finance

Liquid Capital founder Jack Yi stated on the X platform: "In the past, the wave of crypto VC and project disappearances had a core reason, which is that the financing funds were mostly consumed on: maintaining teams to develop useless web3 products. The biggest misconception is benchmarking against web2 products. Essentially, web3 is a financial industry and does not need to replicate web2 products. The most successful companies in the past crypto industry have all been financial products, from stablecoins and exchanges to successful companies in payments.Now that the AI era has arrived, first, there is no need for large financing to recruit teams, and second, AI + finance presents new opportunities. We believe that excellent founders with a few elites can achieve top-tier companies, which is currently the biggest opportunity in primary investment."

ChainCatcher reported live that Franklin Bi, partner at Pantera Capital, Mykolas Majauskas, senior policy director at Bybit, and Zeng Yuchao, managing director at Futu Group, jointly attended the HK Web3 Feastival roundtable to share "From the Ground Up to the Entry Point: The Path of Crypto Assets to Mainstream Finance."Zeng Yuchao introduced that Futu is the largest retail brokerage in Hong Kong, with a market share of over 50%. In January this year, it obtained the VATP license, and last month removed all additional conditions to achieve full integration of securities brokerage and crypto trading. Last year, Futu collaborated with Huaxia Fund to issue a tokenized money market fund, allowing T+0 same-day subscriptions and redemptions. In terms of AI, Futu has launched the Agent skill feature, enabling users to set strategies through natural language and execute trades automatically. He believes that in the future, there will be a transformation from graphical interfaces to AI interfaces.Mykolas Majauskas pointed out that companies currently complaining about regulation will miss this honeymoon period in the future, as larger-scale regulation is on the way. He analyzed global regulatory differences: Europe leads with MiCA, the U.S. supports private issuance, China supports government digital currency, and Hong Kong serves as a tokenization gateway. He warned that many native crypto companies claim to disrupt traditional finance but are actually being acquired by traditional institutions. He believes the fundamental change in AI is at the front end: users only need to express their intentions, and AI autonomously decides to execute strategies. Bybit is building a one-stop financial platform that integrates IBAN, cards, payments, and investments. He believes many traditional wealth management companies will be eliminated because they have historically made you feel wealthy rather than truly helping you accumulate wealth.Franklin Bi stated that blockchain is the perfect technology for building financial systems for AI Agents. When Agents choose between traditional accounts and stablecoins, they are opting for stablecoins, marking the beginning of an exponential trend.

Curve Finance announced on platform X that due to the LayerZero infrastructure being attacked in the rsETH hacking incident, it has decided to suspend Curve's LayerZero infrastructure as a precautionary measure until further understanding of the root cause of the incident. This action will affect:CRV bridging from the following chains: BNB, Sonic, Avalanche, Fantom, Etherlink, Kava (other chains will still use native bridging);The fast bridging of crvUSD (slow bridging on L2 will still be available for normal use).

According to RHEA Finance's official disclosure, the NEAR ecosystem lending protocol RHEA Finance (formerly known as Burrow Finance) experienced a margin trading feature hack, resulting in a loss of approximately $18.4 million.The attacker began laying the groundwork several days prior by creating multiple fake token pools on Ref Finance and injecting liquidity, constructing a malicious exchange route that exploited a vulnerability in the protocol's slippage protection mechanism—this mechanism did not account for the scenario where intermediate tokens were reused when calculating the minimum output of multi-step exchanges—leading to the borrowed debt tokens being directed into fake token pools controlled by the attacker, triggering a large-scale forced liquidation that ultimately drained the protocol's reserve pool. During the attack, the attacker deleted a total of 55 intermediate accounts to cover their tracks. Currently, the attacker has returned approximately 3.359 million USDC and 1.564 million NEAR to the RHEA lending contract, while another 4.34 million USDT has been frozen (of which Tether froze 3.291 million and NEAR Intents froze 1.053 million). The protocol contract has been suspended, and the team is collaborating with centralized exchanges for joint tracking and has notified relevant law enforcement agencies.

Rhea Finance released an attack review report, confirming that the actual loss from this vulnerability is approximately $18.4 million, significantly up from the initial estimate of about $7.6 million. The attacker constructed complex trading paths, manipulated liquidity using fake token pools, and directed borrowed assets into pools under their control, while only returning a minimal amount of assets, causing a large number of margin positions to quickly become under-collateralized and trigger liquidation, ultimately depleting the protocol's reserve funds.Currently, approximately $11.2 million in funds have been recovered or frozen, including some USDC and NEAR assets returned by the attacker, as well as about $4.34 million in USDT that has been frozen (with assistance from Tether).

