protocol

Morpho officially released the "Morpho Midnight White Paper," announcing the launch of a new non-custodial protocol designed specifically for the fixed-rate, fixed-term credit market. At the same time, the complete codebase of Midnight has been open-sourced, and developers can access it directly through GitHub.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recommended the Interfold project, stating, "More people should learn about Interfold, which is a general implementation of the MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) concept that I have been advocating for nearly a decade. This project is essentially a privacy protocol optimized for scenarios such as voting and secret auctions, allowing more people to pay attention to and understand this technological advancement."Vitalik also mentioned that the core mechanisms of Interfold include generating threshold encryption keys, users submitting votes on-chain with ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) credentials, and threshold decryption after arbitrary computation in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which can achieve unconditional voter anonymity, Ethereum-level censorship resistance, and ZK over FHE ensuring result correctness, among other strong security guarantees. The current main limitation is the high cost of complex computations (such as multiplication), with only addition-based voting being mature, and optimizations like slashing-based approaches are being advanced, with a long-term goal of implementing obfuscation techniques to eliminate M-of-N committee dependency.

Bitget announced the launch of a licensed financial protocol called Reality, focused on the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). The issued tokenized stocks (rTokens) are strictly pegged 1:1 to the underlying U.S. stocks, with assets held by a FINRA-registered, SIPC-protected U.S. brokerage, and real-time reserve proof provided through third-party independent audits. By directly accessing liquidity pools of U.S. stocks such as Nasdaq and NYSE, Reality's stock tokens can achieve liquidity on par with traditional brokers; at the same time, stock dividends will be distributed to user accounts in token form 1:1, while cash dividends will be automatically converted and issued as USDT. Stock splits and mergers will also be reflected in real-time on-chain tokens, closely aligning with the experience of holding U.S. stocks.In addition, the U.S. stock tokens launched by Reality are deeply integrated into the Bitget ecosystem, serving as margin for unified accounts and compatible with core product lines such as grid trading, signal following systems, and staking and lending.Bitget CEO Gracy Chen previously proposed the "10% vision": currently, tokenized stocks account for only 0.1% of the $125 trillion global stock market, and she predicts that this proportion will rise to nearly 10% by 2030. Reality is built on this trend, initially focusing on U.S. stocks, with plans to expand asset classes in the future, promoting Bitget's UEX strategy to extend to a broader global financial asset access layer.

The cross-chain routing protocol Squid stated on platform X that the SquidRouterModule involved in the attack disclosed by Blockaid was neither developed, deployed, nor operated by Squid, but rather a third-party Gnosis Safe module that chose to integrate with protocols like Squid, with no prior connection between the two parties.Squid indicated that this third-party module has a vulnerability that accepts a fixed string provided by the caller as message security verification. The attacker exploited this string, which is publicly visible in the verified code of the contract, to execute arbitrary call data and steal funds. Squid's own routing contract (0xce16F) is architecturally completely different from this module and is unaffected; user funds, authorizations, and integrations are all secure.

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov tweeted that the valuation of DeFi lending protocols should not primarily refer to TVL, as it measures net collateral rather than lending activity. Comparing data from the end of 2025, Aave's supply scale is about $52 billion, active loans about $22 billion, loan interest flow over $700 million, and DAO retention about $150 million; SoFi has deposits of about $37.5 billion, a loan book of about $38 billion, loan income of about $1.8 billion, and net profit of about $481 million.Stani stated that in traditional finance, deposits are liabilities or capital costs, and loans are interest-bearing assets, with lenders typically assessing based on the loan book, interest income, interest spread, and asset growth; however, the DeFi market mainly focuses on TVL and DAO retention fees. He believes that Aave is closer to over $700 million in lending business under a traditional financial accounting framework, rather than a $150 million revenue protocol; TVL is not the revenue basis for lending protocols, but the loan book and interest flow are the core.

According to Cointelegraph, the Ethereum Foundation has recently faced criticism from the community for selling ETH, unstaking, and having limited public communication. However, blockchain researcher and investor William Mougayar defended it in a post, stating that the outside world has long misunderstood the Foundation's positioning. ETH, the Ethereum network, and the Ethereum Foundation itself are three different aspects: ETH is an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for promoting protocol development, one of its goals even being "to make the founders gradually less important." The Ethereum Foundation is currently on a "subtraction path," strengthening the network by promoting protocol upgrades, funding underlying research, and reducing its own centralized influence.

