DeFi | Crypto

Curve founder Michael Egorov told Cointelegraph that protocols cannot “live without real revenues flowing” as token incentives lose power to attract liquidity. Decentralized finance (DeFi) can no longer rely on inflationary token incentives to sustain growth, according to Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov.  In an interview with Cointelegraph, Egorov said protocols must generate real revenue rather than depend on emissions to attract liquidity. “Your yield should come from revenues, not from tokens,” Egorov told Cointelegraph. “You need real revenues flowing.” He added that if a token “is not doing something, maybe it’s better for you to not do token at all.” Read more

New research claims specialized AI dramatically outperforms general-purpose models at detecting exploited DeFi vulnerabilities.

Crypto illiquidity is pressuring DeFi lending companies, but Wall Street giants continue to increase their exposure to the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company. Large institutional investors continued to add exposure to crypto treasury companies over the past week, even as bear-market illiquidity forced another round of shakeouts across decentralized finance (DeFi). The biggest corporate shareholders of Bitmine Immersion Technologies, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, increased exposure to the Ether (ETH) treasury company during Q4 2025 despite a broader market sell-off. Still, ongoing bear-market illiquidity is forcing some protocols to wind down operations, with DeFi lender ZeroLend shutting down. Crypto analytics platform Parsec has also shuttered, citing crypto market volatility as the main reason. Read more

The exploit saw the Moonwell protocol exploited for $1.78 million after cbETH was mispriced at $1.12 instead of about $2,200, intensifying debate around AI-co-authored smart contracts. Moonwell, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol deployed on Base and Optimism, was exploited for about $1.78 million after a pricing oracle for Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH) returned a value of about $1.12 instead of $2,200, creating a mispricing that attackers were able to use for profit. Moonwell said in an incident post-mortem that a governance proposal executed on Sunday misconfigured the cbETH oracle by using the cbETH/ETH exchange rate alone, causing the system to report cbETH at about $1.12. The protocol said liquidation bots and opportunistic borrowers exploited the mispricing, leaving roughly $1.78 million in bad debt. The pull requests for the affected contracts show multiple commits co-authored by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, prompting security auditor Pashov to publicly flag the incident as an exampl...

ZeroLend founder “Ryker” says several blockchains the lending protocol operates on are now “inactive,” leading to periods where it has operated at a loss. Decentralized lending protocol ZeroLend says it is shutting down completely after the blockchains it operates on have suffered from low user numbers and liquidity. “After three years of building and operating the protocol, we have made the difficult decision to wind down operations,” ZeroLend’s founder, known only as “Ryker,” said in a post the protocol shared to X on Monday. “Despite the team’s continued efforts, it has become clear that the protocol is no longer sustainable in its current form,” he added. Read more

Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov said onchain lending could help accelerate the development of solar, energy storage and robotics by putting money behind “future-proof” assets. Stani Kulechov, the founder of the decentralized lending platform Aave, says DeFi could benefit from $50 trillion worth of “abundance assets,” such as solar energy, through tokenization by 2050, opening a new class of onchain collateral. Data from RWA.xyz shows that nearly $25 billion worth of real-world assets have been tokenized onchain, but they are mostly in the form of US Treasury bonds, stocks, commodities, private credit and real estate. In a post to X on Sunday, Kulechov said he expects these scarce assets to continue growing but that the “biggest impact from tokenization can be achieved by tokenizing abundance assets.” Read more

Bitcoin and Ether rebounded modestly as ETF outflows mounted, while BlackRock entered DeFi and Binance completed its $1 billion Bitcoin reserve shift. BlackRock made its first formal move into decentralized finance this week, listing its tokenized Treasury fund on Uniswap, with Bitcoin and Ether staging only modest rebounds amid heavy ETF outflows. Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) each rose about 2.5% during the past week but were unable to cross key psychological levels due to mixed exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows and crypto investor sentiment sinking to record lows. Bitcoin ETFs started the week with two consecutive days of inflows, but they quickly reversed with $276 million in outflows on Wednesday and $410 million on Thursday. Read more

On Feb. 11, Uniswap announced that BlackRock's $2.2 billion USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) would trade on UniswapX via a partnership with Securitize. The integration enables BUIDL holders to swap into USDC via an on-chain request-for-quote system that settles atomically with quotes from allowlisted market makers, including Flowdesk, Tokka Labs, and Wintermute. Additionally, BlackRock […] The post Uniswap is bringing BlackRock’s $2.2 billion BUIDL to DeFi, but the trade access comes with a catch appeared first on CryptoSlate.

BlackRock is bringing its $2.1 billion tokenized Treasury fund to Uniswap, expanding institutional access to DeFi and deepening Wall Street’s push into onchain finance. Asset management giant BlackRock is making its first formal move into decentralized finance by bringing its tokenized US Treasury fund to Uniswap, marking a milestone moment for institutional adoption of DeFi. According to a Wednesday announcement, BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) will be listed on the Uniswap decentralized exchange, allowing institutional investors to buy and sell the tokenized security.  As part of the arrangement, BlackRock is also purchasing an undisclosed amount of Uniswap’s native governance token, UNI, the announcement said. Read more

Buterin criticized modern DeFi as centralized in disguise, arguing USDC yield farming misses core principles.

