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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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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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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:

- 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:

- 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.

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

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Today’s News Headlines:

- DefiTuna exploited for $580K on Solana
- Galaxy launches institutional Morpho vaults via Fireblocks
- Cascade loses $1.34M in liquidation manipulation attack
- Aave V4 incentives live on Avalanche
- Ethena launches USDe and sUSDe on Monad
- Ondo partners with SBI to tokenize Japanese assets
- Pyth goes live on Robinhood Chain
- Pendle launches one-click PT looping
- Revert launches Stable Hooks for Uniswap V4
- Visa launches stablecoin platform for global merchants

Robinhood Chain went live on July 1, and roughly two weeks in it is sitting at approximately $180M TVL. One notable feature of the chain: Robinhood has stated there is no native token, and no chain-wide airdrop has been announced. This means the opportunities for DeFi users are concentrated in two areas — the yield products built on top of the chain, and a small set of ecosystem applications that have their own live or confirmed token programs.

For context: Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum-built Ethereum L2 (Arbitrum Orbit), settling to Ethereum, with gas paid in ETH. Robinhood is covering all gas fees for the first 90 days. The default dollar is USDG, Paxos’s stablecoin and the flagship asset of the Global Dollar Network. TVL is concentrated in two protocols — Morpho (~$90M) and Uniswap (~$55M).

The 7% USDG vault (Robinhood Earn)

This is Robinhood’s own in-app product, and accessing it that way matters: the ~7% APY is specific to the Robinhood app. Users buy USDG in Robinhood Crypto, move it into a self-custody wallet (Privy-powered, built into the app), and lend it out through “Robinhood Earn.”

Underneath, this is a Morpho vault — specifically the Steakhouse Financial–curated “Steakhouse USDG” vault (0% management and performance fees), which routes deposits into Morpho Blue markets against three collateral types: USDe (Ethena), syrupUSDG (Maple), and spUSDG (Spark). Ethena is currently the largest collateral source, having seeded the vault with $50M, which accounted for most of the growth to $100M+ TVL in the vault’s first week.

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One point worth being explicit about: if you pull up this same vault directly on Morpho’s website or app rather than through Robinhood, you will only see the vault’s native lending rate — approximately 3.23%. The gap between that and the 7% figure comes from a Merkl-funded incentive layer that Robinhood distributes to depositors who route through its own app; this incentive isn’t reflected in Morpho’s interface.

One factor that meaningfully changes the risk profile here relative to a typical DeFi lending position: deposits are backed by cyber-exploit insurance through Lloyd’s of London, arranged via RELM. This is worth dwelling on rather than treating as a footnote. Smart-contract exploits are historically one of the largest sources of loss across DeFi, and one of the hardest risks for an individual user to actually diligence — even experienced users generally can’t fully audit a protocol’s codebase, and a clean third-party audit history is no guarantee against a future exploit.

It’s important to be precise about scope, though: the coverage applies specifically to cyber/smart-contract exploits. It does not cover a USDG depeg, yield compression, or the Merkl incentive being reduced or removed, and the product remains outside FDIC/SIPC protection. But for the exploit-risk slice specifically — arguably the single hardest category to independently underwrite as a retail user — this is a genuine structural advantage over farming similar vaults without insurance behind them.

Looping USDe / syrupUSDG / spUSDG against USDG

The same three collateral assets used in the Earn vault can also be looped directly on Morpho, which is the more DeFi-native version of the same underlying trade. Before getting into the mechanics, it’s worth knowing what each of these assets actually is, since they’re less familiar than a standard stablecoin.

syrupUSDG is Maple Finance’s yield-bearing version of USDG. Depositing USDG into Maple’s institutional lending pools returns syrupUSDG, which accrues yield from Maple’s overcollateralized lending business to institutional borrowers — currently around 4.6%. It functions similarly to a yield-bearing wrapper such as syrupUSDT or syrupUSDC: you hold syrupUSDG, and its value accrues relative to USDG over time.

spUSDG works the same way but through Spark (part of the Sky/MakerDAO ecosystem). Depositing USDG into Spark’s savings product returns spUSDG, which accrues yield from Spark’s lending and investment strategies — currently around 3.2%.

