“ETFs were referred to as weapons of mass destruction,” Hoffman said, recalling the skepticism that surrounded the structure before it became one of the dominant ways investors access markets.
When he joined the ETF industry in the early 2000s, the market held roughly $200 billion in assets, he said. Today, it’s nearly a $20-trillion global asset class, according to a PwC report.
He said tokenization is following a similar path, but much faster than ETFs.
“Every market that digitizes gets larger,” he said. “And tokenization is really the digitization of capital markets.”
Building for an agent-driven future
For Hoffman, tokenization will become the foundation for what comes next: AI-driven financial services.
He said he envisions a future where autonomous agents continuously monitor markets and allocate capital through professionally managed portfolios that update in real time as conditions change.
“Our end state will be portfolios that are professionally managed, real-time and adjusting to market circumstances and data changes,” he said.
To get there, the industry first needs tokenized assets, onchain prime-brokerage infrastructure and asset-management strategies that can be executed natively on blockchain networks.
Ondo is building toward that vision, he said. The firm already offers tokenized U.S. Treasury products and plans to expand into stocks, ETFs and perpetual futures through its tokenized marketplace.
Investors are increasingly backing stablecoin and credit infrastructure rather than decentralized finance (DeFi) lending alone, with Morpho Labs’ latest funding round drawing attention to onchain credit markets, according to Spark CEO Sam MacPherson.
Morpho announced Tuesday that it raised $175 million in a round led by Paradigm, a16z crypto and Ribbit Capital. While Morpho is widely known as a DeFi lending protocol, the company said that it aims to become a credit infrastructure layer for banks, asset managers and fintechs.
Onchain credit markets allow users and institutions to borrow, lend and deploy capital using blockchain-based assets. Investors are betting the sector will grow alongside stablecoins and other tokenized financial products.
As stablecoins scale, “credit becomes one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the stack,” MacPherson told Cointelegraph.
Related: DeFi protocol Radiant to wind down after failing to recover from 2024 hack
Morpho’s growing role as lending infrastructure
Morpho has a total value locked (TVL) of $6.72 billion and about $3.47 billion in active loans, according to DeFiLlama data. Risk management platform Sentora said in a Friday newsletter that the figures indicate “significant liquidity depth.”
Morpho’s total value locked and active loans have climbed sharply since late 2024.Source: DeFiLlama
Sentora also pointed to Coinbase’s use of Morpho smart contracts to originate more than $2.17 billion in corporate USDC loans as evidence that the protocol is being used as lending infrastructure rather than solely as a retail DeFi platform.
Sentora argued that the trend extends beyond crypto-native lending. The firm said exchanges, custodians and asset managers are actively evaluating blockchain-based lending systems to power credit products, while protocols compete to become the underlying infrastructure for business-to-business integrations.
Capital flows to late-stage crypto firms
Morpho intends to measure the success of the raise over the next 12 to 18 months by expanding integrations with banks, asset managers and large platforms, attracting more institutional capital and rolling out features from traditional credit markets to drive adoption, co-founder Merlin Egalite told Cointelegraph.
“The problem we are trying to solve is less about replacing competitors and more about establishing ourselves as the credit infrastructure layer that banks, asset managers and fintechs build on,” he said.
Morpho’s raise “largest” in DeFi history. Source: Merlin Egalite
The funding round, which Egalite called “the largest raise in DeFi history,” comes as venture capital increasingly concentrates on a small group of established crypto infrastructure projects.
According to a Q1 2026 report by CryptoRank, capital allocated to Series C and later-stage crypto funding rounds surged 1,020% year over year and 320% quarter over quarter. The category accounted for 28.4% of venture funding across just nine deals, while seed and pre-seed funding fell 38.1% and represented only 5.2% of total capital.
Egalite said that he is unconcerned about capital concentration.
Asia Express: North Korea denies crypto hacks, Upbit’s bank tests Ripple
Crypto tried to solve this with its own version of yield. We tried staking rewards, liquidity mining, and levered DeFi strategies. At first glance, they looked productive. But too much of that yield was circular. It depended on token emissions and fresh inflows, not real economic activity. That story is a much harder sell now. What investors want is yield that is durable, transparent, and tied to something real.
The next step is not more crypto-native yield. It is putting onchain dollars into real assets. The opportunity is not to build better wrappers for cash, but to connect onchain dollars to assets investors already know how to price: money market funds, U.S. treasuries, corporate bonds, and credit. This is not about chasing the hottest yield on the screen this week, but about making dollars onchain work harder without making them less useful.
This shift has already started. Tokenized real-world assets are now a meaningful onchain category beyond stablecoins, and tokenized treasuries alone are already worth billions. But treasury tokens by themselves do not fully solve the problem. In most cases, they remain separate investment products. The bigger opportunity is a dollar you can still use across crypto, while it quietly earns from real assets underneath.
