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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.

Circle Chief Strategy Officer Dante Disparte published a response regarding the over $270 million theft incident involving Drift Protocol. Disparte stated that Circle only freezes USDC when legally mandated to do so, and this is not a unilateral decision, nor is it a backdoor or algorithmic monitoring. This reflects the rule of law in internet-native financial activities.He pointed out that the core issue facing open systems is that the legal framework's response speed lags behind technological development. Protocols, wallets, exchanges, and stablecoin issuers should regard security and accountability as a shared obligation, and DeFi protocols can develop on-chain technical protection measures by referencing the circuit breaker mechanisms of traditional markets.He also called for the legislative processes of the U.S. GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act to incorporate due process, property rights, and financial privacy protection standards into law before the next major security incident occurs.

According to SoSoValue data, negotiations between Israel and Lebanon to boost the ceasefire plan have improved market sentiment, leading to a general rebound in the cryptocurrency sector, with the SocialFi sector performing notably, rising 3.01% in 24 hours. Within this sector, Toncoin (TON) and Chiliz (CHZ) rose by 2.95% and 4.15%, respectively. Bitcoin (BTC) increased by 2.01%, breaking through $72,000, while Ethereum (ETH) rose by 0.91%, approaching the $2,200 mark.Meanwhile, MAG7.ssi rose by 1.27%, DEFI.ssi rose by 1.86%, and MEME.ssi rose by 1.63%.In other sectors, the DeFi sector rose by 2.77% in 24 hours, with Hyperliquid (HYPE) increasing by 4.96%; the Layer2 sector rose by 2.47%, with Arbitrum (ARB) increasing by 9.32%; the Layer1 sector rose by 1.90%, with Zcash (ZEC) increasing by 16.78%; the PayFi sector rose by 1.54%, with Dash (DASH) increasing by 17.20%; the CeFi sector rose by 0.63%, with Bitget Token (BGB) increasing by 2.70%.Additionally, the AI and GameFi sectors fell by 0.17% and 0.67%, respectively, with Bittensor (TAO) in the AI sector dropping by 9.86%; in the GameFi sector, ImmutableX (IMX) remained relatively strong, rising by 5.41%.The cryptocurrency sector indices reflecting historical performance show that ssiDeFi, sssiRWA, and siDePIN rose by 3.61%, 3.49%, and 3.12%, respectively.

DeFi solution provider Enhanced Labs announced the completion of a $1 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Maximum Frequency Ventures, with participation from GSR, Selini, Flowdesk, and a group of angel investors. The new funds are expected to support product development and operations, while also promoting the expansion of options-based yield strategies to a broader range of on-chain assets, including tokenized real-world assets.

According to Politico, the cryptocurrency asset bill led by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott is embroiled in controversy over the DeFi developer protection clause, making bipartisan consensus difficult to achieve.The controversial clause aims to exempt non-custodial software developers who do not control user funds from registering as money transmitters or complying with anti-money laundering requirements. Law enforcement agencies such as the National Sheriffs' Association and the National District Attorneys Association have sent letters to Congress warning that this clause would weaken the ability to combat financial crime; Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has also expressed similar concerns.The cryptocurrency industry views this as the core of the bill, with DeFi Education Fund Executive Director Amanda Tuminelli explicitly stating that no modifications to the clause text will be accepted. Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Mark Warner are pushing for amendments to the clause. If the two parties fail to reach a consensus, the bill may advance without Democratic support, affecting the bipartisan majority needed for a full Senate vote.

The DeFi protocol Splyce Finance has completed a strategic round of financing, with investors including Sui Foundation, Stellar Foundation, Solana Foundation, Lucid Drakes, Sarson Funds, and Kin Capital. The specific amount of financing has not yet been disclosed.

The DeFi yield protocol Saturn has officially launched its mainnet. In addition, its private testing phase has ended, with companies such as Flowdesk and Galaxy depositing a total of $10 million. Its stablecoin USDat is built on M0, with Galaxy, Securitize, and Clear Street as operational partners.According to a previous report from ChainCatcher, the stablecoin protocol USDat developer Saturn has completed $800,000 in financing, with participation from YZi Labs and others.

