Markets

Lido DAO transferred the first $1.81 million tranche of its $20 million LDO buyback programme on Wednesday, routing tokens through centralised exchanges in a bid to retire up to 8 per cent of the circulating supply at historically depressed prices.

Drift Protocol will relaunch with USDT as its settlement layer after securing $147.5 million from Tether and partners, replacing Circle's USDC following an April 1 exploit that drained $270 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange.

The platform launched Polymarket USD, a wrapped stablecoin backed one-to-one by USDC, alongside a rebuilt trading engine and upgraded smart contracts that cut gas costs for its 300,000-plus active traders.

The Trump-linked DeFi protocol issued a cease and desist after Sun published evidence of a smart-contract function that lets a small group of insiders freeze any holder's tokens without a governance vote.

The USDC issuer has announced a wrapped bitcoin token backed one-to-one by native BTC with onchain-verifiable reserves, aimed at institutional counterparties including OTC desks, market makers, and lending protocols.

Aave pays 2.61% on USDC while high-yield savings accounts offer 5%. The yield premium that drew billions into decentralised finance has evaporated, and the protocols' best remaining rates come from repackaging traditional finance.

The Cantor Fitzgerald-led process is the first time Tether has opened its cap table meaningfully since founding. The asking price would make the stablecoin issuer worth more than every US bank except JPMorgan Chase — and investors have until late April to decide.

Morpho has opened a beta interface designed to let autonomous AI agents read, simulate and execute transactions on its lending markets without the week of integration work the protocol's SDK previously demanded.

Subnet operator Covenant AI exited Bittensor on Thursday, publishing a detailed indictment of co-founder Jacob Steeves that wiped up to 23 percent off the TAO token's price and triggered a whistleblower document dump alleging near-total founder control over the network's governance.

Binance has offered roughly 1,000 United Arab Emirates-based staff — about a fifth of its global workforce — the option to relocate temporarily to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok, citing six weeks of regional conflict that included Iranian missile and drone debris falling on parts of Dubai.

A New York Times investigation led by Pulitzer winner John Carreyrou has named Adam Back, the Blockstream CEO who invented Hashcash in 1997, as its best candidate for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Back denies the claim, and the evidence falls short of proof while still clearing a higher bar than any previous unmasking attempt.

SOL Strategies, the Nasdaq-listed Solana infrastructure company, has agreed to buy zero-knowledge privacy startup Darklake Labs for $1.2 million, bringing the Zyga proof system and its research team in-house. The acquisition gives the validator operator a native defence against MEV and front-running at a moment when the Solana community is still absorbing its worst DeFi exploit.

Polygon Labs is seeking between $50 million and $100 million in equity to fund its Open Money Stack stablecoin payments business, built on the Coinme and Sequence acquisitions it completed in January. The raise positions Marc Boiron's company as a settlement layer underneath Stripe, Mastercard, and the banks, rather than a consumer-facing payments brand.

The non-profit initiated an $11 million conversion through CoWSwap's time-weighted average price mechanism, just days after reaching its 70,000 ETH staking target — highlighting the tension between generating yield and meeting dollar-denominated expenses.

Visa processed 97% of crypto-linked card transactions in March as monthly volume hit $600 million, driven by stablecoin adoption in Southeast Asia and a structural shift away from speculative spending.

Vault Summit in Cannes drew Apollo, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton and fifty other speakers to Hotel Barrière Le Majestic for eight hours of institutional DeFi that felt nothing like a typical crypto conference.

SoFi Big Business Banking offers 24/7 settlement in both dollars and stablecoins from a nationally chartered bank, with Cumberland, Mastercard, and Galaxy among its first participants.

Aave's 2.61 per cent APY on USDC now trails the 3.14 per cent offered by Interactive Brokers on idle cash, inverting the risk-return logic that underpinned decentralised lending for five years.

Privy, the Stripe-owned wallet infrastructure provider, has integrated the Uniswap API to offer native token swaps across 18 chains. The move gives developers building on Privy access to Uniswap's $4.3 trillion in cumulative liquidity with a single API call.