protocol

According to official news, the Solana ecosystem DeFi protocol Carrot has announced that it will soon shut down. Carrot stated that the Drift exploit incident has had a catastrophic impact on its ongoing operations. Carrot has set May 14 as the deadline for withdrawing remaining funds from Boost, Turbo, and CRT, after which the system will begin deleveraging, reducing all leverage to zero and releasing all liquidity for CRT redemption. Carrot stated that any recovery funds from Drift will still be distributed as previously promised, but there is currently no specific timeline.

Wasabi Protocol stated that Wasabi's contracts on Solana are secure and not affected by this vulnerability. The vulnerability is limited to Wasabi's EVM deployment. The team is working with leading security teams and has contacted law enforcement and the FBI. Further updates will be announced when available.

WasabiCard issued a security statement claiming that it has no affiliation with projects and organizations such as Wasabi Protocol and Wasabi Wallet.It is reported that WasabiCard collaborates with Safeheron for custodial wallets, using private key sharding technology to ensure the security of on-chain funds. They work with on-chain security audit companies like slowmist to strictly audit the sources of on-chain funds. They utilize compliance and anti-money laundering tools such as sumsub to ensure that user identities are legitimate and compliant. As a licensed institution and Web3 financial infrastructure service provider, security and compliance have always been the foundational capabilities of WasabiCard, rather than optional add-ons.

According to monitoring by blockchain security firm CertiK, the Wasabi Protocol has experienced a security breach, with approximately $2.9 million in funds stolen. Preliminary investigations indicate that the attacker gained privileged roles after compromising the wallet deployed by Wasabi, subsequently carrying out the attack.The stolen funds are currently dispersed across the following addresses: 0xb8Bb...70dB (approximately $677,000) and 0x6244...f906 (approximately $1.1 million), and the incident is still under investigation.

According to official news, OKX Onchain OS released the Agent Payments Protocol (APP) yesterday. Subsequently, ecological participants from various fields such as public chains, infrastructure, and AI expressed their support on the X platform.Currently, the publicly supported institutions include more than twenty entities such as Paxos, Solana, RootData, Aptos, Pharos Network, Nansen, Sui, 0G Labs, HeySorin AI, Corbits, QuickNode, Otto AI, Ethy AI, AltLayer, pieverse, Optimism, Surf AI, KITE AI, Mesh, Sahara AI, Teneo Protocol, Zerion, Alibaba Cloud, Uniswap, and others.It is reported that the Agent Payments Protocol (APP) is an open payment protocol aimed at the commercial behavior of AI Agents, designed to support Agents in expanding their capabilities from payment to complete business processes.

According to The Block, the Solana ecosystem multi-signature protocol Squads announced the completion of a $18 million strategic financing round, led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, and others. This round of financing is an equity round, bringing its total financing amount to $42.9 million. Squads will use the funds from this round to expand its stablecoin enterprise financial platform, Altitude.It is reported that Altitude, the stablecoin payment platform under Squads, allows businesses to conduct 24/7 global payment settlements in stablecoins through self-custody wallets, and connects to the global payment network through compliance and risk control systems.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the list of grants and ecosystem support projects for the first quarter of 2026, focusing on cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), protocol security, and core infrastructure development, continuously strengthening the Ethereum underlying technology stack and long-term scalability.This quarter's funding covers several key areas. At the protocol and client level, projects include optimizations for the Geth and Erigon clients, upgrades to the Lighthouse client, and the development of network monitoring tools after the Pectra upgrade, with a focus on improving network performance and attack resistance. Additionally, projects such as HSM key management, the validator security tool Vero, and the DISC-NG node discovery mechanism have also received support to enhance node-level reliability and institutional compliance capabilities.In the areas of cryptography and ZK, the foundation continues to invest in projects such as the analysis of the Poseidon hash function, research on Gröbner basis attacks, exploration of quantum-resistant and homomorphic mixed encryption, and formal verification of RISC-V zkVM, further strengthening the security boundaries of zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic infrastructure.In terms of the developer ecosystem, the BuidlGuidl education system upgrade, ERC standard community building, WalletConnect clear signature library, and Open Creator Rails toolchain are continuously advancing to lower development barriers and enhance user interaction security. Meanwhile, L2BEAT continues to provide transparency analysis for Layer 2, strengthening the data infrastructure for scaling ecosystems.Furthermore, the foundation supports privacy technologies (such as Tor integration and Privacy Pool SDK), decentralized identity (did:ethr standard upgrade), DAO governance research, and public goods experimental projects, covering a complete ecological structure from the protocol layer to the application layer. Overall, this round of funding continues Ethereum's long-term investment in the three core directions of "cryptography + ZK + protocol engineering," emphasizing the support for future multi-layer scaling and institutional-level application implementation through infrastructure and standardization development.

