DAO launches Morpho LP market
- Hylo launches yield-bearing BTC and stablecoin token
- Arcus gives 50% taker fee discounts during beta.

Key Takeaways:

1. The war escalated — and crypto didn’t flinch.

The US blockade of Iran came back, yet liquidity kept expanding, BTC/NQ turned up for a second straight week, and ETF flows stayed positive. Real strength building underneath a hostile macro backdrop.

2. Solana, Monad, and Robinhood Chain led stablecoin flows last week.

Offering double-digit looping APYs, all three are being driven by the same mechanism — incentivized lending markets that keep borrowing costs down, making leveraged positions profitable enough to pull in fresh deposits. The chain-by-chain breakdown, in Section 3.

3. Ondo’s abundant catalysts this week.

Ondo shipped the first tokenized stocks built on DTC entitlements and struck a partnership with Japan’s SBI Group, landing in a week the broader tokenization narrative accelerated across regulators and institutions. What else moved, in Section 4.

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1A. Traditional Macro

The war escalated into a full blockade — and this time crypto didn’t flinch.

The US resumed its naval blockade of Iranian ports and continued strikes around the strait, while Iran struck US assets in Jordan. Trump also floated then reversed a cargo toll through the strait. It’s the same standoff that’s run since spring — on the ground, the situation is worse; on the market, it’s priced as familiar rather than new. Unlike the sharp risk-off two weeks ago, this escalation didn’t break the tape — crypto held and even gained ground.

The war is now a known quantity, not a new shock.

This is the same blockade the US ran from April to June. Markets have seen this playbook, which is why — unlike the sharp risk-off two weeks ago — the escalation didn’t necessarily break risky assets. Although oil spiked to new highs, crypto actually gained ground. The war is still the dominant driver, but it’s being priced as a persistent condition rather than a fresh crisis.

FRED:WALCL-(FRED:RRPONTSYD+FRED:WTREGEN)

Net liquidity: ~$5.99T, +$25.7B WoW (+0.43%). SUPPORTIVE — and the through-line of the week. A third straight weekly expansion, holding above the moving average. This is the single reason risk assets are absorbing continuous geopolitical escalation without breaking. Liquidity is what’s keeping the bid alive.DXY

BTC/NQ ratio

BTC/NQ ratio: closed green — crypto outperformed equities again. IMPROVING. The standout. The relative-strength turn isn’t only a crypto-strength story — it’s partly an AI-unwind story.

The semiconductor trade that led equities all year is rolling over: a key chip index has fallen into a bear market, down ~20% from its record, and South Korea’s KOSPI — one of the purest AI proxies — has swung violently, with multiple 6–9% down days as Samsung and SK Hynix sold off despite record earnings.

Why does it matter for crypto?

AI has been the market’s dominant capital magnet for two years, pulling money away from everything else. As that trade unwinds, it releases liquidity back into the rest of the market — and some of it is finding crypto.

That’s a meaningful part of why BTC/NQ is turning up: it’s less that crypto broke out, more that the thing crushing it relatively is finally losing steam.

Composite: liquidity supportive, the dollar firm, rates the lone clear headwind — and crucially, crypto outperforming into all of it. The regime has shifted from “escalation breaks the tape” to “escalation priced, liquidity wins.” The war is the driver, but liquidity is the stronger force right now.

1B. Crypto Capital On-Ramp

Total stablecoin supply 7d change (level + WoW)

Total stablecoin supply: −$1.17B WoW (−0.38%). CONTRACTING. The base shrank again, extending the choppy outflow pattern that’s run since late May. Last week’s +$1.05B inflow didn’t hold — the on-ramp is still struggling to sustain positive prints for more than a week at a time. Notably, this contraction happened while price rose, so the week’s strength was not funded by fresh stablecoin capital entering the system.

BTC and ETH Exchange Flows

Ethereum’s exchange flow is the interesting read. Reserves fell sharply through the week even as price climbed toward $1.87K, a steeper drawdown than Bitcoin’s. Coins leaving exchanges into a rising price is accumulation — and on ETH specifically, it’s pronounced enough to be worth flagging quietly alongside the ETHBTC strength in Section 2.

ETF flows

ETF flows — positive, but cooling. Spot ETF flows returned to net inflows this week, a constructive sign after the volatility of recent weeks — but the magnitude was lower than the prior week’s. Interestingly, ETH flows are slightly higher than BTC. Flow is there; but it isn’t accelerating.

1C. Week-Ahead Catalysts

FOMC decision — July 28–29.

The dominant event is happening later this week.

Warsh’s second meeting as Chair, and the first real test of the hike markets have priced for year-end amid the oil-driven inflation risk. With forward guidance removed, the statement and press conference carry all the weight — this is the one that can reprice the front end in either direction.