USDe itself, Ethena’s synthetic dollar, is not natively yield-bearing — the yield-bearing version of Ethena’s dollar is normally sUSDe (staked USDe), not plain USDe. So on most chains, holding or looping plain USDe wouldn’t earn anything on its own. What makes it loopable here specifically is a Robinhood Chain incentive: Ethena is running a reward program that pays an additional ~4.5% directly to USDe posted as collateral in these Robinhood Chain Morpho markets.

That 4.5% isn’t USDe’s normal protocol yield — it’s a promotional rate Ethena is offering to bootstrap USDe collateral on this specific chain, functioning much like the Merkl incentive on the USDG side of the Earn vault. Worth keeping in mind that this rate is a subsidy tied to Ethena’s push into Robinhood Chain, not a structural feature of USDe itself, and it can be reduced or ended.

With that context, the loop mechanics: post USDe, syrupUSDG, or spUSDG as collateral, borrow USDG, swap back into the collateral asset, and repeat. As of last week, collateral-side yields were syrupUSDG ~4.6%, USDe ~4.5% (via the Ethena incentive above), and spUSDG ~3.2%, against the USDG borrow-side rate. Looped, this produces an estimated 15–20% ROE.

Two caveats are relevant before sizing a position. First, per-market LLTVs (liquidation thresholds) for these specific Robinhood Chain markets are not published in any static reference — Morpho’s interface renders them client-side, so checking app.morpho.org/robinhood-chain directly before opening a position is advisable rather than assuming a figure. Second, no additional points multiplier was confirmed on top of this loop — no Ethena Sats boost or Maple/Spark points program tied to the Robinhood Chain deployment were verifiable at time of writing, beyond the collateral-side yields already described above.

Farming and airdrop opportunities by protocol

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Today’s News Headlines:

- Gauntlet Raises $125M for TradFi Expansion
- Ethena Eliminates USDe Mint and Redeem Fees
- GROVE Rewards offers 14% APR on sUSDS
- Aave Proposes Standardized Asset Listing Framework
- KPK Adds Nexus Mutual Insurance to Vaults
- Pharos Launches RockawayX RWA Vault
- Rysk Brings Covered Calls to wstETH

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TL;DR

• Most DeFi “market-neutral” yield — basis trades, lending loops — is crowded and secretly correlated. Options premium is one of the few onchain return drivers that’s genuinely different, and it remains under-farmed.

• Three ways to earn on Panoptic: deposit into a vault (passive), hedge an existing Uniswap LP’s delta while collecting a second fee stream (the highest-utility play for most DeFi users), or run self-directed options strategies.

• Under the hood: Panoptic turns Uniswap liquidity into perpetual options — no expiry, no oracle, any Uniswap-listed asset, premiums streaming continuously instead of paid upfront.

• V2 launched June 2026 and TVL is early-stage small — size accordingly.

In this guide: 1. Why this matters now · 2. How to make money on Panoptic · 3. How it works · 4. Risks

1. Why This Matters Now

A lot of “market-neutral” yield in DeFi converges on the same handful of trades. Basis trades went mainstream once products packaged them into one-click yield, and lending loops across Aave, Morpho, and Euler are well-trodden ground. The problem isn’t just compressed spreads — it’s correlation. When funding flips negative or lending utilization drops, most of a “diversified” book turns out to be exposed to the same driver.

Options premium is structurally different: compensation for underwriting realized volatility, a factor that doesn’t move in lockstep with funding rates or lending spreads. Builders across the onchain options space agree it’s under-farmed — a July 2026 Castle Labs/Block Scholes report, which interviewed Panoptic’s founder alongside teams at Rysk, GammaSwap, and Derive, found that volatility-selling only struggled in 2023–2024 because basis trades and double-digit stablecoin yields paid more for less effort. That’s now inverted: yield meaningfully above the mid-single digits is hard to find without looping, and volatility remains one of the last onchain yield sources that hasn’t been fully farmed.