Base has officially launched the third phase of its startup accelerator program, Base Batch 003. This phase lasts for 7 weeks (from April 6 to May 19), and after screening 1,175 applications, 12 teams focusing on areas such as DeFi, AI, stablecoins, and prediction markets have been selected.The 12 selected projects are:Blockrun.ai: Infrastructure for AI agents accessing LLM and data.Stealth: A new type of leveraged primitive for prediction markets.4Mica: Infrastructure for micro-trading settlement.OPAL: A privacy-focused Perp DEX (supporting cryptocurrencies and RWAs).Onsight: A gamified social prediction platform.Credifi: An unsecured lending protocol based on zk-tls and credit scoring.Tomorrow: A collateralized stablecoin lending platform for the creator economy.Agently: A routing layer for AI coordination and trading.Nivo: An on-chain foreign exchange hedging platform for SMEs.JPEG App: An opinion market based on image content.Floe Labs: A credit network for AI agents and institutions.Liminal: A self-custodied AI-native neobank.During the accelerator, selected teams will receive exclusive guidance and partner benefits from experts inside and outside of Coinbase, and they are expected to receive direct investment from the Base ecosystem fund. The program will conclude with an offline Demo Day in San Francisco on May 19.

The Bitcoin protocol Layer2 settlement network officially launched on April 6, achieving optimization and upgrades in on-chain data statistics and computing capabilities.In terms of technology, Layer2 supports deep cumulative calculations on-chain, which can more accurately reflect the on-chain team size and business data, improving processing efficiency in complex scenarios.In terms of governance, the protocol has transferred core permissions to a multi-signature contract, while adopting a dual-track governance model where developers and core community members each hold 50%, with an execution threshold of 65%, further enhancing decentralization.This upgrade completes the transition of the protocol to community autonomy, providing technical and governance references for the DeFi sector.

According to Chainwire, Polymarket has announced the completion of its acquisition of the DeFi infrastructure company Brahma. Brahma was co-founded by Alessandro Tenconi, Akanshu Jain, and Bapireddy Karri, and its team will continue to play key roles in infrastructure, protocol design, and product integration.This integration aims to enhance the trading reliability, execution speed, and capital efficiency of the Polymarket platform, while lowering the entry barrier for new users and improving interoperability across blockchain networks.

According to the official announcement from Seamless Protocol, the Base chain DeFi lending protocol Seamless Protocol, which has been operating for over two and a half years, has announced its official shutdown. The protocol's UI will go offline on June 30, 2026, at which point team support will also cease. Users must withdraw all assets through the UI before this date; otherwise, they will need to manually interact with the contract, which is complex and lacks technical support.The team stated that the core reason for the shutdown is that leverage tokens failed to find a product-market fit—structural liquidity shortages in the DeFi lending market have prevented the product from scaling, compounded by fluctuations in lending rates eroding returns, and the protocol also lacks a sustainable revenue path.The team also pointed out that the DeFi market trend is shifting towards actively managed vaults, which fundamentally diverges from its non-custodial, fully automated product positioning. Additionally, the team will submit a governance proposal to allocate the remaining assets in the DAO treasury to SEAM token holders.

The prediction market Polymarket collected approximately $7.1 million in trading fees in the first week of the second quarter, becoming one of the most profitable protocols in DeFi. If this pace continues, its annual trading fee revenue could reach about $365 million, potentially capturing 96.8% of the trading fee share in on-chain prediction markets.Analysis suggests that this growth stems from the pricing reform on March 30, maintaining daily trading fee levels at around $1 million, with trading activity remaining high. According to DeFiLlama data, Polymarket's total value locked (TVL) has reached $432 million, nearing the peak during the 2024 U.S. presidential election.In terms of mainstream partnerships, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) completed a $600 million cash investment on March 27, as part of a larger $2 billion commitment, to distribute Polymarket's event-driven data to institutional clients. The platform also replaced the USDC.e collateral on Polygon with a brand new 1:1 USDC-backed token, Polymarket USD, as a trading collateral asset.Despite rapid revenue growth, regulatory risks remain. Some U.S. states, as well as countries or regions like Hungary, Portugal, and Argentina, have imposed restrictions or bans on prediction markets, citing that Polymarket is viewed as an unlicensed gambling platform.

According to Decrypt, blockchain infrastructure company Biconomy has proposed a new Ethereum standard ERC-8211, introducing a "smart batching" mechanism that allows AI agents to complete multi-step DeFi operations in a single transaction, with each step dynamically referencing the output of the previous step at execution, addressing the issue of unpredictable output amounts due to price fluctuations or changes in transaction fees.This standard operates on top of the existing Ethereum infrastructure without the need to modify the core protocol or perform a hard fork, allowing developers to implement complex transaction processes directly in TypeScript. Barnabé Monnot, a research scientist at the Ethereum Foundation, stated that ERC-8211 aligns with the foundation's strategic priority of "improving user experience."