DeFi | Crypto

BNY Mellon just joined Citi, Bernstein, and a chorus of Wall Street analysts calling for up to $3.6 trillion of digital cash by 2030. The bet is that stablecoins and tokenized deposits will become core market plumbing, replacing correspondent banking friction and lubricating corporate treasury operations. The question: does that world exist outside a slide […] The post Bank Rails vs DeFi: Now $3.6T of “Digital Cash” Bypasses Bitcoin and Ethereum appeared first on CryptoSlate.

In crypto, MEV typically refers to bots and searchers on chains like Ethereum reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions around DEX trades and liquidations to extract value from users in the form of worse prices, failed transactions, and higher costs. However, did you know that Bitcoin also has MEV-like dynamics at the mempool and policy layer? […] The post Does Bitcoin use MEV to order your transactions like DeFi? appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Balancer and Stream Finance incidents totaling over $200 million shook DeFi as RedStone and major Ethereum protocols launched reform initiatives. Balancer suffered one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) exploits on Monday, with more than $116 million in staked Ether and liquidity pool tokens drained from Balancer v2 contracts and several forks.  The decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM) investigated what appeared to be faulty access control in its smart contracts, which allowed the attackers to withdraw funds directly from liquidity pools.  The exploit began with a $70 million loss, which ballooned to $116 million, primarily affecting liquid staking assets such as Lido’s wstETH and StakeWise’s osETH. Read more

Balancer and Stream Finance incidents totaling over $200 million shook DeFi as RedStone and major Ethereum protocols launched reform initiatives. Balancer suffered one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) exploits on Monday, with more than $116 million in staked Ether and liquidity pool tokens drained from Balancer v2 contracts and several forks.  The decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM) investigated what appeared to be faulty access control in its smart contracts, which allowed the attackers to withdraw funds directly from liquidity pools.  The exploit began with a $70 million loss, which ballooned to $116 million, primarily affecting liquid staking assets such as Lido’s wstETH and StakeWise’s osETH. Read more

For years, DeFi occupied the edges of institutional strategy, a curiosity for crypto-native funds, and a compliance headache for everyone else. However, regulatory moves are slowly changing this stance. Among traditional hedge funds already holding digital assets, 43% now plan to expand into DeFi over the next three years, primarily through tokenised funds, tokenised assets, […] The post From experiment to blueprint: Why 43% of hedge funds plan integration with DeFi appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Despite a dip in active wallets and DeFi losses, blockchain gaming and decentralized finance continued to drive most Web3 activity last month. Blockchain gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) remained the most active sectors in Web3 in October, despite a 3% decline in total daily active wallets to 16 million, according to a new report from DappRadar. Web3 gaming accounted for 27.9% of all decentralized application (DApp) activity over the past month, its highest share of the year, while DeFi maintained solid engagement at 18.4%, despite market volatility and ongoing regulatory pressure. The most widely used DApps include Raydium, Pump.fun, Jupiter Exchange, OKX Dex and PancakeSwap v2. Read more

DeFi can be misunderstood, but it's key to investing's future. Learn about the tech, adoption trends, and how advisors can win with clarity.

RedStone expands beyond price oracles with Credora, integrating risk analytics across DeFi protocols Morpho and Spark. Modular oracle network RedStone launched Credora, a decentralized finance (DeFi)-native risk ratings platform aiming to bring transparency and credit analytics to lending protocols.  RedStone said on Thursday that it had expanded beyond price feeds into the broader domain of credit, collateral and risk intelligence through its Credora acquisition in September.  At launch, Credora by RedStone integrates with DeFi lending markets Morpho and Sparks to offer dynamic risk scores and default-probability analytics, accessible through an API.  Read more

Two headlines hit the internet within hours of each other this week, and together they map the current state of DeFi’s security theater. StakeWise DAO executed contract calls to recover approximately $19.3 million in osETH, along with an additional $1.7 million in osGNO, from the Balancer V2 exploit that drained between $110 million and $128 […] The post What’s happening to DeFi? $231M was just drained but $19M clawed back appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Yields and More maps out over $284 million in DeFi debt tied to Stream Finance, exposing complex loops across stablecoins and lending markets. Decentralized finance (DeFi) researchers mapped out more than $284 million in stablecoin exposure and outstanding loans linked to Stream Finance, following the protocol’s collapse.  On Tuesday, a detailed post by DeFi group Yields and More (YAM) flagged dozens of lending markets and vaults, including platforms Euler, Silo, Morpho and Gearbox, that held positions connected to Stream’s synthetic assets, which include xUSD, xBTC and xETH.  The data highlighted the extent of the fallout. Exposure loops involving Elixir’s deUSD, Treeve’s scUSD and other assets suggested that at least $284.9 million in overall debt is owed to lenders across various markets. This excludes indirect exposure via secondary vaults and other lending strategies.  Read more

For years, Balancer stood as one of DeFi’s most reliable institutions, a protocol that had survived several bear markets, audits, and integrations without scandal. However, that credibility collapsed on Nov. 3, when the blockchain security firm PeckShield reported that Balancer and several of its forks were under an active exploit spreading across multiple chains. Within […] The post How 11 audits couldn’t stop Balancer’s $128 million hack redefining DeFi risks appeared first on CryptoSlate.

