Weekly DeFi Index

This week, the market cap, volume and volatility indices grew +13.04%, +14.68%, and +5.12%, respectively.

• Hyperliquid (HYPE) soared on excitement over its $1.16 billion buyback fund (99% of trading fees go to the Assistance Fund for HYPE buying, excluding builders fees) and Hyperliquid ETF inflows.
• Jito (JTO) saw a price surge following a strong Q1 2026 report. Its Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) share of Solana’s stake doubled to 28.1%. Key May earnings call metrics included: staked SOL rose from 59.2 million to 119.3 million; validators increased 56% to 363; the protocol generated $2.33 million in revenue, while gross tips processed totaled $19.85 million; JitoSOL’s total value locked remained near $1 billion in SOL terms.
• Stable, the USDT-native blockchain, launched StableEarn — a treasury management product that routes USDT deposits into institutional-grade yield through a Morpho (MORPHO) vault backed by Theo's real-world asset suite.

Chart of the Week

Ethereum staking queue reached a high of approximately 3.7 million ETH waiting to be staked, while the exit queue has dropped to lower than 100 ETH for seven consecutive days. This creates a disparity, where staking demand significantly exceeds exit demand, indicating a massive net inflow of validators into the network. 

The near-total absence of withdrawal pressure suggests existing validators and institutional stakers have high confidence in Ethereum's long-term viability.

News Highlights

• NEAR Protocol activated confidential payments on its Intents platform. This new feature allows users to execute private cross-chain transactions, specifically enabling the sending of NEAR tokens and the receipt of ETH without exposing transaction details on the blockchain.
• Near Protocol is launching a dynamic resharding upgrade in June, which will allow the blockchain to automatically add new shards (parallel processing partitions) as network demand increases, eliminating the need for manual validator coordination. This automation is designed to improve scalability, particularly for an emerging AI-led on-chain economy, where autonomous agents handle high volumes of transactions.
• Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the network's ongoing developments in privacy-focused layers, emphasizing that robust user privacy solutions are an essential prerequisite for achieving widespread blockchain adoption. 
• Polkadot governance approved Referendum 1890 to enforce a strict 10,000 DOT minimum self-stake requirement for active network validators, shifting economic slashing risks completely away from nominators and onto infrastructure operators. This foundational reform paves the way for upcoming upgrades that completely eliminate slashing fears for everyday retail stakers and compress token unbonding wait times from 28 days down to 24 to 48 hours, significantly enhancing network liquidity and participation incentives.
• Remittance company MoneyGram expanded its blockchain infrastructure footprint by joining the Layer-1 network Tempo as an Anchor Remittance Validator, collaborating with Stripe to settle real-world funds on-chain. 
• Map Protocol suffered a critical security exploit on its Butter Network cross-chain bridge, resulting in the unauthorized minting of approximately one quadrillion MAPO tokens. This malicious act caused the token's value to plummet 96%  within hours, dropping from roughly $0.003 to $0.0001.
• European stablecoin issuer StablR suspended minting and redemption operations for its USDR and EURR tokens after a cyberattack led to the unauthorized issuance of $13.5 million in uncollateralized supply. The exploit, executed via a single compromised key inside a weak 1-of-3 multi-signature configuration, caused severe market depegging and forced a reserve-backing shortfall that tests the real-time enforcement and recovery frameworks of the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations.
• An exploit targeting the third-party module SquidRouterModule resulted in the theft of approximately $3.2 million from 86 Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) multi-signature wallets across the Ethereum and Base networks over two hours. Cross-chain protocol Squid confirmed the incident is unrelated to its core protocol; all Squid users and integrators remain unaffected.

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