Q2 GDP (advance). The first read on second-quarter growth, feeding directly into the data-dependent Fed’s calculus.

Onchain: the Curve DAO vote to activate LlamaLend 2 markets on Ethereum mainnet closes July 21, and ETHGlobal’s Pragma Lisbon runs July 23 — worth noting for the DeFi calendar, though neither is a macro mover.

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Section 2 — Onchain Risk Regime

Individual Stablecoins Flows

USDG led again at +$256.2M, extending the Global Dollar rail’s run for a third straight week. The important nuance: this isn’t only yield-farming demand. On Robinhood Chain, USDG is the settlement asset for Lighter and other perps DEXs, so its growth reflects trading activity, not just deposit-chasing — a healthier, stickier form of demand than incentive farming alone.

Meanwhile on outflows:

USDS −$915.2M (−$1.31B over 30d), with BUIDL −$250.2M and USDtb −$273.4M. On the surface that looks bearish, but these three are the market’s conservative-yield instruments — USDS for the ~3.5% sUSDS savings rate, BUIDL and USDtb for Treasury yield.

Capital leaving the safest, lowest-return dollars is a mild risk-on signal — money stepping out of parked-and-earning positions rather than fleeing the system. USDC (−$75.1M) and USDT (−$108.7M) were modestly negative, consistent with the total-supply contraction in 1B.

Aave / Sphere Rates

Sphere rates: funding 6.42%, +0.04% — essentially flat but still elevated, and well above the 4.12% borrow rate (supply 3.12%). Both borrow and supply ticked down slightly. So funding is holding high while lending rates soften — leverage stays expensive and crowded.

ETH to BTC Comparison

ETHBTC: closed +0.11%, a third consecutive green weekly candle, now sitting right on / just above the 20W MA. For the 3rd consecutive week, ETH outperformed Bitcoin. Giving room for alts to rise.

3A. Stablecoin flows by chain — table with 7d flow, 7d %, 30d %

Solana

$14.01B, +$137.1M (7d, +0.99%), −$279.2M (30d). Growth is reallocation, not net inflow. Kamino’s curated vaults (Steakhouse ~7.4%, RockawayX ~5.9%) keep drawing deposits, while the base lending market shrinks.

Curated Yield Vaults on Kamino

Curated lending and looping venues on Solana continue to attract deposits over the trailing 30 days. This is distinct from the chain-level supply metric above — it measures protocol deposits, not total on-chain stablecoin issuance:

OnRe raised its ONyc supply cap 25M on July 17 and filled it immediately — loop APYs run 18–22%, or up to ~31% via Exponent’s fixed-rate PT-ONyc.

In parallel, Loopscale added new round of incentive for USDC lending to OnRe market.

For users willing to take a fixed-rate position, looped PT-ONyc yields up to ~30.92% APY via Exponent’s fixed-rate conversion, versus up to ~20.31% for direct ONyc looping (plus 6x Points). In short: both lending against ONyc and looping ONyc currently offer attractive yield, and the cap expansion plus new Loopscale liquidity has re-opened capacity that had previously been fully subscribed.

Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain’s tracked stablecoin market capitalization is $393.4M, up 31.33% (+$93.8M) over 7 days. A 30-day comparison is not applicable: the chain launched July 1, 2026, and the 30-days-prior reading predates its existence. USDG, the chain’s native stablecoin, increased from $204.6M to $295.5M over the period (+$90.8M); USDe added $3.0M.

Incentive Structure — the Merkl-Boosted Morpho USDG Market

Growth is almost entirely USDG, up from $204.6M to $295.5M, pulled in by a Merkl-boosted Morpho vault paying roughly 7% total (1.6% native lending plus a 5.4% incentive, paid in steakUSDG) — and the campaign has close to a year of runway left, which reads as a durable subsidy rather than a short-term push.

The vault also accepts USDe, syrupUSDG, and spUSDG as collateral against USDG borrowing, so each of those assets is being pulled in as looping collateral alongside direct deposits.

Robinhood's choice of USDG over USDC or USDT has been linked to revenue-sharing terms, consistent with the chain funding an incentive program this size.

Monad

Monad’s tracked stablecoin market capitalization is $526.2M, up 19.52% (+$85.9M) over 7 days and 43.90% (+$160.5M) over 30 days, distributed across multiple tokens rather than concentrated in a single asset.

Aave V3 — Merkl Supply Incentives Compressing the Cost of Leverage

Aave V3 launched on Monad on July 2, 2026, backed by a combined $15.5M incentive commitment from the Monad Foundation and Aave DAO. The initial market listed USDT0, USDC, GHO, USDe, mUSD, AUSD, WETH, cbBTC, wstETH, weETH, syrupUSDC, and sUSDe. Aave V3’s TVL on Monad is $262.6M (insufficient history for a 30-day comparison).

