Weekly DeFi Index

This week, the market cap and volatility indices increased +2.86% and +51.02%, respectively, while the volume index dropped -10.02%.

• World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a cryptocurrency firm backed by the Trump family, is reportedly in discussions to sell its payments subsidiary, AI Financial, to blockchain company Perpetuals.com in a deal potentially valued at up to $15 million. This potential sale marks a strategic reversal for the Trump family's crypto venture, which acquired control of AI Financial (formerly Alt5 Sigma) in August 2024 for $750 million with the intention of building a major international stablecoin payments business.
• Ondo Finance (ONDO) is partnering with Broadridge to launch a system for tokenized stock holders to participate in proxy voting and corporate governance.
• Aave (AAVE) expanded its V3 lending protocol and the GHO stablecoin ecosystem onto the Monad blockchain. By deploying on the high-performance Layer-1 network, the protocol intends to significantly enhance transaction processing speeds and lower costs. This move is positioned to foster broader adoption of the GHO stablecoin and improve the capital efficiency of Aave's DeFi products.

Chart of the Week

In June, tokenized equities trading reached $6.7 billion in volume (both on decentralized and centralized exchanges), representing a 42% increase from May. This surge was primarily driven by investor interest in the tokenized S&P 500 ETF (SPY, ~$1.3 billion) and  Circle (CRCL, ~$1.3 billion), which skyrocketed by 19.5x and 68.5%, respectively. Meanwhile, SpaceX (SPCX) gained traction following the company's initial public offering (IPO) with $523 million trading volume, the same level as Alphabet (GOOG).

News Highlights

• Vitalik Buterin detailed a multi-year "Lean Ethereum" roadmap to overhaul nearly every major protocol component without disrupting existing dapps. By prioritizing quantum resistance, recursive STARKs for privacy, state storage scaling, and a potential shift to a RISC-V architecture, the network is preparing for its most profound optimization to date.
• Zcash developer Shielded Labs warned that the scheduled Ironwood network upgrade may be delayed to give ecosystem participants more time to prepare for the Z3 software migration.
• Taiko brought its cross-chain bridge back online ten days after a security breach drained $1.7 million from the protocol. The recovery and relaunch gained a positive community reaction, causing the protocol's native token to surge significantly.
• BonkDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) tied to Solana-based memecoin BONK, lost approximately $20 million from its treasury after an attacker spent around $4.4 million to quietly accumulate a voting majority and pass a governance proposal that transferred the funds.
• DeFi yield platform Summer Finance suffered a $6 million exploit when an attacker used a $65 million flash loan to exploit accounting vulnerabilities in its Fleet Commander vault architecture. The attacker inflated reported assets to extract funds through legitimate contract functions, forcing the protocol to pause all active vaults.

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