Author: NBTC

Decentralized perpetuals exchange Lighter is attracting increased inflows as it prepares to close its private beta phase and open to the public. The exchange crossed $350 million in total value locked (TVL) on Sept 3, and is at $375 million today, representing a 90% increase from the beginning of August. Lighter TVL – DeFiLlama While there is no set date for the public launch, the project posted on X on July 31, “Lighter Private Beta Ending Soon!”. Currently, the platform is gated by invite codes, which users receive based on trading activity and total points earned. Lighter also introduced pre-launch…

The cryptocurrency market fell nearly 4% Monday, intensifying concerns over a surge in Ethereum (ETH) unstaking. On-chain data shows 1.18 million ETH are queued for withdrawal, the largest backlog in months. The delays highlight pressure on the Ethereum network. Normally, unstaking takes three to five days. Current applicants face up to 40 days. ETH Unstaking Surge ≠ Selling Pressure Unstaking does not automatically mean selling. Many holders may keep their ETH, waiting for higher prices or DeFi opportunities. Data from Dune Analytics indicates no strong link between unstaking volume and ETH price over the past 45 days. However, when withdrawn,…

Wall Street banking and research firm Compass Point has initiated coverage of crypto platform Bullish (BLSH), the parent company of CoinDesk, with a neutral rating and a $45 price target. Despite a belief that Bullish’s lower fee structure could help it chip away at Coinbase’s (COIN) U.S. market share in the future, the analyst Ed Engel cited concerns about the timing as well as the stock’s valuation. “We have a hard time seeing Bullish entering U.S. markets until Congress passes market structure legislation (i.e. the CLARITY Act),” Engel wrote. The CLARITY ACT, a bill aiming to clarify jurisdiction between the…

Stablecoin firm Circle has unfrozen $58 million worth of USDC belonging to Hayden Davis two weeks after a temporary restraining order (TRO), issued as part of his LIBRA court case, was lifted. This means that Davis, who worked with Argentinian President, Javier Milei, to launch the scandalous LIBRA token, will have full access to do whatever he wants with these funds. Blockworks’ Senior Data Engineer, Fernando Molina, spotted Circle’s unfreezing today, and noted, “It is clear that Circle did not comply with the request from the Argentine justice system.” He added, “Despite the fact that the judge had authorized it…

TL;DR Due, a global payments solution on Starknet, enables fast, low-cost cross-border transactions in over 80 countries. It supports multiple fiat currencies and stablecoins including USDC, EURC, and USDT, offering virtual multi-currency accounts for businesses and individuals. Transactions settle in under 24 hours for fiat and instantly for stablecoins, providing a seamless, secure, and accessible alternative to traditional banking and wire transfers. Starknet is expanding its ecosystem with the launch of Due, a versatile payments platform designed to simplify global financial transactions. Built on top of interoperable blockchains and stablecoins, Due allows individuals and businesses worldwide to send and receive…

Polygon is a Layer 2 blockchain platform that scales Ethereum by processing transactions off-chain before committing checkpoints to Ethereum’s mainnet, enabling fast and low-cost transactions while maintaining security. The platform functions as a multi-chain ecosystem that addresses Ethereum’s scalability limitations through various technical approaches, including sidechains, plasma chains, and zero-knowledge rollups. What started as Matic Network in 2017 has grown into a blockchain infrastructure giant. Today, Polygon processes 4 million daily transactions across 117+ million total unique wallets—more than most standalone blockchains achieve. The platform hosts $1.13 billion in tokenized real-world assets across 268+ issuances, while maintaining transaction costs averaging…

Webisoft and the Midnight Foundation have teamed up to build an institutional-grade dark pool decentralized exchange, a move aimed squarely at bringing confidential, large-scale trading to decentralized finance. The development lab Webisoft will use Midnight’s privacy-enhancing stack to construct a full-stack dark pool on the Midnight network, combining zero-knowledge proofs, a private matching engine, and atomic settlement to let institutions execute big trades without broadcasting their intentions to the whole market. On today’s public DEXs, every buy and sell order is visible on-chain, and that visibility is costly for institutions. A very large order sends a clear signal about supply…

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe “If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s success, it’s that he never tried to make money.” — Ward Kimball, Disney animator Andrew Keys is an Ethereum OG whose credentials include attending the first-ever Ethereum meetup in 2014 and making ETH worth more than a dollar. “The first time Ethereum crossed $1 was because I put a permissioned version of the Java client of Ethereum on top of Azure,” he said on the Empire podcast, “and we put out a 100-word press release in the…

Kite, a company developing infrastructure for the agentic web, has raised $18 million in a Series A round, bringing its total funding to $33 million. The round was led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from 8VC, Samsung Next, SBI US Gateway Fund, Vertex Ventures, Hashed, HashKey Capital, Dispersion Capital, Alumni Ventures, Avalanche Foundation, GSR Markets, LayerZero, Animoca Brands, Essence VC, and Alchemy. Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite builds distributed systems designed for autonomous agents. The team has previously developed large-scale real-time data infrastructures for decentralized networks such as Sui, Polygon, Chainlink, and EigenLayer. Kite recently launched Kite…

A Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into missing text messages from former chair Gary Gensler’s phone between October 2022 and September 2023 has concluded that “avoidable errors” led to their loss. The SEC Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigated how nearly a year’s worth of text messages from Gary Gensler were permanently lost between October 2022 and September 2023, during the height of the agency’s crypto enforcement action campaign. In a report released on Wednesday, the OIG revealed that the SEC’s IT department “implemented a poorly understood and automated policy that caused an enterprise wipe of Gensler’s government-issued mobile device,”…