Andre Cronje stated in an interview with Cointelegraph that many DeFi protocols today are "no longer truly DeFi" and are more like "profit-driven companies operated by teams," as they generally rely on upgradable contracts, multi-signatures, off-chain infrastructure, and manual operational control.Cronje pointed out that the current industry is still overly focused on smart contract audits while neglecting operational risks that are closer to traditional finance (TradFi). He believes that recent attack incidents are not due to code vulnerabilities but stem from off-chain infrastructure, permission management, and social engineering attacks.The discussion arises from the recent frequent security incidents in DeFi. In April, protocols such as Flying Tulip, Drift Protocol, and Kelp encountered security events, with Drift and Kelp suffering losses of approximately $280 million and $293 million, respectively.In response, Flying Tulip has introduced a "Withdrawal Circuit Breaker," which can delay or queue withdrawal requests when unusually large withdrawals occur, allowing the team about 6 hours to respond. Cronje emphasized that this mechanism does not permanently freeze withdrawals but serves as a layer of protection within the security system.However, Michael Egorov holds a cautious attitude towards this. He stated that the circuit breaker itself could also become a new point of centralized risk. If control permissions fall into the hands of an attacker, the mechanism originally intended to protect the protocol could instead be used to freeze assets or directly transfer funds.Egorov believes that the long-term direction of DeFi should be to minimize human intervention and centralized permissions as much as possible, rather than adding more layers of manual control. "The security of DeFi comes from decentralization, not more human management."

Sui ecosystem DEX protocol Aftermath Finance announced that the team has discovered a vulnerability affecting the protocol and is actively investigating it with security partners.As a precaution, the protocol has been suspended, and measures are being taken to minimize the potential impact on user funds.

The Bitcoin lending protocol Tropykus announced the gradual shutdown process of the current version of the protocol. The deposit and lending functions will be permanently disabled, and users can perform withdrawal and repayment operations until the deadline of July 27, 2026. After this date, related operations will only support direct interaction with the smart contract.The official statement indicated that this shutdown decision is based on considerations of long-term strategic evolution. In the face of security challenges posed by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the existing architecture can no longer meet long-term development needs. The team recommends that all users complete withdrawals and settle their lending positions before the deadline.

According to on-chain analyst PeckShield, the vault YieldCore-3rd-deal under Trading Protocol was attacked, resulting in a loss of approximately $398,000.The reason for the attack is a vulnerability due to the lack of caller permission verification in the contract. The attacker exploited this vulnerability to bypass the authorization mechanism and withdrew all funds from the vault. Currently, the relevant on-chain transaction records have been disclosed.

The Over Foundation has stated that due to financial constraints, it has ceased operations of all Over Protocol infrastructure and services, including OverWallet, OverNode, OverFlex, RPC nodes, block explorers, and related APIs, with no plans for recovery.Over Protocol is a Layer 1 mainnet that, while designed to be decentralized, is likely unable to continue operating in practice now that the foundation has stopped its services. Block production will depend on whether independent validators continue to run the open-source client, and the foundation cannot guarantee this. The foundation expressed that the original intention of the project was to allow ordinary users to participate in the construction of the Layer 1 network, thanked the community for their support, and expressed regret for not being able to continue the advancement.

The Humanity Foundation recently requested early investors to make a binary decision regarding the ownership plan for the $H token. On-chain monitoring data shows that the well-known market maker Jump Trading's associated address transferred 50 million $H to a centralized exchange on April 26, just before the deadline for investor responses.Further on-chain records indicate that Jump Trading began transferring $H tokens in batches starting from December 2025, with a cumulative processing scale measured in hundreds of millions. Trix Ventures subsequently released an on-chain analysis report, indicating that Jump Trading's actions, combined with the foundation's enforced binary decision plan, may trigger market participants to price in the unlocking event on June 25 in advance.

