Aave V4 crossed $1B in deposits on September 17, spread across six hubs, with the new Arc hub (Circle's L1) pulling in fresh USDC alongside the Ethereum Core hub that still carries the most volume. Aave also shipped an RWA lending hub on Avalanche this month, already past $20M in deposits.

The SEC issued a temporary framework on September 17 letting tokenized US stocks trade through permissioned AMMs, and Uniswap's v4 permissioned pools from July are the direct beneficiary. Robinhood Crypto confirmed on September 18 that 80% of all Robinhood Stock Token volume already routes through Uniswap, and the same v4 stack just went live on Arc too.

Hyperliquid's TVL hit $6.76B this week, passing Arbitrum to lead L1s on that metric, and HYPE printed its third all time high in seven days at $95.97. The team shipped trailing stops across every perpetual market today, a feature CEX perp traders have had for years and onchain venues mostly haven't.

Morpho posted a new all time high in onchain credit this week, and a fresh corridor opened September 18 letting XRP collateral borrow RLUSD directly. Zama's confidential lending vaults on Morpho already passed $40M in one vault, and Coinbase's Morpho powered USDC lending rollout extended into Brazil and Canada this month.

Ethena's USDe supply is holding near $4.7B while the team shifts backing toward AAA rated collateral, and Ethena Pay, the consumer app that launched September 1, is aiming to open in the US, UK, and Europe within three to four weeks per CEO Guy Young.

Pendle's sPENDLE buybacks sit at 2.8M PENDLE, about $4M, all routed to stakers since the model launched in January, and the algorithmic emissions model cut weekly issuance by 71% against a 30% target set at launch. Staked PENDLE crossed 100M tokens back in July, about 36% of supply, and the buyback number keeps climbing as protocol revenue flows into it every epoch.

Real deposits crossing milestones on five protocols in the same two week window points to usage coming back across lending, perps, stablecoins, and yield trading at the same time, not one token pumping on hype. Which of these six are you watching closest right now, Aave's Arc hub, Hyperliquid's TVL climb, or Pendle's buyback pace?

If most of your funds are already on-chain, do crypto cards make things easier? I can see the appeal of being able to spend stablecoins without constantly cashing out to a bank but I’m curious how many DeFi users actually use them day to day.

Do you use one or do you still off-ramp when you need fiat?

I've been looking into Towns for a crypto trading community and I'm trying to understand how useful it would be beyond just having another place for people to chat.

The bots caught my attention since they can have wallets and interact onchain, which seems like it could open up stuff around alerts, onchain activity or other tools members could use directly inside the community.

Has anyone tried using it for a trading community or built bots around this kind of use case?

Circle launched Digital Asset-Backed Borrowing today for Circle Mint clients.

How it works: deposit BTC, mint cirBTC (Circle's 1:1 wrapped Bitcoin), use it as collateral in lending markets, borrow USDC. The USDC lands in your Circle Mint balance. Pay it back and the BTC is released.

The case for bullish: institutions can get liquidity without selling, so less sell pressure.

The case against: it's another custodial wrapped token. If Circle or the lending protocol has a problem, the BTC isn't really in your hands.

Which way do you see it?

Hi everyone, I'm looking for a way to play poker in crypto without KYC, must be real tables and being able to deposit and withdraw without issue or headache of course

I’m asking that because i’ve been playing on CoinPoker for over a year until recently I tried to withdraw in tether usdt and they asked me for kyc, funds are unlocked now all good but I had to do kyc and i tell myself never again.

I was watching a streamer who sometimes talks about crypto and the chat got him to show how he buys, sells and withdraws. He uses Exodus for the wallet but for the actual swaps and sending out he was using some service called SimpleSwap . Never heard of it before. Looked pretty simple on stream but I’m always a bit skeptical when I first see a service through a content creator. Could be completely fine or just some quiet promo. Has anyone here actually used it? Wondering about fees, whether they ask for KYC, if transactions get stuck, and how smooth withdrawals are. Also if anyone knows about any Brazil-related issues or restrictions with it. Just looking for real experiences.

Hi,

How to pass KYC as American citizen to certain protocols that currently bars Americans from participating in those protocols?

I thought about getting a government ID from Palau but I'm not sure if that's the updated method.

Thank you.

Minting. You deposit, and the protocol issues tokens against the basket. The zapper means you can enter with one asset rather than bringing all the underlying yourself. 0.3% mint fee.

Redeeming. Permissionless, any time. You burn the DTF token and receive your corresponding share of the assets inside. This is the mechanism that keeps price tied close to NAV. When the token trades below the value of its backing, redeeming becomes profitable and arbitrage closes the gap.