High yields mean nothing without execution certainty. Institutional DeFi adoption demands predictable transactions over speculative returns at scale. Opinion by: Robin Nordnes, co-founder and CEO of Raiku Many decentralized finance (DeFi) diehards assume that the future of institutional adoption will be driven by sparkly, sky-high yields. The reality is that the mainstream will be most impressed with consistency and reliability. DeFi opened the door for ordinary people to access financial tools that were previously reserved for institutions. For the first time, anyone could invest their money in open markets from anywhere in the world. That was a massive step forward. The same openness that made this possible came with a trade-off. Decentralization gave us freedom, but it sometimes meant unpredictability. Read more

Broadcasting transactions before they are executed imposes a "hidden tax" on retail crypto users while alienating financial institutions. Maximal extractable value (MEV), the process of miners or validators reordering transactions in a block to extract profits, is preventing financial institutions from adopting decentralized finance (DeFi), which hurts retail users, according to Aditya Palepu, CEO of DEX Labs, the lead contributor to decentralized crypto derivatives exchange DerivaDEX. All electronically-traded markets suffer from maximal extractable value or similar issues inherent in the information asymmetry in ordering trading transaction data, Palepu told Cointelegraph.  The solution is to prevent order flow data from being visible before execution through processing transactions in trusted execution environments, which handle transactions privately through a funded vault or some other mechanism, Palepu said. He added: Read more

Broadcasting transactions before they are executed imposes a “hidden tax” on retail crypto users while alienating financial institutions. Maximal extractable value (MEV), the process of miners or validators reordering transactions in a block to extract profits, is preventing financial institutions from adopting decentralized finance (DeFi), which hurts retail users, according to Aditya Palepu, CEO of DEX Labs, the lead contributor to decentralized crypto derivatives exchange DerivaDEX. All electronically-traded markets suffer from maximal extractable value or similar issues inherent in the information asymmetry in ordering trading transaction data, Palepu told Cointelegraph.  The solution is to prevent order flow data from being visible before execution through processing transactions in trusted execution environments, which handle transactions privately through a funded vault or some other mechanism, Palepu said. He added: Read more

Solana (SOL) processes approximately 70 million transactions per day and recorded over $143 billion in monthly DEX volume as of Oct. 30, according to DefiLlama. The network operates with 1,295 consensus validators across 40 countries, and a Nakamoto Coefficient of 20, according to the Foundation’s June 2025 Network Health Report. Production throughput runs at approximately […] The post 70M daily transactions, $143B volume: How Solana won DeFi’s throughput race appeared first on CryptoSlate.

On Oct. 20, a hiccup in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region set off a chain reaction across the crypto industry. Coinbase reported degraded service, Infura and Alchemy posted AWS-related incident notes, and several wallets and rollups began timing out. None of these failures came from the blockchains themselves. Consensus was fine. The problem was everything wrapped around […] The post If Web3 is decentralized, why do DeFi dApps still break when the cloud goes down? appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Like early email protocols, DeFi remains complex and isolated. Bridging DeFi and TradFi through hybrid payment solutions could unlock crypto’s mainstream potential. Opinion by: Mark Jones, founder of Hana Wallet It’s often forgotten that the first emails were sent between US college professors looking to share files and work collaboratively in the early 1970s. The sending of emails between two professors initially involved using a closed system between two computers on the ARPANET that would enable messages to be sent over the File Transfer Protocol.  The process was slow, complex, time-consuming and consequently didn’t gain any traction beyond Ivy League universities or government research facilities. Read more

Like early email protocols, DeFi remains complex and isolated. Bridging DeFi and TradFi through hybrid payment solutions could unlock crypto’s mainstream potential. Opinion by: Mark Jones, founder of Hana Wallet It’s often forgotten that the first emails were sent between US college professors looking to share files and work collaboratively in the early 1970s. The sending of emails between two professors initially involved using a closed system between two computers on the ARPANET that would enable messages to be sent over the File Transfer Protocol.  The process was slow, complex, time-consuming and consequently didn’t gain any traction beyond Ivy League universities or government research facilities. Read more

Crypto markets that trade 24/7 demand automated wallet protections, not manual vigilance. Passive vaults leave people exposed to overnight liquidations. Opinion by: Brian Huang, co-founder of Glider Crypto markets run 24/7. Today’s wallets leave users exposed to constant risk, highlighting the urgent need for automated protections that operate around the clock. While the US stock market closes every weekday at 4:00 p.m. ET, cryptocurrency markets never sleep.  As more assets, including stocks, move onchain over the next few years, it won’t be long before most assets will trade 24/7. While permissionless access to assets around the world is great, no consumer tool today, whether TradFi or DeFi, is built to protect users around the clock.  Read more

The Nasdaq-listed company will allocate 5.6% of its $3.57 billion Ether treasury through ether.fi and EigenCloud on Linea, marking one of the largest corporate DeFi deployments to date. SharpLink Gaming has announced plans to deploy $200 million worth of Ether (ETH) from its corporate treasury onto Consensys’ Linea network. The company said the multi-year initiative will use Linea’s zkEVM layer-2 infrastructure to generate onchain yield and increase the efficiency of its ETH holdings. According to Tuesday’s press release, the strategy aims to capture “highly competitive, differentiated, risk-adjusted ETH-denominated returns.” SharpLink plans to generate yields from staking, restaking rewards earned by helping secure EigenCloud’s decentralized verification services (AVSs), and incentives from Linea and ether.fi — a decentralized liquid staking and restaking protocol. Read more