Ethereum developer Tom Lehman has released a draft proposal for EIP-8182, which aims to make private transactions a native feature of Ethereum by introducing shared privacy pools, a fixed address system contract, and zero-knowledge proof verification precompiles at the Ethereum protocol layer.The proposal states that the solution will be implemented through a hard fork upgrade, without an administrator key, governance tokens, or on-chain upgrade mechanisms, with the goal of addressing the issues of decentralization and inconsistent trust models in privacy applications. As designed, users can make private transactions to any Ethereum address or ENS name using existing wallets, and it supports atomic "de-sensitization - interaction - re-privatization" processes.

The vault protocol 3F, built on the decentralized lending protocol Morpho, has completed a total financing of $4 million, led by Maven 11, with participation from institutions such as F-Prime, GSR, and Gate Ventures. The company did not disclose a specific valuation.It is reported that 3F is built on top of Morpho, aiming to provide users with RWA leveraged exposure through a "one-click operation." Users only need to select the target asset and leverage multiple, and the protocol will automatically complete the entire position-building process: including purchasing the underlying asset through short-term bridge financing, depositing it as collateral in Morpho, and borrowing stablecoins to repay the financing. This mechanism essentially simplifies the "looping" process in traditional DeFi, which involves repeatedly buying assets, collateralizing, lending, and reinvesting.While this process can be efficiently completed in pure crypto assets through flash loans, it is usually more complex and inefficient in RWA scenarios due to issues such as settlement delays. 3F is expected to officially launch in the second quarter of this year.

AI deep technology and Web3 infrastructure company Cluster Protocol announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, led by DAO5, with participation from Paper Ventures, JPEG Trading, Mapleblock Capital, among others, bringing the company's total funding to $7.75 million.The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of its EVM ecosystem-oriented browser-native IDE product CodeXero, expand the product and engineering teams, and enhance AI systems, developer workflows, deployment infrastructure, and ecosystem growth. Cluster Protocol stated that CodeXero has connected over 300,000 wallets, processed more than 3 billion AI tokens, and supported the deployment of over 25,000 dApps.

AI Smart Routing and Infrastructure Network DGrid AI officially announces the launch of its AI inference API integrated with the x402 payment protocol. This API seamlessly merges payment logic with AI model invocation for the first time, allowing developers and AI Agents to complete authorization, inference, and payment within a single API request lifecycle without managing cumbersome API Keys or requiring centralized account pre-funding.It is reported that this API currently supports BNB Chain (BSC) as the underlying settlement network. With the micropayment features of the x402 protocol, the system can achieve extremely low-friction on-chain real-time settlement while ensuring that invocation costs remain absolutely controllable. Additionally, this API supports streaming responses and real-time usage feedback while being compatible with mainstream AI invocation methods, making it suitable for various application scenarios, including model selection for AI Agents, inference billing, intelligent agents, and multi-task execution.DGrid states that this initiative aims to completely break the prepaid barriers of traditional large model invocation and provide a programmable underlying payment infrastructure for building a fully automated AI Agent economy (machine-to-machine transactions).

Web3 asset data platform RootData issued a daily transparency alert on Twitter (X), highlighting the lack of information such as team details, key calendar events, and token data for projects like Mars Protocol, Anvil, Lynex, AstridDAO, and Hatom Labs. 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 RootData's transparency score is used to measure a project's integrity and timeliness, aiming to reflect the project's information disclosure status, urging project teams to immediately claim their projects. The transparency score is categorized from A to F, with a total of 5 levels from high to low; the lower the score, the more incomplete the project's information disclosure, and the higher the risk of wrongdoing, requiring investors to be highly vigilant.

According to Decrypt, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, stated during a hearing before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. government is currently running a Bitcoin node for cybersecurity-related testing, but is not engaged in mining.Paparo indicated that the U.S. military's interest in Bitcoin primarily focuses on its value as a computer science tool, including cryptography, blockchain, and reusable proof-of-work mechanisms, with the aim of using the Bitcoin protocol to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance military capabilities, which is still in the experimental stage. He also mentioned that maintaining the global dominance of the U.S. dollar aligns with U.S. military interests and gave a positive evaluation of the stablecoin legalization bill, the GENIUS Act, signed by Trump last summer, believing that the bill helps to solidify the global position of the dollar.