Quick Take

• Real-world asset (RWA)-focused markets on Hyperliquid accounted for over 56% of the DEX's trading volume.
• Zcash activated its "Ironwood" upgrade, sealing its US$1.7 billion Orchard shielded pool and initiating a migration to a new pool starting from zero tokens.
• Ripple launched "Ripple Mint," a unified multichain platform that helps institutions access, mint, redeem, and manage the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin.
• Morpho launched Midnight, a fixed-rate and fixed-term credit protocol.
• Uniswap Labs introduced Permissioned Pools to enable the trading of regulated tokenized assets on its DEX.
• Ondo Finance subsidiary Oasis Pro Markets secured SEC and FINRA clearance to offer tokenized equities and funds to U.S. investors. Ondo also enabled its tokenized stocks (SPYon and QQQon) as collateral on its OndoPerps platform.
• Ondo Finance canceled plans for a tokenized asset Layer-1 (L1) blockchain, opting instead to build a private, high-speed trading network that powers its new perpetual futures platform and improves asset execution efficiency.
• Lido launched Curated Module v2, an infrastructure upgrade to boost Ethereum’s validator efficiency and decentralization.
• 1inch introduced the Aqua protocol across 11 blockchains to unify liquidity pools.
• World Foundation raised $52.5 million through a locked WLD token sale led by Pantera Capital to scale its World ID biometric identity network.
• A critical security vulnerability in the Zilliqa Ledger app used predictable ephemeral nonces when signing transactions, allowing attackers to recover private keys from onchain signatures. This forced a temporary halt on network deposits and withdrawals.
• Arbitrum-based protocol AFX Trade was drained of $24.15 million in USDC after attackers compromised external bridge validator keys to authorize fraudulent withdrawals.
• Stablecoin payments firm Triple-A confirmed a security breach involving unauthorized access to its treasury wallets, resulting in an $11.8 million loss.
• SecondFi is shutting down after an exploit in its transaction signing software allowed hackers to derive private keys and steal 16.1 million ADA (approximately $2.4 million) across 374 wallets.
• Algorithmic stablecoin Balance Coin collapsed over 99% following an exploit where an attacker manipulated a pricing flaw to siphon roughly $912,000 from its Bitcoin vaults.

Weekly DeFi Index

This week, the market cap, volume, and volatility indices decreased -5.68%, -4.37%, and -39.36%, respectively.

• Morpho (MORPHO) launched Midnight, a fixed-rate and fixed-term credit protocol. The launch includes a new Markets App that allows users to lend and borrow directly within these fixed-rate markets, with plans to expand to additional networks.
• Uniswap Labs (UNI) is introducing "Permissioned Pools" as part of its v4 infrastructure upgrade, allowing regulatory compliance checks to be processed directly onchain. This unlocks automated market maker (AMM) liquidity for institutional products and bridges TradFi with decentralized infrastructure to ensure compliant trading of tokenized funds and RWAs.
• Ondo Finance (ONDO) subsidiary Oasis Pro Markets secured SEC and FINRA clearance to offer tokenized equities and funds to U.S. investors. Ondo Finance also enabled its tokenized stocks, starting with SPYon and QQQon, as collateral on its OndoPerps platform.
• Ondo Finance canceled plans for a tokenized asset L1 blockchain, opting instead to build a private, high-speed trading network that will power its new perpetual futures platform and improve execution efficiency for onchain financial assets.
• Lido (LDO) launched Curated Module v2, an infrastructure upgrade to enhance Ethereum’s validator efficiency and decentralization. The upgrade adds support for 0x02 withdrawal credentials, allowing individual validators to increase their effective balance from the standard 32 ETH to as high as 2,048 ETH.

Chart of the Week

Over the past week, tokenized RWAs emerged as the leading trading category on Hyperliquid. Starting July 23, the seven-day moving average trading volume for HIP-3 markets featuring RWAs surpassed Hyperliquid's native perpetual contracts. By July 28, these RWA-focused markets accounted for over 56% of the DEX's trading volume, totaling more than $3.3 billion on a seven-day average.

News Highlights

• Privacy-focused blockchain Zcash activated its "Ironwood" upgrade, sealing its $1.7 billion Orchard shielded pool and initiating a mandatory migration to a new pool starting from zero tokens. This architectural change definitively rules out undetectable counterfeiting bugs, reinforcing confidence in the protocol's cryptographic integrity.
• Ripple launched "Ripple Mint," a unified multichain platform that helps institutions access, mint, redeem, and manage the RLUSD stablecoin. 
• DEX aggregator 1inch introduced the Aqua protocol across 11 blockchains to unify liquidity pools. By allowing liquidity providers to authorize multiple market-making strategies directly from a single wallet inventory without locking funds into individual pools, the protocol improves capital utilization, operating similarly to coordinated overbooking.
• World Foundation raised $52.5 million through a locked WLD token sale led by Pantera Capital to scale its World ID biometric identity network. This capital injection addresses demand for human identity verification amid the rise of autonomous AI agents, despite ongoing regulatory scrutiny over global biometric data collection.
• A critical security vulnerability in the Zilliqa Ledger app used predictable ephemeral nonces when signing transactions, allowing attackers to recover private keys from onchain signatures. This forced a temporary halt on network deposits and withdrawals.
• Arbitrum-based protocol AFX Trade was drained of $24.15 million in USDC after attackers compromised external bridge validator keys to authorize fraudulent withdrawals.
• Stablecoin payments firm Triple-A confirmed a security breach involving unauthorized access to its treasury wallets, resulting in an $11.8 million loss in company-owned digital assets.
• Cardano wallet provider SecondFi is shutting down after an exploit in its transaction signing software allowed hackers to derive private keys and steal 16.1 million ADA (approximately $2.4 million) across 374 wallets. Although the core Cardano network remained uncompromised, the breach forced the platform to wind down permanently.
• Low-circulation algorithmic stablecoin Balance Coin collapsed over 99% following an exploit where an attacker manipulated a pricing flaw to siphon roughly $912,000 from its Bitcoin vaults.

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