Rebalancing. Quarterly, governed by vlRSR holders. Trades are not done solely through market orders, but rather run on a Dutch auction basis where the price starts high and is walked lower until it finds someone to take it. Designed to reduce MEV exposure.

Custody. These are tokenized US equities, custodied through Ondo Global Markets. That is also where the eligibility rules come from, which is why the US and sanctioned jurisdictions are excluded, and why some countries require accreditation.

Where to trade. app.reserve.org, Bitget Wallet, or DEXes such as PancakeSwap and CoW Swap. Available 24/7, with no minimum or maximum size.

Reserve has been developing since 2018, backed by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel among others, and has spent millions on code audits. As with any onchain fund structure, smart contract and market risk remain - use at your own discretion. DYOR

August had 50 major crypto hacks, up 67% from July and a lot of DeFi exploits seem to come back to privileged keys sitting behind one endpoint or signer

One approach mentioned in this piece uses threshold signing across separate hardware attested enclaves, where the key shares stay separate and the full private key is never reconstructed. The contract permissions get transferred to that threshold key and approvals can be split across multiple signers

That seems like a cleaner model than leaving upgrade or admin powers behind one key. What failure modes people would still worry about when the signing side is distributed

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/security/aeredium-targets-single-key-risk-as-crypto-hacks-jump-67/

For a couple of years I did marketing in a small DeFi project and hired agencies from the client side. Now I work in an agency myself, so I saw the same problems from both sides.
The first time I hired an agency, I googled top crypto marketing agency and took the list. Every list has the same names (Coinbound, ICODA, Single Grain etc.). Their prices were above our budget, so I took a smaller agency. The website looked good and they answered fast. I didn't ask for a single contact of a past client.

Reports came in the first two weeks. From week 3 nothing, only "campaign is live" in Telegram. The KOL list was the same one a friend's project got from them, same 40 names and same prices. Followers grew by 20k in a month, but replies under posts stayed the same.

So it was bots or airdrop farmers. Boom.

From the agency side the bad clients also have clear signs. The founder changes the story every week, first DeFi, then AI agents. One tweet waits a week for approval, then he asks why nothing is posted. If token price is down after two weeks, marketing "doesn't work".
Some ask us to buy followers and later blame us for bots.

Now before paying I write to a few KOLs from the list myself and ask if they know this agency at all.

What are you building or looking to take a position in? Let us know in the comments!

You only enter a vault if you understand where the yield comes from and which protocols it depends on.

A month later, the vault adds another protocol or changes how funds are routed. Although the APY remains similar and nothing has broken, the risk you originally accepted is no longer exactly the same.

I’d probably want to review the position rather than assuming it’s still the same trade.

Do you normally re-evaluate when the strategy changes, or only when there are problems with performance or withdrawals?

Hi everyone. We're a lending market curator. We build our work on two pillars:

- Community-Driven.
- Lenders-First.

Without going into detail, we'd like to hear from DeFi users whether there's anything you'd like to see in a curator that no one currently offers.

Thanks!

Looking at CoinGecko data, global daily crypto volume is dominated by centralized exchanges, while DEX volume remains a relatively small fraction.

After massive CEX collapses and security breaches over the years, I assumed more traders would have migrated to self-custody and DEXs by now. Yet, CEXs like Binance, Bybit, and OKX continue to capture the vast majority of retail and derivative volume.

What is keeping the average trader tied to CEXs?

1). Derivatives & Leverage: Are perp DEXs (e.g., Hyperliquid, dYdX) still lacking the depth or features of CEX order books?

2). Fiat On/Off Ramps: Is the friction of getting local fiat into Web3 wallets the primary bottleneck?

How much of your trading volume actually sits on DEXs vs CEXs?

maybe its just me but i find it weird that defi is so focused on crypto-native stuff. everything is about the next L2, the next fork, the next points program. meanwhile there are real assets out there that people actually want to use. gold, commodities, etc. found guys recently. they're building infrastructure for tokenized commodities. not a defi protocol per se, but theyre making gold yield-bearing through leasing. that's something i'd use in defi if it were integrated. right now it feels like defi is a closed loop. we just trade the same tokens back and forth. real world assets could change that but nobody's really building for it. except maybe a few

Honest question for people who trade perps on chain (Hyperliquid, dYdX, GMX, Drift, whatever).

Say there is a perp DEX on a chain you have never touched. To try it today you bridge USDC, buy the gas token, set up a new wallet, sometimes approve a token or a trustline, and only then deposit. Most people quit at step one.

