defi

Morpho co-founder and CEO Paul Frambot stated in a post on X that over the past six months, the team has received many opportunities to acquire cryptocurrency companies.He mentioned that Morpho rarely acquires companies for intellectual property or technology. If they want to build a certain capability, they prefer to hire the right talent and develop it end-to-end themselves, following their own engineering, auditing, and formal verification processes. Talent acquisition may be attractive, but the valuation will be purely based on a comparison of the cost of the talent acquired versus hiring an equivalent team.

Nomura Securities' digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital announced a partnership with Keyring Network to serve as the risk governance entity for the institutional lending market, with the first market set to launch on Euler Finance. The parties did not disclose committed capital, fee terms, or launch dates.According to the cooperation framework, Keyring provides infrastructure and tools, including access verification, quantitative risk parameter setting, and clearing framework design; Laser Digital's asset management department contributes governance standards, portfolio structure, and market practices. Both parties pointed out that institutional participation in DeFi lending faces four major obstacles: licensing, vulnerability risks, governance, and settlement. The solution combines zero-knowledge licensing, quantitative risk modeling, network insurance, and Keyring's settlement technology.According to DefiLlama data, Euler has a total value locked of $368.8 million across 17 chains, with outstanding loans of $555.4 million. Laser Digital previously supported ZIGChain's emerging market private credit in August, while Keyring introduced a zero-knowledge identity layer for the DeFi vault on Avalanche in August 2025. Nomura established Laser Digital in 2022, with operational headquarters in Dubai and Switzerland.

The security company Defimon issued an alert stating that a governance takeover attack against YAM Finance has been detected. After self-delegating approximately 504,000 YAM (about 3.3% of the total supply, slightly above the legal voting threshold), the attacker submitted YamGovernorAlpha proposal #45, which is described as empty ("0x"), with the sole action being to call the setPendingAdmin method of the YAM Timelock contract, pointing to the attacker's address.It has been disclosed that if the proposal is voted through and executed, the attacker will become the pendingAdmin, and then can fully control the Timelock through acceptAdmin, which includes management rights over all YAM protocol contracts and the DAO treasury, involving a risk amount of approximately $337,000. As the protocol is currently in a dormant state, Defimon Alerts reminds users holding YAM to vote against the proposal before block height 25897343 (about 34 hours remaining).

According to CoinDesk, the DeFi protection protocol Firelight Protocol announced the completion of $8 million in financing, led by Gumi Cryptos Capital, with participation from Maven 11, Metalayer, Joint Effects, and Tribe Capital.Firelight is incubated by the DeFi infrastructure provider Sentora (managing assets totaling $2.4 billion) and plans to officially launch in September this year.

According to DeFiLlama data, the top three centralized exchanges by net inflow of funds in the past 24 hours are Binance at $113 million, Bitget at $86.83 million, and Bybit at $67.52 million, with a total net inflow exceeding $267 million.

According to GlobeNewsWire, the U.S. publicly traded company DeFi Development Corp. (Nasdaq: DFDV) announced plans to conduct an initial public offering (IPO), issuing up to $20 million in Series C perpetual preferred stock, with net proceeds to be used for working capital, increasing SOL holdings, and investing in other digital assets.

Robinhood Chain recorded a single-day DEX trading volume of $989 million on Friday, setting a historical high. The total value locked (TVL) on the chain reached $708 million, with a nearly 100% month-over-month increase; the supply of stablecoins was approximately $770 million, with a month-over-month increase of 47%.In July, the chain was dominated by the memecoin market after the launch of CASHCAT's spot trading, while in August it shifted towards utility and infrastructure tokens. PONS is one of the leading launchpads on the chain, with its market capitalization increasing from $20 million to over $200 million. Another leading launchpad, LONG (long.xyz), supports tokens paired with tokenized stocks (mainly memecoins), which is a core differentiating advantage of Robinhood Chain.The largest stock-paired memecoin is "AI" (Artificial Inu), paired with tokenized NVDA, with its market capitalization rising from $1.5 million on August 1 to a peak of $135 million on August 30, and its NVDA pool liquidity exceeding $3.3 million. Memecoins paired with tokenized stocks account for about a quarter of the stock-related trading volume on the chain. Other projects include the liquidity layer protocol Delta, the ve(3,3) emission project UP similar to Aerodrome, and the OHM-style bond project NetNet, all of which saw their valuations increase tenfold in August.

According to The Defiant, the meme coin BONER, built around Hims & Hers short positions on the Robinhood Chain, has absorbed over half of the tokenized HIMS stock. As of Monday 17:12 UTC, a total of 58,714 tokenized HIMS have been issued on-chain, of which 31,198 (53%) are locked in the BONER/HIMS liquidity pool, while another 1,424 are spread across eight other meme coin pools, leaving only 20,303 in the HIMS/stablecoin and HIMS/ETH pools for price discovery.Due to the NYSE being closed over the weekend and the lack of real-time stock prices for arbitrage, the weak liquidity pool experienced significant volatility driven by small orders: the token surged to $132.64 during the Sunday 22:00 time slot, while the stock's closing price last Friday was only $28.84. After the NYSE reopened on Monday, BBVI minted about 4,000 new tokens in less than an hour to inject a premium, and the price quickly fell back to around $29. In contrast, Ondo Finance issued approximately 10.4 million similar HIMS wrapped tokens, with a market cap of $30.8 million, which is 18 times the circulation of Robinhood Chain, closely tracking the underlying stock throughout.Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 built by Robinhood based on Arbitrum technology, launched on July 1, with a TVL of $727.4 million on Monday.

