The Federal Reserve recently implemented a "hawkish rate cut," lowering the interest rate range to 3.75%-4.00%. With limited policy visibility, markets have turned cautious amid a lack of data.Policy Uncertainty The Fed faces a data vacuum due to the government shutdown, leading to diminished rate cut expectations and a flattening short-end yield curve. Decision-making is increasingly driven by liquidity dynamics. Liquidity Distorts Markets Passive funds and quantitative strategies dominate l...

Abstract – From Wild-West Lending to Institution-Grade Capital Markets Maple Finance was started by former bond-salesmen and structurers who believed blockchains could do debt markets better than Bloomberg terminals. In three years it has moved from “zero-collateral alpha” to a multi-chain, multi-asset credit platform that has underwritten > US $4 bn of loans, tokenised US $270 m of U.S. Treasuries and still kept defaults below 3 %. This piece walks through the product arcs, the 2022 near-dea...

Last Friday's leverage-triggered liquidation has structurally shifted market capital and attention: from perpetual contracts to spot trading, from centralized exchanges (CEXs) to decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and from major cryptocurrencies to low-cap altcoins. Traders' appetite for high-yield opportunities hasn't vanished—it may even have intensified due to revenge trading psychology. Liquidity will flow to the most promising opportunities, potentially fueling a new Memecoin supercycle. Me...

I. A Dusty Photo, a Living Legend A single resurfaced group picture is now ricocheting through crypto-Twitter. In the back row, wearing a light sweater and an almost shy smile, stands a young Jeff Yan—today the anonymous founder of Hyperliquid, the perpetual-swap DEX that routinely out-trades Coinbase’s entire derivatives book. The shot was taken in 2018 at the inaugural BUIDLers camp run by Binance Labs. Seven years later the apprentice has become the giant’s most stubborn competitor.II. 201...

The Set-Up: A Capital-Led Spring Between 20 April and 20 July 2025 the crypto-market staged its sharpest rebound since the 2021 bull-run. Tokens with the largest market-caps doubled—or tripled—while on-chain gauges moved at wildly different speeds. Below is a 90-day score-card for the eight most valuable (or most talked-about) public chains, ranked by how dramatic the divergence between price and fundamentals has become.1. Ethereum – The King is Back, Bought by ETFs Price: ▲ 130 % (US $1 600 ...

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin emphasizes in his latest article that as digital technology deeply integrates into daily life, health, finance, and governance, building a technological system with "full-stack openness" and "verifiability" is crucial to avoid a "digital dystopia" risk. The article elaborates on three core areas: * Health Sector: Using vaccine R&D/inequitable distribution and health data collection as examples, he illustrates how proprietary technology leads to access inequ...

Bookmark Avantis (AVNT) is a decentralized derivatives protocol built on the Base chain, focusing on perpetual contract trading and supporting assets including cryptocurrencies, forex, commodities, and U.S. stock indices with leverage of up to 500x. Its token, AVNT, recently listed on Upbit, Bithumb, and Binance, nearly doubling in price within 24 hours. Protocol Performance: Since its mainnet launch in February 2024, cumulative trading volume has exceeded $22 billion, TVL has reached $16.75 ...

From Wild West to Wedding Aisle: Compliance Becomes the New Sexy The global crypto market has crossed its adolescent rebellion phase. Regulators on every continent now demand KYC, audits and quarterly calls—exactly the corporate vocabulary the industry once mocked. The classic “decentralised foundation” model is choking on three contradictions: non-profit wrappers vs. for-profit teams, DAO gridlock vs. market speed, and subpoenas vs. anonymity. The fix? List the thing. Or buy the thing that’s...

Not Invented Here—So Why Did PayPal Outsource Its Next-Gen Rails? PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst just led an $18 million Series A into Kite AI, a start-up building a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for AI-to-AI micro-payments. The cheque is small by Silicon-Valley standards, but the signal is deafening: the incumbent payments giants are staring at a “plumbing crisis” and would rather rent than own the next set of pipes. While Stripe is coding its own chain (Tempo) and Circle is polishi...

WalletConnect (now rebranded as Reown) is a core connectivity layer protocol within the Web3 ecosystem. Since its inception in 2018, it has evolved into critical infrastructure supporting over 40,000 dApps and 600+ wallets, facilitating more than 2.2 billion connections cumulatively. The project has expanded from its initial QR code scanning protocol to a comprehensive user experience layer encompassing AppKit and WalletKit, aiming to serve as a "digital passport" connecting users to the Web3...