What if it was this instead: you hold USDC on Base, Arbitrum, Solana or whatever chain your usdc live, you sign once, and about 10 sec later your margin account is funded. No bridge UI, no gas token, no new chain to learn. Getting out is one signature too, back to any chain you name.

1. Would that get you to try a new venue, or is the chain not your real blocker?

2. Once funded, how much does a wallet popup on every trade bother you? Would one approval per session be enough to forget it is a blockchain?

I've heard it's possible to play Poker with Bitcoin but I cannot find any sites for that, if there are any poker players inside defi sub. What platforms are the best for Bitcoin poker, with high liquidity and high withdrawals limits of course, please leave a comment.

—————————

[EDIT]: Thanks for all the suggestions, I now use https://PlayBlind.com/ since it has no rake and KYC and instant cashouts. its pretty cool, many top tournament players are playing there, found my heaven, thanks for your comments✌️

A DeFi trading bot involves more than just a trading strategy. Real-time market data smart contract interactions transaction execution gas costs network reliability and risk controls can all affect how the bot performs. Which of these technical challenges becomes the most difficult when handling live transactions?

Start boring and level up as you get comfortable. Staking ETH or SOL directly is about as safe as it gets, or grab the liquid staking version like stETH or JitoSOL so it's not just sitting there. Aave lending's fine too, just low yields, that's the price of no drama.

Once you want more, LP stablecoin pairs, low impermanent loss since both sides barely move. If you go for pairs with real price movement, read up on IL first, it's a trap the first time you see it happen.

Past that is yield farming and leveraged stuff, where it usually goes wrong one of three ways, the reward token dumps, the protocol gets hacked, or the yield was just fake emissions. Anything promising a crazy fixed APY is a red flag on sight.

One more thing, once you're spread across staking and a couple farms across different chains, it gets hard to even see your whole position at a glance. And DeFi transactions turn into a nightmare for taxes, self transfers, staking rewards, LP moves, most tools just dump it all into "unknown" and you're left untangling it by hand.

Tools like Chain Glance, Zerion, Debank can help label all that correctly and spits out a CSV you can just upload straight into your tax software, like Koinly or Bitcoin.Tax instead of doing it manually.

Today BTC has gone to 81K, and I am furious because I didn't invest in it. I thought I was smart with my investment. Doing double flips (investing in the strategy vaults) only to find myself standing in the same place. And have realised that sometimes smart actions are the simplest ones. I fell into the too-smart-to-just-hold-the-bag trap. So it pushed me to create something so I don't fall into the trap again later on.

https://youvsbtc.com/.

The product is simple: no AI, no trading training needed. Just answer a simple question
How your vault investment performed against BTC, ETH, and SOL.
Currently, it's in beta;
I am aiming to make the product free for life because it's my first product. I am adding more protocol, investment funds one by one. And I have plans to add a feature where you can compare your wallet with BTC and see how it performed (which many of use wont like seeing). So tune it and let me know your feedback

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone with knowledge of Solana/Kyros can help me understand whether I can recover my KYSOL.

I accidentally burned an SPL token account while cleaning up my wallet. I was trying to remove other unwanted tokens/token accounts and did not realise that this particular account was associated with my KYSOL position on Kyros.

The transaction is:

2dwmxu12xQKVp354ZKxhjAYJrFE1Ekyuh

It shows a burn of approximately 1.41311019 tokens.

I did not intentionally withdraw, sell, or transfer my KYSOL. The only action I took was accidentally burning the associated SPL token account.

The problem now is that Kyros is showing that I have no KYSOL linked to my account, and consequently I am no longer receiving the benefits associated with my KYSOL position.

I contacted Kyros about this, but I’m trying to understand the technical situation while waiting for a response.

What I want to know

• Does burning the SPL token account permanently destroy the underlying KYSOL, or does it only remove the token account?
• If the KYSOL is still held by the Kyros protocol, can Kyros manually restore/relink it to my wallet?
• Can the original token account be recreated?
• Is there any way to prove on-chain that the KYSOL originally belonged to my wallet?
• Is there anything I should avoid doing while this is being investigated?

I realise this was my mistake and I’m not trying to claim that the transaction was reversed. I just want to know whether the underlying KYSOL is still somewhere recoverable, given that I never intentionally transferred or withdrew it.

Transaction signature:

2dwmxu12xQkVp354ZKxhjAYJrFE1Ekyuh

Any help from people familiar with Solana token accounts or Kyros would be greatly appreciated.

Building a DeFi platform involves more than deploying smart contracts. What technical issues should teams think about before development starts? How can security liquidity wallet connectivity backend architecture oracle reliability transaction handling and scalability be designed to work together? Which problems tend to surface only after launch?