French Finance Minister Roland Lescure stated that Europe needs more euro-denominated stablecoins and encouraged EU banks to explore tokenized deposits, a statement seen as a potential shift in the position of the French government and central bank.Lescure publicly supports the Qivalis alliance, composed of 12 European banks including BBVA, ING, UniCredit, and BNP Paribas, which plans to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin in the second half of 2026 to address the dominance of the dollar in the digital payments space. He pointed out that the current scale of euro stablecoins is far lower than that of dollar stablecoins, which is "unsatisfactory," and emphasized that promoting relevant developments is "exactly what we need." In contrast, former Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire had a strong opposition to privately issued stablecoins, believing they threaten monetary sovereignty; recently, French central bank governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau also warned that stablecoins and tokenized currencies could pose risks of "monetary privatization." Analysts believe that France's latest statement may signal a more pragmatic approach in Europe regarding stablecoin and digital currency policies, attempting to seek a balance between regulation and innovation.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino posted on X that Tether has frozen 3.29 million USDT in the hacker address of Rhea Finance.Paolo Ardoino specifically mentioned, "Tether takes this matter seriously," seemingly implying that Circle has not restricted the actions of hackers using USDC to transfer stolen funds in recent incidents such as Drift.

According to CertiK monitoring, the DeFi protocol Rhea Finance was attacked, with attackers extracting at least $7.6 million in total.The attackers misled the oracle and validation layer to complete the attack by creating fake token contracts and injecting liquidity into newly created funding pools.

According to official news, the digital asset investment platform Grayscale has recently updated its list of candidate assets, covering six major cryptocurrency sectors, with new candidate assets particularly concentrated in the AI and finance categories.The AI sector has the most new candidate assets, including a total of 9 projects: Fabric Protocol, Flock, Grass, Kaito, Kite AI, Nous Research, Poseidon, Venice, and Virtuals Protocol. These are considered alongside Bittensor, Livepeer, Near, Render, and Story, reflecting institutional interest in the AI + cryptocurrency sector.In the finance sector, 7 DeFi projects have entered the candidate list: Ethena, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, Kamino Finance, Maple Finance, Morpho, and Pendle, complementing existing products such as Aave, Aerodrome, Curve, Ondo, and Uniswap.In the smart contract platform sector, 6 new projects have been added: Celo, Mantle, MegaETH, Monad, Toncoin, and Tron, with Canton Network also included. The utility tools sector has added DoubleZero, Geodnet, Helium, Jito, LayerZero, and Wormhole.Currently, Grayscale's existing product suite covers mainstream assets such as BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, AVAX, BNB, and ADA. The candidate list does not guarantee that related products will be launched, and Grayscale has stated that it will update the list within 15 days after the end of each quarter.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin (@EmberCN), approximately 116 million ONDO (worth about $30.21 million) have been gradually transferred from the Ondo Finance multi-signature wallet to Coinbase over the past month and a half.The transfer pattern shows a clear trend: approximately 20 million ONDO are transferred from the multi-signature wallet to another multi-signature address almost every week, and then within a few days, the funds are split into multiple transactions and gradually transferred to Coinbase.

In response to the tweet "Helius CEO announces the next round of the crypto cycle is coming," Solana co-founder Toly replied that cheaper, faster, and lower-risk financial methods will ultimately prevail over all alternatives. Immutable, formally verified software. The admin key contains on-chain immutable policies, such as time locks. All truly interesting things in the financial sector, like criminals, involve extremely broad aspects. Therefore, anything complex cannot be separated from admin privileges.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stated in its latest report that Tokenized Finance is not a simple upgrade of traditional finance, but rather a structural transformation. It replaces intermediaries with smart contracts and shared ledgers, restructuring the architecture of global markets. Currently, the scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has reached $27.5 billion, with tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds exceeding $12 billion.The IMF pointed out that while tokenization can achieve near-instant settlement and 24/7 trading, its speed, automation, and programmability may amplify systemic risks, rapidly spreading liquidity crises under market pressure, lacking the buffering effect of traditional settlement delays.

According to Arkham data, at 02:26, 163.93 BTC (worth approximately 10.93 million USD) was transferred from Lombard Finance to multiple anonymous addresses.

The Web3 asset data platform RootData issued a daily transparency alert on Twitter (X), noting the lack of information regarding teams, key calendar events, token data, and other details for projects such as Fluid, SideShift.ai, Blackhole, Pharaoh, and Koi Finance. It calls on project teams to submit/update their information on RootData to improve their transparency scores. Additionally, RootData stated that it will continue to monitor and expose "black box" projects that lack core information.It is reported that the RootData transparency score is used to measure the integrity and timeliness of projects, aiming to reflect the information disclosure situation of projects and urging project teams to immediately claim their projects. The transparency score is divided into 5 levels from A to F, with lower scores indicating more incomplete information disclosure and higher risks of wrongdoing, requiring investors to be highly vigilant.

According to market news, Spain's CaixaBank has obtained authorization as a Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) under the EU MiCA regulation, becoming the sixth licensed bank in the country to offer customers services for the custody, buying, and transferring of crypto assets.The six authorized institutions in order are BBVA, Openbank (under the Santander Group), Cecabank, Renta 4 Banco, Kutxabank, and CaixaBank. Among them, BBVA was the first to be approved in 2025 and officially launched Bitcoin and Ethereum buying and custody services in July of the same year. The MiCA authorization serves as a "regulatory passport" across the EU, allowing licensed institutions to operate legally without having to apply country by country. The transition period in Spain will end on June 30, 2026, at which point unauthorized institutions will not be allowed to provide crypto asset services.