2026 so far?

Gold is leading. Risk assets are bleeding.

x402 is turning into real flow infra.

120M+ total txs now – Base still leads overall (~70M), but Solana is catching fire on recent momentum and already flipped weekly volume (5.8M vs 5.3M).

The winner won’t be who got there first, but who keeps the flow. And right now, that race is still open.

I've been looking into 42.space since before their public launch, and the vision behind it is genuinely impressive.

Let me try to explain it simply.

Think of 42 as a launchpad for future events.
Each possible outcome becomes a tradable token with a live price, and when the event resolves, the market settles fairly according to predefined rules.

The easiest way to understand it is through a comparison:

• Classic token launchpads → Price goes up until it doesn't, and capital gets trapped in dead pools. FUN but not FAIR.

• Prediction markets → You win by betting right, but every position is capped at $1. FAIR but not FUN.

• 42 → Merges both into a single market structure through a new asset class: Event Futures. Every event spawns Outcome Tokens on a bonding curve.

Their markets trade continuously before resolution and, unlike $1/$0 prediction markets, settlement isn’t capped: payouts are dynamic that scale with participation, and markets still resolve objectively, on the truth.

It's both FUN and FAIR.

The design is ultra sexy, and the trading experience is super smooth.

It went public last week, along with a points program that rewards not only your volume (mint-redeem) but also post-resolution, both your wins and losses. It's a fundamentally new approach to trading future events that’s definitely worth trying out.

If you want to see how it works firsthand, you can visit 42.space and enter code MUUR.

Tokenized stocks cracked the $1B mark.

Ondo is setting the pace with $605M, while xStocks is carving out its own lane at $232M+.

Feels like we’re watching equities slowly migrate on-chain for access and composability. If this keeps compounding, tokenized stocks start becoming the bridge between TradFi capital and DeFi rails.

Solana’s stablecoin stack is getting less monopolistic.

USDC + USDT used to control ~96% of supply — now it’s down to ~80%. That’s fragmentation creeping in, meaning new issuers and yield-driven stables are finding real traction on-chain.

New March insights are now on your desk ↓

General
➖ CoinGecko: CEX & DEX Trading Activity Report 2026
➖ Galaxy: Weekly Top Stories - 02/27/26

Market
➖ CoinShares: Investing in blockchain equities: regulated exposure to the crypto economy
➖ CoinShares: The question this cycle finally answers
➖ CoinShares: Market update - February 27th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Digital asset fund flows | March 2nd, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Equities update | March 3rd 2026
➖ Binance: Weekly: Assessing Market Recovery Amid Tech and Sentiment Trends
➖ The Defiant: Crypto Outflows from Iranian Exchanges Surge Amid US-Israeli Airstrikes
➖ Glassnode: BTC Market Pulse: Week 10
➖ Glassnode: Introducing: Strategy Watch

DeFi
➖ DL Research: Kyan: The end of wasted capital

Tokens & currencies
➖ CoinShares: Professional Bitcoin ownership in the first leg of the bear, Q4 2025
➖ Bitwise: Bitcoin’s Role in a Traditional Portfolio

Ether.fi staking is up ~34% YoY while Lido slipped ~8%.

Looping vaults on weETH + card rails using it as collateral turned the asset from passive stake into working capital.

When staking becomes usable, not just locked, flow follows.

Arbitrum became the most crowded home for RWAs on-chain.

Not the biggest in dollar value (that’s still ETH) but the highest asset count. Arbitrum is becoming the sandbox where tokenized products actually get built and deployed.

If RWA = the next liquidity layer, then distribution > size. And Arbitrum is optimizing for breadth before depth – the same way DeFi did in its early breakout phase.

DeFi TVL has been stuck around ~$94B for a while, basically sideways.

But Hyperliquid L1 is quietly moving against the tide, adding ~10% TVL in the last 30 days. In a flat market, relative growth like that usually means liquidity is rotating, not expanding.

When capital starts concentrating like this, it often points to where the next trading gravity is forming.

Euro M2 sits around ~$15.5T.

Euro stablecoins crossed ~$1B — that’s ~0.006% penetration. Basically untouched ground.

BMNR and Strategy are both deep underwater right now, sitting on ~$8.4B and ~$7.5B in unrealized losses.

That’s the flip side of the DAT meta: when treasury-as-trade works, it turbocharges upside… but when macro turns, it amplifies drawdown just as fast.

DeFi TVL has been stuck around ~$94B for a while, basically sideways.

But Hyperliquid L1 is quietly moving against the tide, adding ~10% TVL in the last 30 days. In a flat market, relative growth like that usually means liquidity is rotating, not expanding.

When capital starts concentrating like this, it often points to where the next trading gravity is forming.

About 38% of alts are sitting near their cycle lows right now.

That’s actually worse than the aftermath of the FTX collapse. When that many charts look identical, it’s a full market reset.

Capitulation like this usually wipes the slate clean.

Zama pushed encrypted execution from seconds per tx to 20+ TPS on CPUs, which means confidential computation is finally moving toward real network scale.

Next step: GPU acceleration in 2026, targeting hundreds of TPS per chain, with dedicated FHE hardware on the roadmap after that. At this point the bottleneck is compute.

Sentora is becoming the fastest-growing curator on Morpho.

Its vaults jumped from $15M to $200M+ in a few months, which tells you something important: capital is hunting curated yield, not just raw protocols.

Stripe has already pushed $190M+ in stablecoin volume since Q4 2024, routing flows across Ethereum, Polygon, and Base – each playing its role: liquidity, cheap throughput, and ecosystem distribution.

If the current trajectory holds, $400M+ combined volume by summer 2026 looks very realistic, especially with Stripe leaning deeper into stablecoins and cross-border payments.

Stablecoins cleared ~$61,2T over the last 12 months across 13.8B transfers – that’s a parallel payment rail.

Ethereum still settles the biggest tickets (41% of value), Tron’s share slid to 25%, while Solana and BNB hover around 8-10% each.

But flip from value to activity and the map changes: BNB Chain handles ~40% of all stablecoin tx count. Smaller tickets, higher velocity – that’s real usage.

Ethereum is still the stablecoin balance sheet, while L2s are becoming the distribution pipes.

Over the last year, Ethereum supply climbed from $135B → $184B (+36%), while major L2s expanded even faster, $13.7B → $19.1B (+40%).

Same system, different roles: L1 stores the dollars, L2s move them.

Here’s the truth behind the lobbying war.

Big banks generate ~70–80% of their net interest income from depositor funding – cheap deposits that they recycle into higher-yield assets. Products like Coinbase ONE start breaking that model by giving users yield closer to the underlying rate.

So the push to shape the CLARITY Bill is an attempt to protect the depositor subsidy, because once yield moves on-chain, the banking margin game gets a lot harder.

The “ETH killers” narrative keeps circulating… but the liquidity map says otherwise.

Ethereum still holds ~56.6% of all DeFi TVL, with every other chain fighting over the remaining half. The ecosystem keeps fragmenting, but capital keeps settling back to the same gravity well.

In DeFi, liquidity compounds. And Ethereum is still where the deepest pool sits.

Morpho’s market size jumped +$1B WoW (+20%), and most of it traces back to Katana integrations with OKX and Binance.

Fresh USDT and USDC are bridging in, but here’s the interesting part: the same liquidity gets counted twice. First in the Ethereum bridge vault, then again once it’s deployed on Katana.

The capital flows matter as much as raw deposits. When liquidity starts routing through one infra layer, the numbers (and the narrative) scale fast.