Uniswap's governance proposal aims to extend the protocol fee collection and burning infrastructure to BNB Chain and Polygon, and to complete the fee activation process on Celo that was not executed due to a configuration error.The proposal includes: setting the fee receiving address for the V2 protocol on BNB Chain, Polygon, and Celo to TokenJar, and designating the V3 Factory owner on the relevant chains as V3OpenFeeAdapter; additionally, Celo will transfer the feeToSetter role and V4 PoolManager ownership to CrossChainAccount.The proposal states that fees from each chain will be aggregated into the corresponding TokenJar, and then UNI will be bridged back to the Ethereum mainnet and sent to the burn address.

According to CoinMarketCap data, the performance of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization is as follows: Top five gainers: NEAR Protocol (NEAR) up 21.14%, current price $2.20; Worldcoin (WLD) up 12.39%, current price $0.2947; Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET) up 9.05%, current price $0.2105; Quant (QNT) up 8.76%, current price $79.28; Celestia (TIA) up 8.74%, current price $0.445.

The cross-chain network Everclear officially announced on social media that it has decided to end the operations of the Everclear Foundation and Labs, and to stop product development. Currently, the protocol has been shut down, and the Everclear UI and chain have ceased operation. The team stated that the remaining TVL in the protocol has been fully withdrawn, and to their knowledge, no user funds are trapped.Regarding the reasons for the shutdown, Everclear stated that although the monthly trading volume had previously reached $500 million, the team failed to establish sufficient commercial depth and convert it into effective revenue due to users' high price sensitivity in the cross-chain solver field. Additionally, the team exhausted its funds (runway) during the transition to a B2B2C model over the past six months, and several acquisition proposals explored were also unsuccessful.For future arrangements, Everclear is conducting an orderly liquidation to address outstanding debts. The team stated that if there are remaining funds after the debts are settled, they will explore repurchasing existing tokens, with a potential total repurchase amount estimated between $50,000 and $200,000, but this has not yet been finalized. Furthermore, the foundation is considering open-sourcing the protocol's intellectual property (IP) to give the DAO the option to continue advancing work under new management; currently, the DAO itself is still operational.

According to The Block, the Ethereum Layer 2 project Zero Network announced that it will officially shut down soon, just about 1.5 years after its launch. Zero Network was launched by the Zerion team in November 2024, positioned as the first EVM-compatible gas-free Rollup, aimed at lowering user barriers and promoting mainstream adoption.The team stated that they will focus resources on Zerion's API and wallet business. Users need to bridge out their NFTs, ETH, and other tokens from the Zero Network by the end of July, as the bridging deposit function has currently been suspended.

Helio Protocol's XAUT gold stablecoin ecosystem has announced a strategic partnership with Dephy and APRO, aiming to jointly promote the application of AI intelligent quantitative systems in the fields of gold stablecoins, RWA (real-world assets on-chain), and DeFi.It is reported that this collaboration will be based on the Dephy Apro System AI quantitative architecture, combined with the on-chain asset clearing and cross-market liquidity management capabilities of the XAUT ecosystem, to construct a financial model of "AI + gold stablecoin + on-chain quantification." This model aims to achieve functions such as AI intelligent market prediction, automated on-chain quantitative trading, dynamic risk control, and intelligent adjustment of multi-market liquidity.In addition, according to official statistical data released, the average daily quantitative return rate of the XAUT AI Quant System reached 10.17% in the first quarter of 2026. In the future, the XAUT ecosystem plans to further promote the construction of infrastructure such as the AI-Agent automated trading system, cross-border payment network for gold stablecoins, and intelligent RWA clearing system.

According to Blockaid monitoring, the Map Protocol/Butter Network cross-chain bridge has been attacked on Ethereum and BSC. The attacker tricked the Butter Bridge V3.1 contract into directly minting approximately 100 trillion MAPO tokens to a newly created EOA address, which is about 480 million times the legitimate supply of 208 million tokens. Additionally, according to DeFi community YAM monitoring, the attacker has currently profited approximately 52.2 ETH (about $110,000). In response, MAP Protocol stated that the team is aware of the situation and is coordinating with external security partners to investigate and contain the issue. The bridging between MAPO ERC-20 and MAPO mainnet has been suspended. Please do not trade MAPO ERC-20 tokens on Uniswap at this time. During the event mitigation period, the liquidity pool remains at risk.Butter Network responded that ButterSwap has been suspended, and the team is coordinating with external security partners for the investigation. Pending transactions will be processed after security is restored. User funds are not at risk, and all affected transactions will be fully processed after recovery.

Drift Protocol stated on platform X that after the protocol is restored online, users who have staked in the Insurance Fund will be able to withdraw their corresponding shares normally. The Insurance Fund is designed to maintain the protocol's solvency in the event of liquidation or bankruptcy. Since the protocol was paused before losses were completed through normal liquidation or bankruptcy processes, the Insurance Fund was not affected by the related vulnerabilities or attacks.Drift Protocol added that the assets of the protocol's own Insurance Fund will be used to support system restart and user recovery, and plans to publicly disclose the relevant on-chain addresses so that the community can track the use of funds and subsequent deployments.

