ENA trading at ~5.6 FDV/Fees is telling us the market is not pricing in growth yet.

That is near cycle lows, even as Ethena expands USDe backing into institutional lending, RWAs, and new basis trades.

DeFi yields are compressing. The main reason – less demand for leverage.

Back in 2024, ETF flows and election narratives pushed traders to borrow aggressively, driving Aave USDC rates above 10% and putting DeFi well above the Fed.

Now supply has doubled, but demand is more distributed and less aggressive, so rates normalized back toward TradFi. DeFi is now a live price of leverage demand, and that demand is simply not there.

Hyperliquid is now matching Binance on execution quality, from $10K to $1M trades with ~9–10 bps slippage on BTC.

That is full parity with the deepest perp market in the world, but fully on-chain. While other DEXs break down at size, Hyperliquid stays flat, especially on pairs like SOL where the gap becomes obvious above $100K.

DEX perps pushing ~37% of CEX futures volume is not just a new high, it marks a structural shift in where leverage lives.

What used to be an alternative is now competing directly with centralized venues on execution, liquidity, and scale. The interesting part is that this is happening while spot DEX share sits closer to ~15%. The derivatives are the real battleground, and on-chain is winning where capital efficiency matters most.

Tokenized stocks crossed $1B market cap.

Most of that expansion is recent, with Ondo and xStocks leading, which shows the demand is shifting from stable yield into equity exposure on-chain.

Monad hit 200 validators with 14B MON staked across the network within Backpack.

Backpack alone controls a massive share, with a steep drop-off across the rest, so decentralization is growing, but still uneven. If Monad can scale validator count without degrading performance, it solves the core tradeoff most high-throughput chains struggle with. If that holds in production, this is how you get both speed and credible decentralization, not one at the expense of the other.

Morpho borrowers paying ~$170M in interest over the past year implies roughly $17M in protocol revenue at a 10% take rate, against a ~$1.7B valuation.

That puts it at a very different multiple than Aave, which is doing ~$140M in revenue on a similar ~$1.5B valuation.

Morpho is pricing in its peer-to-peer lending model and capital efficiency gains, while Aave is already monetizing at scale. The question for the market is whether Morpho can convert usage into revenue fast enough to justify that premium.

Hyperliquid hitting a 6.9% OI share vs CEXs is a new high and a clear continuation of the same trend.

We last saw this level in August 2025, but the difference now is structural. Liquidity is deeper, execution is tighter, and traders are more comfortable holding risk on-chain.

New research is already packed for you ↓

General
➖ Crypto.com: Research Roundup Newsletter (April 2026)
➖ Crypto.com: Crypto Card Consumer Spending Insights 2025
➖ Binance: Navigating Crypto: Industry Map
➖ Galaxy: Weekly Top Stories - 04/10/26
➖ Galaxy: Beyond the Flywheel: How DATs Can Reinvent Themselves

Market
➖ CoinShares: Market update | April 10th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Equities update | April 13th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Digital Asset Fund Flows | April 13th, 2026
➖ Crypto.com: Market Update (March 2026)
➖ CoinGecko: Spot CEX Report 2026
➖ Glassnode: BTC Market Pulse: Week 16

DeFi
➖ DL Research: The SlowFi Thesis: Why Bitcoin’s friction could power the next DeFi summer
➖ Binance: The Convergence of DeFi, TradFi and CeFi

Blockchains & networks
➖ 4pillars: Monthly EIP - Mar 2026 (ft. Ethereum’s Unforkable Identity)

There's been a regime shift in prediction markets.

Polymarket dominated for most of 2024, but now we're seeing Kalshi steadily gaining market share. What's most notable about this is Opinion's sudden growth spurt, which seems to have come out of nowhere.

ETH spot ETFs finally printing inflows again after five straight months of outflows, with +$118M in April breaking a $2.8B bleed.

It is not a massive number, but the shift in direction still matters. With $11.68B cumulative inflows and nearly $13B in assets, the base is already there. Institutional demand paused, and now it is starting to come back.