According to RootData's financing data statistics, in August, the crypto primary market disclosed 49 financing events, with a total financing amount of approximately $596 million, a month-on-month decrease of 74.2% compared to July's approximately $2.312 billion, and a year-on-year decrease of 35.5% compared to August 2025's approximately $924 million; the number of financing events saw a slight month-on-month increase of 2.1% compared to July's 48 events, but a year-on-year decrease of 42.4% compared to 85 events during the same period last year. (This data does not include questionable financing and excludes mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, post-IPO, and debt financing.)From the perspective of sectors, DeFi was the most active sector this month, completing 19 financings, but the disclosed amount was only about $73.1 million; the infrastructure sector completed 14 financings, with a disclosed amount of approximately $311 million, ranking first in terms of amount; CeFi completed 8 financings, with a disclosed amount of approximately $199 million. The top three projects by financing amount were Ripple ($275 million), RQD Clearing ($74 million), and Fasset ($68 million), with the top three projects totaling approximately $417 million, accounting for about 70.0% of the overall disclosed financing scale.In terms of RWA, RootData currently includes 529 RWA-related projects, of which 149 projects have financing records, with a financing coverage rate of approximately 28.2%. However, looking at August alone, there was only one RWA-related financing, Entropy, with a financing amount of $14 million, accounting for about 2.0% of this month's financing events and approximately 2.3% of the disclosed financing amount.In addition, 6 merger and acquisition events were disclosed in August, a significant decrease from July's 19 events; among them, 4 belong to CeFi, including BitGo's acquisition of NYDIG, Nasdaq's acquisition of LeveL Markets, Rain's acquisition of Ansa, and OpenFX's acquisition of Global Ledger. These were mainly concentrated in CeFi, payments, market infrastructure, and data analysis services.In terms of investment institutions, YZi Labs, MH Ventures, Mapleblock, Polychain, and others remain active. Overall, in August, financing market funds mainly flowed into payments, clearing, stablecoins, CeFi, and institutional-level infrastructure; RWA sector projects have sufficient reserves and high narrative heat, but monthly financing has not yet seen a simultaneous increase.

The DeFi lending protocol Venus Protocol has launched the Liquidity Hub, aimed at establishing a unified capital allocation layer for the Venus ecosystem. Users only need to deposit one type of asset to receive the corresponding Hub Token. The Liquidity Hub will automatically seek better APY combinations based on different market yield opportunities and allocate funds to products such as Core, Flux, and Fixed-Rate Vaults, without requiring users to manually manage positions across multiple products.The Liquidity Hub is not a new lending market but a unified liquidity entry built on top of Venus's existing products. Capital allocation, rebalancing, and the flow of underlying assets are all recorded on-chain, maintaining openness, transparency, and verifiability. Currently, Liquidity Hub v1 has been deployed on the BNB Chain, and in the future, it will connect to more lending markets, institutional yield products, and new sources of yield.

The Cronos network associated with Crypto.com has paused operations after detecting an attack on the lending protocol Tectonic. The Cronos Network stated on the X platform that it has identified vulnerabilities on Tectonic and has paused the network. Tectonic also confirmed that it is investigating the related incident and advised users not to interact with the protocol until safety is confirmed. According to DefiLlama data, Tectonic had a total locked value of approximately $121.7 million before the incident, with active loans of about $82.7 million.On-chain researcher Weilin Li attributed the attack to price manipulation of the TONIC token. The attacker bought enough TONIC within 20 minutes to inflate its price by about 100 times, and then used the inflated tokens as collateral to borrow other assets from Tectonic, a method similar to the 2022 Mango Markets oracle manipulation attack. Li initially estimated that the attacker profited about $66 million, and later discovered another address controlled by a different attacker containing about $8 million, bringing the total estimate to around $75 million. Li also stated that the attacker only successfully bridged about $6 million to Ethereum, as the pause on the Cronos network prevented most affected assets from flowing out.Crypto.com CEO Kris Marsalek stated that the company's app and exchange were not attacked, and its security team is assisting Tectonic with the investigation.

Cosmos Labs released a technical report, admitting that it previously misjudged an integer underflow vulnerability in the Cosmos EVM, which led to attacks on six blockchain networks between August 20 and 25, resulting in a total theft of approximately $5.7 million in tokens. The attacker exploited the vulnerability to underflow account balances to the maximum value of 2^256-1, then performed a reverse operation to transfer the inflated balance out, thereby stealing tokens from the target accounts without creating tokens out of thin air.The report shows that researchers submitted the defect through a bug bounty program on April 25, but testers were unable to reproduce it on the existing Cosmos chain configuration, so Cosmos Labs silently patched it in May. Independent researchers confirmed in early August that the vulnerability affected all Cosmos EVM chains, and Cosmos Labs released a patch on August 19, but the first attack occurred about 20 hours later.In terms of specific losses, MANTRA lost 720.9 million tokens (approximately $3.6 million), TAC lost nearly 3 billion TAC, and KiiChain lost about 148 million KII. Both MANTRA and KiiChain criticized Cosmos Labs for not notifying the affected chains in advance and suggesting a shutdown, with KiiChain stating that the patch would take several days to deploy while a shutdown would only take a few minutes. Cosmos Labs stated that it has coordinated responses with 40 chains and assisted 13 chains in completing repairs or shutdowns before being attacked.

According to DefiLlama data, the DeFi TVL of the Robinhood chain is currently about $683 million, with a growth of 17.78% over the past week, ranking first among leading blockchains.In terms of DEX trading volume, the network achieved $890 million in transactions in the past 24 hours, ranking 5th across the network. Additionally, the Robinhood chain's fees in the past 24 hours reached $279,000, ranking 6th across the network.