Author: NBTC

The total value locked (TVL) on DeFi fell from $172 billion to $148 billion as the sector logged $635 million in exploit losses across April alone. Coinbase Ventures bought Ethena’s $ENA token on the open market, Janus Henderson took its own strategic $ENA position, and Morpho closed a $175 million round structured entirely around the $MORPHO token. Apollo separately secured rights to acquire up to 90 million $MORPHO tokens over 48 months. The bet these investors are making is that governance tokens attached to DeFi protocols with real institutional distribution will rerate as financial infrastructure, and that the security panic…

Ethereum has been underperforming since the start of the week, losing 17% of its value over the last seven days. The decline comes amid a massive selloff in the broader cryptocurrency market. Ethereum has lost the $1,700 level, with the bears now targeting the $1,500 psychological level in the near term. However, the weekly chart is extremely bearish, with the liquidity magnet around the $1,380 zone. While it remains to be seen if Ethereum will drop to this April 2025 low, the technical indicators suggest that the bears are very much in control. Bitmine’s Tom Lee remains optimistic, predicts $ETH…

Strip out the AI darlings from the S&P 500, and the index barely moved over the past two years. With them, it more than doubled. From May 2024 to June 2026, the S&P 500 posted a 142% gain. Remove the AI stocks, and that number collapses to 16%. The gap between those two figures tells you everything about where the market’s real engine lives, and how narrow that engine has become. A 45% concentration that should worry you AI stocks now account for 45% of the S&P 500’s total market capitalization. That’s an all-time high for any single thematic cluster…

Amid the absence of fundamental narratives around Shiba Inu ($SHIB), the community’s attention has shifted from charts to capital flows, with particular focus on the legendary address holding 16% of $SHIB supply, after which new large players have begun to emerge on-chain, adding nervousness to the market. According to Arkham, another large holder, this time “0x9896…1098”, transferred 17.958 billion $SHIB to Binance, which is about $114,000. What makes this transaction interesting is that the volume was received by the wallet exactly two weeks ago. The holder did not maintain the coins for long, but redirected them to the exchange almost…

CME Group has turned on around-the-clock trading for its cryptocurrency futures and options, opening the regulated derivatives markets through the weekend for the first time. The change took effect on Friday, May 29, and lets clients trade the contracts at any hour, any day, on the CME Globex platform. The shift ends a long-standing quirk of regulated crypto derivatives, which until now shut down on weekends and outside set daily hours even as the underlying tokens kept trading nonstop. Over the opening weekend, more than 7,200 crypto futures and options contracts traded, worth roughly $50 million in notional value, CME…

ZIGChain integrates Ondo Finance to bring tokenized US stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) onchain, according to information shared with Finbold on Monday, June 8, 2026 ZIGChain, a Layer 1 blockchain built to bring investment products onchain for institutions and everyday users, has announced an integration with Ondo Finance to bring tokenized US stocks and ETFs to users across ZIGChain’s ecosystem. Ondo Finance pioneered the tokenization of institutional-grade real-world assets, and the integration extends onchain exposure to publicly traded US securities to a new generation of users across the GCC and beyond. The integration deepens ZIGChain’s real-world asset stack alongside Valdora…

Key takeaways: Aggressive Bitcoin buying by Strategy helped to offset the recent leveraged long liquidations. Rising bond yields and a heavy US government debt burden are driving investors toward scarce assets. A potential deal between the US and Iran could quickly restore traders’ risk appetite. Bitcoin ($BTC) faced a rejection following a failed attempt to break above $82,000 on Thursday. A subsequent retest of the $76,000 level on Monday triggered $400 million in liquidations for bullish Bitcoin positions over a four-day period. While traders’ confidence took a hit from the 7% price decline, the prospects for recovering the $80,000 mark…

Curve Finance has officially launched Llamalend v2 on the Optimism network, marking a significant upgrade to its decentralized lending infrastructure. The update removes the previous restriction that required lending pairs to include crvUSD, the protocol’s native stablecoin, allowing users to create lending markets with virtually any combination of collateral and borrowed assets. Key Changes in Llamalend v2 The most notable change in Llamalend v2 is the elimination of the mandatory crvUSD pairing. Previously, all lending markets on Curve had to include crvUSD as either the collateral or borrowed asset. This limitation constrained the types of lending strategies users could employ.…

A cryptocurrency whale address that remained inactive for three years has suddenly reemerged, executing a series of large transactions on the decentralized lending protocol Aave. According to on-chain analytics firm Onchain Lens, the address deposited 20,000 Ether ($ETH), valued at approximately $33.28 million, into Aave V3 and subsequently borrowed 30 million $USDT. The whale then used the borrowed stablecoins to purchase additional $ETH, significantly increasing its holdings. Whale Activity Details Following the transactions, the address’s total $ETH balance rose from 38,554 $ETH (worth roughly $64.28 million) to 56,380 $ETH, now valued at approximately $94.04 million. The move represents a notable…

Amid South Korea’s preparation for a new phase of digital asset regulation, a consortium consisting of Hana Financial TI, XRPL Korea, and Axelar successfully completed a proof-of-concept testing of mechanisms for issuing and circulating a stablecoin pegged to the Korean won (KRW) on the $XRP Ledger. The key feature of the case was the decision to avoid using third-party smart contracts in favor of XRPL’s native protocols. As project participants note, for institutional players such as Hana Financial, one of the country’s largest banking holding companies, compliance logic embedded directly into the blockchain is critical. During the tests, tools required…