Binance tweeted that the participation threshold for the Zest Protocol (ZEST) airdrop has been announced. Users need to reach 240 Alpha points to participate. Participating in this event will consume 15 points, decreasing by 5 points per minute. The event will start today at 21:00.

Echo Protocol announced that its eBTC deployment on Monad experienced unauthorized activity, resulting in abnormal minting and financial losses. Preliminary investigations indicate that the issue stemmed from the compromise of the administrator keys related to the Monad deployment, with approximately $816,000 in assets currently confirmed to be affected.Echo stated that the Monad network itself was not affected and continues to operate normally. The team has regained control of the administrator keys and has destroyed the remaining 955 eBTC held by the attacker. The project further clarified: the current incident appears to be limited to the Monad deployment; there is no evidence to suggest that the Aptos side has been affected; aBTC on Aptos and eBTC on Monad are independent, non-bridgeable assets; the current related risk exposure on Aptos is approximately $71,000.As an additional precaution, Echo has suspended the cross-chain functionality of the Monad deployment and has begun upgrading the related EVM bridging contracts and permission control mechanisms, while reminding users not to interact with any unofficial claims, refund, or recovery pages.

Kelp stated on platform X that it has collaborated with multiple DeFi protocols to complete the liquidation of the attacker’s positions, and the recovery process of rsETH has made significant progress. Among them, Compound has participated in coordination multiple times over the past four weeks and provided about 3,000 ETH in support, while jointly completing the liquidation with Aave, recovering a total of approximately 17,426.2 rsETH. Euler Finance has liquidated the attacker’s positions within its protocol and plans to return the excess ETH to the DeFi ecosystem fund.

Echo Protocol announced that it is investigating a security incident affecting the Echo cross-chain bridge on Monad. During the investigation, all cross-chain transactions remain suspended.According to previous reports, market news indicated that Echo Protocol was hacked on Monad. The attacker minted 1,000 eBTC (approximately $76.7 million) and used a tested process to deposit 45 eBTC (approximately $34.5 million) into Curvance. Subsequently, they borrowed approximately 11.29 WBTC (approximately $867,700) using this as collateral, bridged the WBTC to Ethereum, exchanged it for ETH, and ultimately transferred 384 ETH (approximately $821,700) to Tornado Cash.Yuxian, the founder of Slow Mist, stated that Echo Protocol may have been compromised due to the Admin single point private key being breached.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Echo Protocol was attacked on the Monad chain. The attacker minted 1,000 eBTC ($76.7 million) and withdrew funds from Curvance through a previously tested attack path.Currently, the attacker has deposited 45 eBTC ($34.5 million) into Curvance as collateral, borrowed about 11.29 WBTC ($867,700), and cross-chained to Ethereum, sending 385 ETH (approximately $818,000) to TornadoCash after exchanging for ETH. The attacker still controls a large amount of minted eBTC.

According to The Block, Geoffrey Kendrick, the global head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered Bank, stated that the total scale of on-chain tokenized assets is expected to reach $4 trillion by the end of 2028, with stablecoins and real-world assets (RWA) each accounting for $2 trillion. Standard Chartered believes that DeFi protocols with mature risk control systems and scalability will be the main beneficiaries of this trend, while the advancement of the U.S. Clarity Act may become an important catalyst for accelerating the on-chain transition of traditional finance.Kendrick pointed out that the core advantage of DeFi lies in "composability." In an on-chain environment, the same asset can simultaneously earn yields, serve as collateral, and maintain liquidity, which the traditional financial system cannot achieve with similar efficiency. He stated that this structural advantage means "1+1=3." Standard Chartered cited BlackRock's tokenized U.S. Treasury fund BUIDL as an example, noting that the product not only yields about 4% from U.S. Treasuries but can also be converted into sBUIDL for use in lending protocol collateral and serves as a reserve asset for products like Ethena USDtb and Ondo OUSG.The report also noted that the current scale of off-chain assets is still about 1,000 times that of on-chain assets, and the tokenization of institutional-grade assets may become the core source of growth for the next phase of the industry. Regarding institutional adoption, Standard Chartered mentioned that Aave's asset scale once matched that of the 38th largest bank in the U.S., and the current daily trading volume of on-chain stablecoin lending has reached $1.5 billion to $2 billion.At the same time, the Bitcoin lending product developed in collaboration between Coinbase and Morpho currently has a loan scale of about $1.75 billion, covering approximately 22,000 borrowers, indicating that traditional financial institutions are gradually using DeFi as underlying infrastructure.