Ripple is working to make decentralized finance more familiar to regulated institutions and is placing XRP at the center of that effort. DeFi’s earlier growth cycles were built around open, retail-facing liquidity pools and the associated risk tolerance. Total value locked across major protocols climbed into the tens of billions of dollars and, at previous […] The post Ripple says compliance controls will unlock DeFi, but XRPL liquidity is still too thin to prove it appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Ethereum co-founder outlined alternative stablecoin models that he says better align with DeFi’s original promise of risk decentralization. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin drew a clear boundary around what he considers “real” decentralized finance (DeFi), pushing back against yield-driven stablecoin strategies that he says fail to meaningfully transform risk.  In a discussion on X, Buterin said that DeFi derives its value from changing how risk is allocated and managed, not simply from generating yield on centralized assets.  Buterin’s comments come amid renewed scrutiny over DeFi’s dominant use cases, particularly in lending markets built around fiat-backed stablecoins like USDC (USDC).  Read more

Senior decision-makers flagged liquidity constraints and market depth as key barriers to institutional crypto adoption in 2026. A survey of senior crypto investors and executives suggests capital priorities are shifting away from decentralized finance (DeFi) and toward core infrastructure, as decision-makers focus on liquidity constraints and market plumbing.  The findings come from a new report published by the digital asset conference CfC St. Moritz, based on responses from 242 attendees of its invitation-only event in January. Respondents included institutional investors, founders, C-suite executives, regulators and family office representatives.  According to the survey, 85% of respondents selected infrastructure as their top funding priority, ahead of DeFi, compliance, cybersecurity and user experience.  Read more

Aave's strategic consolidation under a single brand reflects a broader industry shift toward specialized financial products over general-purpose crypto wallets following months of governance disputes and regulatory clarity. The post Aave Goes All-In on DeFi, Shuts Down Avara Brand and Family Wallet appeared first on Cryptonews.

Europe narrows crypto tax gaps, US lawmakers revisit market structure, and institutions push DeFi into compliance territory. 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 custodians and exchanges, which will be required to collect and report standardized user activity data under the OECD’s Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). However, the DeFi carve-out may not last. Mangels said tax authorities are increasingly drawing on Anti-Money Laundering (AML) frameworks to define accountability in crypto markets, and regulators are closely watching whether DeFi platforms can be classified as virtual asset service providers. Read more

Washington is edging closer to a landmark crypto framework, though disputes over DeFi and stablecoin rewards risk pushing final passage beyond 2026.

DeFi's composability creates cascading exploit risks while protocols handle risk idiosyncratically. Institutional adoption demands TradFi-style standardized frameworks. 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 ones. ​DeFi’s current growth exposes mounting risks that could lead to trust roadblocks. For institutions to confidently onboard, the ecosystem must implement stronger risk guardrails and resilient infrastructure.  Read more

DeFi is still out of scope for DAC8 and CARF, but AML enforcement trends suggest that may not last, according to Taxbit’s Colby Mangels. The European Union’s new cryptocurrency tax reporting framework is built around what governments can immediately enforce, leaving decentralized finance (DeFi) outside its scope for now. A former Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) official who worked on the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) said that this gap is a deliberate focus and not a blind spot. “It doesn’t make sense to go to your grandma and ask her to give you all the tax reporting on crypto just because you happened to work with her over a certain period,” Colby Mangels, Taxbit’s global head of government solutions and a former OECD adviser, told Cointelegraph. “You really have to go to the intermediaries that are doing this as a business.” Read more

Aave now controls 51.5% of the DeFi lending market share, the first time any protocol has crossed the 50% threshold since 2020. The milestone arrives not through competitor collapse but through steady accumulation: Aave's $33.37 billion in total value locked sits atop a $64.83 billion lending category that has consolidated around a single liquidity hub. […] The post How Aave’s DeFi monopoly created a risky feedback loop with only a $460M backstop appeared first on CryptoSlate.

US lawmakers pause the CLARITY Act as DeFi leaders warn the bill still risks developers, DAOs rethink governance and regulators face mounting pressure. United States lawmakers postponed a planned markup of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY), delaying progress on a bill intended to define how cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms are regulated and prompting renewed pushback from DeFi leaders who say the bill still fails to adequately protect developers.  Industry groups and crypto venture firms warned that proposed amendments could impose requirements that are not suitable for decentralized systems. Representatives from Paradigm and Variant said the current draft leaves unresolved ambiguity over whether DeFi developers and infrastructure providers could be forced to implement Know Your Customer (KYC), register with financial regulators or comply with rules designed for centralized platforms. The delay follows mounting criticism from across the crypto sector, including public o...