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Every month, we’re diving into the state of the overall DeFi sector: the biggest developments, changes and updates across the ecosystem. All in one place.

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DeFi Stats We’re Watching

The metrics are accurate at the time of publication. The percentage change is over a 30-day period.

Noteworthy DeFi Developments

  • Hyperliquid has expanded its HIP-4 outcome contracts beyond crypto price milestones to cover real-world macro events, allowing traders to bet on outcomes like U.S. inflation prints and Federal Reserve decisions directly alongside their crypto perpetuals. Unlike Polymarket, which outsources dispute resolution to UMA's oracle network, Hyperliquid handles settlement in-house through its own validator set.

  • Anchorage Digital, a U.S. crypto bank, expanded its Atlas Collateral Management product to serve as collateral manager for Ethena Labs' institutional lending. The arrangement allows Ethena to invest in loans while keeping borrower collateral in Anchorage's custody rather than moving it onchain. Atlas says it will monitor collateral and loan thresholds in real time, and execute rules-based margin actions. 

  • Coinbase has struck a wide-ranging partnership with Ethena, becoming the primary custodian, wallet provider and perpetuals venue for the protocol's assets. The deal also brings Ethena's USDe synthetic dollar to Base and the broader Coinbase ecosystem. Alongside an investment from Coinbase Ventures into Ethena, the partnership aims to put Ethena's onchain savings and finance products in front of Coinbase's 100-million-plus users. 

A DeFi App We Tried in June: Ostium

What it does: Ostium is a decentralized exchange that lets users trade perpetual contracts on real world assets (RWAs) like stocks, equities, commodities and foreign exchange. 

Built on Arbitrum, the exchange offers synthetic exposure to individual equities like Nvidia and Tesla, indices like the S&P 500, commodities like gold and crude oil, and crypto majors. Positions are collateralized in USDC with a $5 minimum trade size, and allows leverage up to 200x on select markets. 

Pricing data is provided by Chainlink Data Streams for crypto markets, and a custom, pull-based oracle that aggregates exchange data for RWAs. Liquidity is backed by an LP vault plus a junior capital buffer that absorbs trader profit and loss before it can reach passive depositors.

Our thoughts: Ostium combines a brokerage account, an FX platform, and a commodities desk into a single onchain venue. For traders that have used perpetuals exchanges before, the interface will feel vary familiar. Users can connect a wallet or sign in with an email account and start trading within minutes. For users outside the U.S., or people looking for exposure to U.S. markets without going through a traditional broker, the ability to trade the breadth of assets that Ostium offers on leverage may prove useful. 

Unlike crypto native DEXs like Hyperliquid, Ostium is built for RWAs, providing deep liquidity to listed assets that favor large institutions and whales.

Because Ostium tracks traditional markets, its RWA pairs follow normal trading hours (Monday-Friday: 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM ET). This may be unusual to crypto natives, who are used to trading 24/7, but can feel natural to institutions and equities traders.

The exchange’s design also leans on offchain components, with institutional market makers hedging flow off-exchange and a custom oracle feeding RWA prices. 

Stats on the project:

Data as of June 9, 2026

  • TVL: $48.5M

  • Annualized revenue: $16.3M

  • 30-day Perp volume: $5.1B

Disclaimer: This section reflects our analysts’ subjective impressions from testing apps and differs from our otherwise fact-driven content. Opinions are based on our evaluation; readers should conduct their own research.

More DeFi Updates

  • Lido unveiled Staking Router v3 (LIP-35), a re-design of how its liquid staking protocol accounts for validators:  instead of simply counting validators, the new architecture involves tracking their actual ETH balances. The new design is aimed to align with Ethereum's Pectra upgrade, as part of which EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective validator balance from 32 to 2,048 ETH, letting large operators collapse dozens of validators into a handful, and cut operational overhead, gas and monitoring costs. 

  • Uniswap and Base helped run what was billed as the first live DeFi borrowing transaction on Capitol Hill, letting Senate staffers watch a loan settle onchain in real time with no intermediaries involved. Organized by the Blockchain Association and sponsored by the DeFi Education Fund, the demo was staged to show lawmakers the technology firsthand ahead of their upcoming deliberations on the CLARITY Act.

  • Bitwise has taken over management of the Crypto Carry Fund (USCC), a $259-million tokenized fund that runs a market-neutral basis trade, currently yielding 4% annually. USCC tokens are accepted as collateral across Aave, Kamino and Morpho, letting holders borrow stablecoins against their positions without having to unwind the yield strategy. Built on Superstate’s infra, this is Bitwise’s first tokenized fund.

  • Morpho published a white paper on Midnight, a non-custodial protocol for fixed-rate, fixed-term credit. Unlike the variable-rate, pooled liquidity of its existing Morpho Blue markets, Midnight matches lenders and borrowers through an intent-based system that turns loans into tradable positions, and externalizes both rate and risk management. 

  • Jupiter launched Forecast, billed as Solana's first fully native prediction market that lets users buy outcome shares from multiple competing market makers rather than a single liquidity pool. It also automatically routes each trade to the best available price.

  • Hyperliquid Strategies, a treasury company that aims to accumulate the HYPE token, has teamed up with Unit Labs to launch a validator on Hyperliquid. The majority of the initial stake comes from HSI's treasury HYPE, custodied at Anchorage Digital Bank, and the validator is open to delegations from the broader community. 

  • Uniswap shipped four UX updates across its apps: an in-app wallet; single-action crosschain swaps; combined multichain token balances; and realized and unrealized profit-and-loss tracking per asset. The wallet, powered by Privy, preserves self-custody, while crosschain routing through Across spans eleven networks including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Unichain.

DeFi word of the month: Flash Loan

Definition: A flash loan is a type of uncollateralized loan that requires no deposit or credit checks, but must be borrowed and fully repaid within the same block. If the borrower cannot repay by the time the transaction settles, the entire transaction is reverted, leaving the blockchain's state unchanged. Flash loans are used by sophisticated traders to exploit brief price differences across platforms.

Used in a sentence: A trader used a flash loan to borrow $1 million worth of ETH with no collateral, bought an underpriced token on one exchange and sold it on another exchange to pocket the difference. They then repaid the loan, all within a single block.

This is the State of DeFi. June Edition.

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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.

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