For Elon Musk’s company, it’s a rounding error against a valuation of over $1.8 trillion: small enough that the stock will never trade on it, yet large enough to normalize the asset in a way no dedicated vehicle can.
For years, onchain analysts estimated SpaceX held about 8,300 bitcoin. The S-1 then revealed the real number was more than twice that, meaning one of the most scrutinized private companies in the world held a billion-dollar bitcoin position, and the public’s best guess was off by half until securities law forced the answer.
Now the position lives under public company rules.
Fair-value accounting means every quarterly report marks bitcoin to market, recording gains and losses whether or not SpaceX trades the coin. Tesla showed how that looks in a drawdown, booking hundreds of millions in paper losses on a position it wasn’t selling.
SpaceX arrives with bitcoin 37% already below its January high, though its roughly $35,000 cost basis means the stake is still up about 80% from its initial buys.
Neither Tesla nor SpaceX — both Elon Musk-owned firms — have ever shown an appetite for trading its stack. These companies continue to hold (at least for now) bitcoin through public earnings cycles and analyst questions, while the position swings, hands every Fortune 500 finance chief a working example of a mega-caps that treat bitcoin as a reserve asset, absorbs the earnings noise and moves on.
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said a security audit by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos artificial intelligence model found no serious vulnerabilities in the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency’s protocol.
Requested by Shielded Labs, a Swiss-based non-profit supporting the development of Zcash, the AI security audit did not find “any more serious bugs” in the Zcash protocol, according to a Saturday X post by Wilcox.
On June 3, Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a vulnerability in the shielded pool. Functionality was restored later that day through an emergency upgrade.
The issue stemmed from a four-year-old forgery bug in the Orchard shielded pool that was discovered by security researcher Taylor Hornby with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model. The Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited, nor was there any unauthorized value creation detected, while user privacy was unaffected.
Source: Zooko Wilcox
AI models spark crypto security concerns
While developers are using new AI models to identify vulnerabilities, the technology is simultaneously raising security concerns across the crypto industry.
On Tuesday, Anthropic released the first public version of its Claude Mythos model, Fable 5. The company said last month that the Mythos model uncovered more than 10,000 high or critical-severity vulnerabilities in “systemically important software,” leading to concerns about whether it should be publicly released.
The company said users that Fable 5 was “made safe for general use” and has safeguards that reroute some topics, such as cybersecurity, to a different model, Claude Opus 4.8.
On Friday, Anthropic said it suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models due to a US government export control directive citing national security concerns.
Related: Recovery hopes fade as Kelp DAO hacker launders nearly all $220M in stolen funds
The proliferation of these new AI models has shifted the cybersecurity playing field in favor of the threat actors, causing a “vulnerability apocalypse” that is fueling a resurgence in decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks, Mitchell Amador, the CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi, told Cointelegraph in a recent interview.
Crypto hacks surged to $634 million in April, the highest monthly value since the Bybit hack led to about $1.4 billion in losses in February 2025, according to DefiLlama data.
Magazine: The legal battle over who can claim DeFi’s stolen millions
Crypto data and media company Blockworks has acquired rival research platform Messari at a discount to its prior valuation, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported Friday. The deal joins two of the most prominent names in the crypto intelligence space.
Crypto data and media company Blockworks has acquired rival research platform Messari, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Bloomberg also confirmed the deal.
The acquisition joins two of the most prominent names in crypto data and research. Blockworks, cofounded by Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito, raised at a $192 million valuation in April from a round led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures also participating. The company had explicitly said it planned to use that capital to acquire competitors. Financial terms of the Messari purchase were not disclosed.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Blockworks paid more than $10 million for the company, a significant discount from a reported $300 million its was valued at in 2022
Messari’s Rough Year
Messari was already in a weakened position heading into the deal. In March, CEO Eric Turner stepped down alongside a round of layoffs as the company pivoted to an “AI-first” strategy focused on institutional research. CTO Diran Li assumed the chief executive role. Turner had himself taken over as CEO in 2024 after founder Ryan Selkis resigned following a series of controversial posts.
Messari also shelved its flagship Mainnet conference in New York, which had drawn thousands of attendees at its peak. The retreat, combined with leadership churn, left the research firm in a significantly diminished competitive position relative to the cycle highs when it was seen as the go-to source for institutional crypto intelligence.
Blockworks’ Roll-Up Ambition
Blockworks has moved aggressively from crypto media into data infrastructure. The company’s platform ingests trillions of rows of blockchain and exchange data from nearly 100 sources. It also operates Blockworks IR, an investor relations product for on-chain companies, and the Token Transparency Framework, a disclosure standard that has rated more than 30 token issuers and been presented to the SEC and CFTC.
Yanowitz has cast the data push in explicitly infrastructure terms. “Our mission is to build trust in onchain markets,” he said in April when announcing the fundraise. “Every liquid asset class in history has required data you can rely on, a way for businesses to communicate with investors, and disclosures that hold issuers accountable. In traditional markets, that infrastructure is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In crypto, almost none of it exists yet.”