This isn’t a claim that Panoptic yield is “better” than a basis trade — it carries its own risks (Section 4) on smaller, younger infrastructure. But for genuinely diversifying a market-neutral book rather than spreading the same bet across more venues, it’s one of the few corners of DeFi where the return driver is actually different.

What Panoptic is, in one paragraph: a permissionless options protocol built directly on Uniswap v3/v4 — it repurposes Uniswap liquidity positions as the options themselves. No expiry (positions are perpetual), no price oracle (so any Uniswap-listed asset works, including long-tail tokens no other venue can list), non-custodial, and up to four option legs in a single transaction. Built by physicist-turned-founder Guillaume Lambert, backed by Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Jane Street; relaunched as V2, “The DeFi Yield Platform,” in June 2026.

2. How to Make Money on Panoptic

Three paths, in rough order of effort.

2.1 Deposit into a vault (passive)

V2’s headline feature is a vault layer: deposit into a strategy, let automation handle the strikes, hedging, and rebalancing.

Live markets currently cover ETH and SPCX (a tokenized SpaceX-tracking instrument); the lineup is a snapshot and will evolve. Check APYs in-app — they move with utilization and realized volatility.

2.2 Hedge your existing Uniswap LP (the highest-utility play)

If you take one strategy from this guide, take this one. It requires no capital migration — just an offsetting position against exposure you already have. Panoptic has written about this setup themselves; the figures below are from their published example.

The problem: a Uniswap LP position centered on current price is roughly half base asset, half quote asset — a hidden directional bet, not a neutral one. An ETH/USDC position centered near $2,642 (range ~$2,080–$3,361) carries a delta of about +0.47: a 1% ETH drop costs about -0.49%, unhedged, on top of the IL you already expect.

The fix: sell a Panoptic perpetual call sized so its negative delta offsets the LP’s +0.47.

Re-run the same 1% drop: the loss shrinks to about -0.02%. Roughly 95% of near-term price sensitivity, gone.

And the hedge pays you. The short call earns Uniswap-style fees on the borrowed liquidity plus streamia, stacked on what the LP already earns. The combined structure is functionally a short straddle collecting fees from both sides:

Two caveats. The short call caps upside — a hard rally eats into gains the naked LP would have kept. And delta drifts as price moves, so staying neutral means periodically adjusting the LP range and the call; the app displays net delta so the drift is visible. The app also packages this whole structure as a one-click “Delta-Neutral Uniswap LP” flow under the Provide Liquidity tab.

2.3 Run your own strategies (self-directed)

The multi-leg, no-expiry structure supports the full options toolkit:

Gamma Scalping

What you’re actually earning, in all three paths: some mix of three stackable income layers — commissions (fees when positions open/close), interest (sellers pay ongoing interest on borrowed liquidity; passive depositors collect it), and streamia (the streaming options premium itself, earned by whoever writes the option). Backtests by Panoptic and Block Scholes modeled meaningfully positive annualized returns for premium-selling and gamma-scalping in volatile pools — simulations, not realized returns, but directionally encouraging.

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3. How It Works

Enough detail to understand what you’re holding; skip to Section 4 if you just want the risk picture.

LPing is already selling an option. A concentrated Uniswap LP position has the payoff of a short put (or short straddle for a two-sided range): it earns fees in range and suffers “assignment” — impermanent loss — when price moves through. Millions of LPs are already selling options without collecting an options premium. Panoptic formalizes this and builds the missing other side: being long that option, by borrowing and removing pooled liquidity instead of adding it.

Three roles, one pool. Passive depositors supply collateral vaults and earn commissions plus interest. Option sellers borrow that liquidity and deploy it into Uniswap near current price (that is a short option) — up to ~5x notional against posted collateral. Option buyers borrow liquidity and remove it (that is a long option), posting only ~10% of notional. Everyone draws from and returns to the same collateral pool, so the system stays fully collateralized without a central counterparty.

Streamia: premium that streams. Instead of an upfront Black-Scholes premium priced off an oracle, buyers pay block-by-block: the Uniswap swap fees the borrowed liquidity would have earned, scaled by a utilization spread. Over time this converges on average to fair option value — priced by real trading activity in the pool, not a model. That’s the mechanical reason Panoptic needs no oracle and can list options on anything with a Uniswap pool.

