Update (2-4-26 at 6:49 UTC): This article has been updated to show the correct Stacks block time as 5 seconds Fireblocks, an institutional-grade crypto infrastructure company, announced on Wednesday that it will integrate Stacks, a decentralized finance (DeFi) layer for the Bitcoin protocol, to give institutional clients access to lending and yield-bearing opportunities. The integration…

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Aave Labs says it is sunsetting its “umbrella brand” Avara in the company’s latest move to refocus on decentralized finance and simplify its branding. Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov posted to X on Tuesday that Avara, a company encompassing projects including the Family crypto wallet and previously the social media platform Lens, “is no…

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Key takeaways World Liberty Financial has entered DeFi lending with the launch of World Liberty Markets, an onchain borrowing and lending platform built around its dollar-pegged stablecoin USD1. The platform uses smart contracts to manage lending terms, replacing centralized intermediaries with transparent and automated risk controls that are visible on the blockchain. USD1 plays a…

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Jupiter said it has secured a $35 million strategic investment from ParaFi Capital, marking the first time the Solana-based onchain trading and liquidity aggregation protocol has taken outside capital after years of bootstrapped, profitable growth. The transaction involved token purchases at market prices with no discount and an extended lockup period and was settled entirely…

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Step Finance, a decentralized finance portfolio tracker on Solana, has disclosed a security breach that led to the compromise of several treasury wallets, triggering a sharp sell-off in its native token. “Earlier today, several of our treasury wallets were compromised by a sophisticated actor during APAC hours. This was an attack facilitated through a well-known…

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Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures-backed Bitcoin zero-knowledge rollup (ZK-rollup) Citrea launched its mainnet on Tuesday with BTC collateral lending, BTC-structured products and a new US dollar stablecoin, ctUSD.  The launch is aimed at turning what Citrea calls “economically idle” Bitcoin (BTC) into base collateral for decentralized finance (DeFi) and payments, while anchoring more of that…

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The European Union’s new crypto tax reporting regime under DAC8 is intentionally focused on enforceable targets, leaving decentralized finance (DeFi) outside its scope for now. Colby Mangels, a former adviser to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and now Taxbit’s global head of government solutions, said the rules prioritize identifiable intermediaries such as…

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Opinion by: Robert Schmitt, founder and co-CEO at Cork DeFi has entered its institutional phase. As large investors dip their toes into crypto ETFs and digital asset treasuries (DATs), the ecosystem is gradually evolving into an institutional-grade financial system in its own right, with the introduction of new financial instruments and digital counterparts of well-established…

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Blockchain network Avalanche saw rising institutional adoption across tokenized money market funds, loans, and indices in the fourth quarter, driving the value of real-world assets on the layer 1 to a new high, even as its token underperformed the broader market. The total value locked of tokenized real-world assets on Avalanche rose 68.6% over the…

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Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) have been written off as dead by many investors, but a new “State of DePIN 2025” report from Messari and Escape Velocity argues the sector has steadily grown into a $10 billion market generating $72 million in onchain revenue last year alone. According to the report, the “class of 2018-2022”…

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