Blockworks has positioned itself as the crypto equivalent of Morningstar, which built a durable financial data business alongside its media and ratings operations. Messari served a broadly similar market, with research reports, on-chain analytics, and an enterprise data terminal.
However, the two largest incidents were not simple smart-contract exploits of the type AI could engineer.
In one, a North Korea-linked group drained about $285 million from Drift Protocol after a six-month social-engineering campaign that won it admin access. For the other, the attacker exploited a single-verifier flaw that allowed roughly $292 million to be siphoned from Kelp DAO.
Another example hit on Tuesday, when Humanity Protocol, a decentralized human-identity service, lost over $30 million to a private-key compromise. CoinDesk found that a hacker gained access to three out of six private keys on one employee’s laptop,
Therein is the problem. While the most obvious smart-contract prompts may be exactly the ones Anthropic’s filters are designed to catch, the largest losses have not needed a contract bug.
The exploits, Ledger’s Guillemet noted, come from familiar weak points: social engineering, bad signing flows, exposed keys and human error.
A model like Fable does not need to hand over a finished exploit to change the economics of an attack. It can read public repositories, compare old versions of software, summarize audit reports and draft convincing messages that look for the small operational mistakes humans miss.
“These exploits remain rooted in social engineering and human error. “
A defender, in such an environment, has to secure every key path, every dependency, every signing flow and every privileged account. Because AI accelerates the scouting phase, the final signing step becomes more important. Private keys need to sit somewhere a compromised laptop cannot reach, and users need a trusted screen that shows what they are actually approving.
Yet the growing institutional interest has not translated neatly into ETH’s market performance, a disconnect that has frustrated many investors. Raman attributes that gap largely to timing.
“The sales cycles for institutions are especially long,” he said. “The piping is all in place. We just haven’t seen all the assets come onchain yet.”
He said his view is that Ethereum is currently in a transitional phase where the infrastructure has largely been built, but the scale of adoption has yet to be fully reflected in the asset itself. As more tokenized assets migrate onchain, he believes the market will eventually reevaluate ETH’s role as the asset securing the network.
“When you look at the headlines in retrospect, it’ll be: the global financial system’s internet moment happened on Ethereum,” he said.
Raman also pushed back on criticism surrounding the Ethereum Foundation, which has faced scrutiny over leadership changes and its evolving role in the ecosystem. He argues that the foundation’s willingness to step back is a feature, not a flaw.
“The substrate for the financial system can’t have a party controlling it,” he said. “The network is universal. The pieces are all there now. Let’s hand it off.”
Rather than acting as a central coordinator, Raman believes the foundation should focus on maintaining Ethereum’s core values — security, censorship resistance, privacy and open standards — while continuing work on long-term priorities such as zero-knowledge technology and quantum resistance.
Bitcoin climbed above $64,000 on Saturday, reaching an intraday high of more than $64,200. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is up more than 1% over the past 24 hours and is now up over 8% from its June low of just above $59,000.
Sentiment has also been supported by further positive developments on the geopolitical front in the Middle East.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister stated on X: “We are closer to a peace deal than ever before. With finalisation likely within the next 24 hours, Pakistan is preparing for the electronic signing of the agreement immediately afterwards, followed by technical-level talks next week.”
Meanwhile, Friday recorded the largest daily inflow into U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs since May, with net inflows totaling $85.9 million. The last time inflows exceeded this level was on May 14.
On Friday, a Standard Chartered analyst said that ETF holders have anecdotally been liquidating their positions to free up cash to participate in the SpaceX initial public offering. After SpaceX’s IPO launch on Friday, it may finally ease that selling pressure, the analyst added.
The comparison may indicate how much the U.S. crypto derivatives market could change over the next several years. While spot bitcoin ETFs opened the door for traditional investors to gain exposure to bitcoin through brokerage accounts, regulated perpetual futures could give both retail and institutional traders access to one of crypto’s most popular trading instruments without needing to use offshore venues.
Prediction market platform Kalshi, which launched U.S. perpetual futures last week, said on Wednesday that it already crossed $1 billion in trading volume.
Palmer argued that one reason perpetual futures became so successful outside the U.S. is their simplicity. Unlike dated futures, which require traders to manage expirations and contract rolls, perps allow positions to remain open indefinitely.
“I think it’s a simple derivative structure compared to some of the nuances of dealing with dated futures,” he said. “If I buy a June [future], then it expires, and if I want to keep my position on, I have to roll it.”
Kraken believes removing those complexities — and eventually allowing crypto assets to be used as collateral — could help bring U.S. traders closer to the experience available in international markets, he said.
For now, the company sees the launch of regulated perps as just the beginning. Despite crypto derivatives generating trillions of dollars in annual volume globally, Palmer said the U.S. market remains in its early stages.