Versus familiar venues:

4. Risks

None of the yield above is free — it’s compensation for specific, identifiable risks:

• Liquidation risk. Sellers running undercollateralized positions (up to ~5x) can be liquidated on adverse moves. Passive vault depositors don’t carry this directly.

• Streamia mispricing. Premium derives from realized pool activity, not a forward-looking vol model — it can lag or diverge from “fair” pricing, especially in thin pools.

• Smart contract risk — with a track record to weigh. Extensively audited (ABDK, OpenZeppelin, Code4rena, Certora/Cantina for V1; Obsidian, Nethermind, and another Code4rena competition for V2). One serious incident: an August 2025 position-spoofing vulnerability, responsibly disclosed and resolved via a whitehat rescue securing over 98% of the ~$4M at risk, with a $250K bounty paid. No funds were maliciously exploited — but this is young, complex infrastructure.

• Liquidity and scale. V2 tracked at roughly $1.2–1.3M TVL in its first ten days; the protocol has historically sat in the single-digit millions. Large allocations may hit capacity constraints or wider spreads. Check live TVL on DefiLlama before sizing.

• Vault execution risk. Vault depositors trust the strategy’s systematic execution — understand strike-selection rules, rebalancing cadence, and fees before allocating.

• V2 maturity — per the team itself. The unified engine launched June 2026 and lacks V1’s track record. In the Castle Labs/Block Scholes report, Panoptic’s founder described the institutions he’s targeting as needing a more mature risk-management layer and true portfolio-wide margin — capabilities still being built. Useful honesty when sizing an allocation today.

Sources: Panoptic docs and blog (including their published delta-neutral LP example, which supplies Section 2.2’s figures), the Panoptic/Block Scholes joint research (backtested figures — not realized returns), and “The Renaissance of Onchain Options” (Castle Labs × Block Scholes, July 2026). Figures are time-sensitive; confirm live numbers in-app or on DefiLlama before allocating.

Farm 12%+ ETH APY + Points

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Today’s News Headlines 🗞️

- Securitize goes public on NYSE as SECZ
- dYdX rebrands as Arcus on new Robinhood Chain
- Arcus launches perps beta with waitlist access
- Arbitrum proposes Fast Feed service
- Aave V3 launches on Monad
- Robinhood Earn goes live with 7% APR
- World launches new prediction markets on Solana

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Hyperliquid set the template, and Lighter proved it could be repeated: build a genuinely good perp exchange, run a points program, reward early users at the token generation event (TGE). Both have now launched their tokens, and the question for anyone still farming is simple — who’s next?

This is a look at five established contenders that stand out right now, plus one brand-new entry worth getting in early on. The filter is the two things that actually matter: perp volume (and whether it’s trending up) and total value locked (TVL).

TradeXYZ - The Leading Contender

TradeXYZ was the first team to deploy under Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, which lets independent builders run their own perp markets on top of Hyperliquid’s infrastructure. Its niche is traditional assets: 24/7 perpetuals on US equities (Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon), a synthetic Nasdaq-style index, commodities, and FX.

In March 2026 it secured an official S&P 500 license, enabling a round-the-clock perp on the benchmark index. It accounts for the large majority of HIP-3 open interest and has posted roughly $53 billion in 30-day perp volume.

Strength: real product-market fit in equity perps, a category most crypto-native DEXs don’t touch.

Weakness: there is no official points program and no confirmed token. Rumors of a Paradigm raise have circulated but remain unconfirmed.

How to earn points:

Because there’s no formal program, this is a “be early before a possible retroactive snapshot” play. You trade equity, commodity, and FX perps through Hyperliquid perps interface and search for the XYZ ticker in front, e.g: TradeXYZ app or integrated frontends (MetaMask Perps, Phantom), funding with USDC on isolated margin.

Volume here may also count toward Hyperliquid’s own points — a potential double-dip. The lack of an official program is the appeal, where competition is far lower than on platforms openly advertising rewards.