Those incentives are being distributed through Merkl, paid in WMON on the stablecoin supply markets. Live campaign parameters:

Mechanism:

Subsidized supply yield holds utilization — and therefore borrow costs — down, which is what makes looping yield-bearing collateral (like Maple's syrupUSDC) profitable.

The GHO listing is further backstopped by a Monad Foundation commitment to acquire and retain 10M GHO for a minimum of six months, alongside a 500,000 GHO incentive allocation from Aave DAO.

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Ethena — USDe Expansion, Liquid Leverage, and LP Seeding

USDe launched on Monad in the last 7 days, rising from near-zero to $17.2M in tracked market capitalization, bridged via Stargate and enabled as Aave collateral for recursive borrowing. This is paired with Ethena’s Liquid Leverage program — the mechanism previously deployed on Ethereum mainnet, maintaining a 50/50 USDe/sUSDe collateral mix to offset the 7-day sUSDe unstaking constraint and target a blended yield approximating a full sUSDe position — now extended to Monad. The live Merkl campaign for it:

• “Lend USDe on Aave (looping required)” — part of Ethena’s Liquid Leverage program, with Merkl as distribution partner in collaboration with the ACI.

• Target APR 3.75%, ~$15.86M TVL, ~$1.62K/day in aMonUSDe rewards, ~36.8K aMonUSDe total, running 17–24 July 2026.

• Eligibility requires borrowing and maintaining a health factor below 2.5, i.e. the reward is explicitly conditioned on holding a levered (looped) position.

On top of the lending-side incentive, Ethena is also seeding direct DEX liquidity on Monad via Uniswap v4, with active Merkl-distributed campaigns on the sUSDe-USDT0 pool (0.05% fee tier, 12.47% APR, $2.98M TVL) and the USDe-USDT0 pool (0.01% fee tier, 11.8% APR, $3.15M TVL), both with ~7 days remaining at observation.

This is liquidity-side subsidization layered on top of the lending-side rewards: seeding pool depth reduces slippage on the swaps a looper executes when entering, rebalancing, or unwinding, and therefore directly facilitates the looping process the Liquid Leverage program is designed to drive.

3B. Structural Shifts- DEX Volumes

Robinhood Chain is the loudest narrative in crypto this week by every attention metric we track. On-chain, the picture splits: top-five DEX volume built on a gas subsidy and a memecoin launchpad cycle, a lending core that is genuinely organic, and a tokenized-RWA flagship that remains a rounding error.

This section separates what the market is farming, what it is trading, and where it is positioning with sticky capital.

Robinhood Chain’s dominance is manufactured, but not empty.

A 90-day zero-gas subsidy (through September 29) combined with a memecoin launchpad cycle produced roughly $5.25B in 7-day DEX volume, briefly landing the chain in the top five by that metric. But the chain earns only ~$4,000/day in actual protocol fees against 7.6M daily transactions — a 16–33x gap between chain-level and app-level fees that shows almost all economic value is being captured by trading apps, not the chain itself.

The memecoin engine was CASHCAT, launched July 7–8, which peaked near a $226M market cap before falling ~70%; on its peak day it alone generated ~$98M in volume, about 17% of the entire chain’s total.

Its launchpad, NOXA, deployed the majority of all tokens on the chain, out-earned Pump.fun in fees for five straight days, then halted launches citing bot spam — and its successors haven’t replicated the traction.

Robinhood Chain: Anatomy of Manufactured Dominance

Launched July 1, 2026 as an Arbitrum Orbit L2 (ETH gas token, with 10% of net protocol fees routed back to the Arbitrum ecosystem), Robinhood Chain compressed a full launch-chain cycle into three weeks: vertical volume ramp, memecoin mania, launchpad collapse, and decay — all running on subsidized rails.

The subsidy distortion

Robinhood is covering gas for all Robinhood Wallet swaps above $5 through September 29, 2026. The result is a chain that processed 7.6M transactions in a single day while generating roughly $4,000 in daily protocol fees (July 10–11). The persistent gap between chain-level fees and app-level fees — roughly 16–33x depending on the window — confirms that nearly all economic value is captured by the trading applications, not the chain’s own infrastructure. Every volume and activity figure in the table above is running on subsidized rails.

Beneath the noise, locked capital tells a different story than volume does. Morpho Blue lending holds ~$150M — roughly 65% of chain TVL — well ahead of Uniswap (~$61M), Arcus (~$17M), and NOXA (~$6M).