AAVE is down ~11.5% over the past month, but DACM keeps accumulating into weakness instead of de-risking.

They pulled another 2.39K AAVE off Binance, bringing the position to ~13.7K with zero sells across both wallets.

I see the deliberate positioning. When a player keeps moving assets off exchange during drawdowns, it usually signals conviction and a longer time horizon.

RWAs crossed $20B outstanding, but only ~9% actually gets used inside DeFi.

Most pools sit underutilized, with tight risk parameters and thin liquidity keeping borrowing activity low. The mismatch is structural. DeFi rails were built around assets like ETH and BTC, where pricing, liquidation, and liquidity are continuous. RWAs come with slower settlement, offchain dependencies, and legal constraints that do not fit that model cleanly.

Until those frictions get abstracted away, RWAs will keep growing on paper faster than they get used onchain.

If you live in the EU and have ever tried to bridge between crypto <> fiat, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

You wire money to an exchange via SEPA, wait a few days to finalize the transaction, buy your tokens, and then withdraw them to your own wallet. Fees at every step, multiple days before you actually hold anything. The same goes for offramping, often even worse & longer.

WeChangeApp is here to make fiat <> crypto bridging as seamless as possible. You KYC once, pick what you want to buy, and once your wire clears, the crypto goes straight to your wallet in minutes.

It's fully noncustodial, so no platform is sitting on your funds in between.

It's fully regulated in the EU with an MiCA license. The infrastructure itself runs on Bridge for payment rails and Fireblocks for security.

If you're in the EU and the current system annoys you, worth a look.

Lighter is moving beyond being a venue and opening up its rails to other builders.

The Partner Attribution program already has a real use case with Wallet in Telegram plugging into its backend for perps. Liquidity is being subsidized aggressively. $250K a week going to market makers on RWA books shows where they want depth, especially in commodities and equity perps.

What matters now is distribution. If more apps route flow through Lighter, it starts looking like shared infrastructure rather than a standalone exchange.

Arbitrum Timeboost has pulled in over $6M in fees, so the mechanism is clearly getting used. It is doing its job on congestion and MEV, but the demand side is still narrow.

Most of the auction wins come from just four entities. That points to a market where speed and infra still matter more than open participation.

More players will show up once the edge compresses. Right now it still pays to be early and well-equipped.

Tokenized equities on Solana jumped from ~$2.5M to $22M+ daily since January, with ~$630M in March.

That pace usually shows a new flow finding a home. What stands out is where this activity lands. Solana keeps absorbing anything that needs speed and tight execution, from memes to perps and now equities.

Feels like traders are not switching venues for each category anymore. They are staying in one place and trading everything there.

Ondo picking up momentum on BNB Chain is showing up directly in the numbers.

Tokenized equities there are up close to 10x YTD, and CRCLon already crossed $130M, which is meaningful for a single name on a newer venue. BNB Chain tends to attract more retail flow and faster rotation, so equities there behave closer to tradable assets than long-term allocations.

Looks like tokenized stocks are starting to fragment by user base. Ethereum holds deeper liquidity, Solana captures flow, and BNB Chain is carving out a more trading-heavy niche.

PANW operating income up 59% YoY and the trend is still pushing higher.

That kind of growth at this scale usually means pricing power is holding and demand isn’t slowing. Cybersecurity keeps behaving like a non-cyclical spend. Companies cut elsewhere, but not here.

Grvt going from negligible share to ~3.1% of perp DEX OI with a 26x jump while the market itself only did 4x stands out.

That kind of divergence usually means one thing: they found a pocket of demand others were not serving well. Either UX, liquidity routing, or a specific trader segment clicked.

Still early. 3% share is meaningful growth, but the real signal is whether they can hold it once competitors react and liquidity spreads back out.

BTC funding just pushed to its most negative levels since 2023.

That usually means positioning is heavily skewed short and traders are paying to stay there.

In past cycles, extremes like this lined up with local lows. Not every time, but often enough to watch closely.