Pacifica — the previous Solana standout, but the window is narrowing

Pacifica went from zero to the top perp DEX on Solana by daily volume within months of its 2025 launch, overtaking Jupiter while still in closed beta. It runs sub-20ms off-chain matching with on-chain settlement, integrates AI risk tools, and has crossed $100 billion in cumulative volume.

Strength: it’s self-funded with no VC backers — the same structure as Hyperliquid pre-token, meaning no investor allocations to dilute the eventual community share. Weakness: it’s been farmed heavily and is widely known, so you’re no longer “first.” There’s still no token confirmed. Backing: none — self-funded. Founded by ex-FTX COO Constance Wang with a team drawn from Binance, Coinbase, Jane Street and OpenAI.

How to farm it: connect a Solana wallet (Phantom or Solflare), deposit, and trade. A 10-million point pool is distributed weekly, with snapshots every Thursday at 00:00 UTC.

Pacifica’s points formula is deliberately opaque and updated weekly, and it is explicitly designed so that running multiple accounts gives no advantage — “having 100 accounts provides no advantage over one.” Self-trading and sybil activity earn nothing.

Points are earned through organic trading (via GUI or API), and the team says feedback and word-of-mouth also count. In short, this is a farm that rewards real, sustained usage rather than mechanical volume-spamming.

GMTrade — the pooled-liquidity RWA play that just took Solana’s volume crown

GMTrade is the newest on this list, and it’s earned its spot: by 30-day volume it’s now the single largest perp DEX on Solana, ahead of even Pacifica.

Structurally, it’s a different model from the order-book DEXs elsewhere on this list. GMTrade launched on Solana mainnet in March 2025 as GMXSOL, a GMX DAO-approved fork bringing GMX V2’s pooled-liquidity model (traders take the other side of a liquidity pool, not an order book) to Solana. It rebranded to GMTrade in November 2025 as the team moved toward full independence from the GMX label.

Its differentiator is breadth: alongside crypto, it lists close to 90 markets spanning forex, commodities (gold, silver, WTI crude, palladium), indices, and equities, priced via Chainlink Data Streams.

Strength: Broad market coverage for a pooled-liquidity model, and low fees (the team quotes ~0.5 bps trading fees, well under most Solana order-book competitors). The multi-pool (”GM Pool”) architecture also isolates LP risk per market rather than pooling it all together.

Weakness: no confirmed token, no announced TGE date, and — unlike Pacifica — no clearly disclosed VC backing or funding round to point to, which makes the eventual token structure harder to predict. As a pooled-liquidity model, LPs (not just traders) are taking on real counterparty risk against trader PnL, which is a different risk profile than an order-book venue.

Backing: not clearly disclosed. It originated as a community/DAO-approved GMX deployment on Solana rather than a VC-funded startup, and continues to be built by an independent team; no funding round has been publicly announced.

How to earn points:

points here are called GT Points, explicitly described by the team as “credentials for participation in the Token Generation Event (TGE)” — though no TGE date has been announced. The mechanic is a Bitcoin-inspired scarcity model:

• Minting: GT starts at $0.01 to mint, meaning $1 in trading fees (after any discounts) generates roughly 100 GT.

• Exponential cost curve: every 210,000 GT minted raises the mint cost by 2.1%, so early participation is worth meaningfully more GT per dollar spent than farming later — the crypto-equivalent of Bitcoin’s halving, but smoother and more frequent.

• Sources: GT accrues from trading fees, providing liquidity, and referrals. VIP tiers and referral bonuses (reportedly a five-level referral structure with a 10% cut of direct referrals’ points) boost the rate further.

Because the mint cost keeps climbing and there’s no confirmed token yet, this is very much an “accumulate now while it’s cheap” play rather than a low-effort holding farm — you need to actually generate trading fee volume (or LP) to mint GT.

StandX — quietly strong volume, and a genuinely different points model

StandX is an order-book perp DEX on BNB Chain and Solana, with mainnet live since November 2025 and daily volume above $100 million. Its defining feature is DUSD, a yield-bearing stablecoin that auto-earns with no staking required and serves as the platform’s unit of account — the “house” runs delta-neutral.

Strength: you can effectively farm by holding, not just trading, which suits lower-activity users. Its points model is also the most distinctive on this list.

Weakness: the program is heavily skewed toward DUSD rather than trading, the platform is unaudited, and the market selection is still limited. Note too that point emissions were halved on May 24, 2026 — so the rates below are the current, reduced ones.

Backing: self-funded, built by former Binance Futures and Goldman Sachs team members, with a Solana ecosystem grant.

How to earn points:

Points split into three buckets — Trader, Maker, and Holder.

• Holder: simply holding DUSD earns roughly 0.5–0.6 points per DUSD per day (a Vault deposit gets the top 0.625x multiplier), and the DUSD figure includes your unrealized PnL. Providing liquidity earns 0.5x on DUSD / 0.6x on other tokens, and swapping DUSD on select DEX pools (Raydium on Solana) earns 2.5% of volume.

• Maker: you earn on resting limit orders even if they never fill — orders live 3+ seconds accrue points, and the closer to mark price the better (top rate within 10 bps). Keeping orders live 30+ minutes per hour within 10 bps unlocks a separate 5M-token maker pool. This is close to zero-execution-risk farming.

• Trader: standard volume points, plus the unusual “Loser Points” — you earn points from your realized losses. Referrals add a 5% bonus on both sides.

The holding-plus-maker combination is what makes StandX worth a look despite the limited markets.

⚠️ Risk Warning: DUSD is a yield-bearing stablecoin that uses delta-neutral futures hedging to maintain its peg, but it is not without risk. Market volatility, funding rate fluctuations, smart contract vulnerabilities, and oracle failures could all impact the protocol’s stability and your returns. Rewards are not guaranteed and depend on staking and funding fee revenue, which can turn negative. Redemptions take 7 days to process, so funds are not instantly accessible. Only use funds you can afford to lock up, and always review the latest protocol metrics at StandX before participating.

Variational — the institutional-grade dark horse

Variational is less a single exchange than infrastructure powering multiple trading apps on Arbitrum. Omni is the retail-facing, zero-fee perp platform with 450+ markets; Pro targets the much larger institutional OTC derivatives market, bringing booking, clearing and settlement on-chain.

Rather than building an order book per market, Variational uses an RFQ model that aggregates liquidity from centralized exchanges, DEXs, and TradFi dealers, aiming for institutional-grade depth. In May 2026, it launched its first real-world-asset perps (gold, silver, copper, oil) and is betting that RWA perpetuals become the biggest contract class in DeFi.

Strength: a genuine dual flywheel (retail via Omni, institutions via Pro), zero fees, deep RWA ambitions, and arguably the strongest founder pedigree here — co-founders Lucas Schuermann and Edward Yu are both ex-Genesis Trading (engineering and quant trading, respectively).

Weakness: the token isn’t live yet (points only), the RFQ/whitelisted-market-maker model is less “decentralized” than an open order book, and RWA perps sit in a regulatory gray area with no CFTC approval. The rewards system is also explicitly a work in progress.

Backing: a $50M Series A led by Dragonfly (May 2026) with Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures, on top of a 10.3M seed — total funding above $60M. This is top-tier capital, which materially raises the odds they ship and eventually do a token ( VAR is already referenced in their docs).

How to farm it: trade perps on Omni to build a Reward Tier based on your last 30 days of activity, where Total Volume = personal volume + (0.2 × referred volume). Tiers run Iron → Infinity (from $0 up to $2.5B in 30-day volume), each unlocking a larger points boost (+0% up to +5%) and eventually a volume multiplier (up to 1.3x at Infinity), so climbing early compounds everything you do afterward.

Points are distributed weekly, every Friday at 00:00 UTC, and the program runs no later than the end of Q3 2026.

Two quirks worth knowing: referrals earn you 1 point for every 10 your referrals earn, and every losing trade you close has up to a 5% chance of being fully refunded — a rebate-like edge that softens the cost of consistent farming.

The Newcomer - Promising Points Program With Low Risk Alternatives

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