The Solana Foundation formalized Solana’s institutional market-structure tier with Frontier Traders, requiring $500M in trailing 30-day DEX volume for VIP access, with the debut campaign running on SpaceX tokenized equity.
The Solana Foundation launched Frontier Traders Thursday afternoon, a formal institutional program for elite trading firms, with the first qualifying campaign opening on SpaceX tokenized equity Friday.
The entry bar sits at $500 million in trailing 30-day onchain DEX volume combined with $16 million in gross time-weighted open interest. Three VIP tiers scale from there: VIP 1 for $500M–$2B in volume, VIP 2 for $2B–$5B, and VIP 3 for $5B and above. Maker minimums are reviewed directly with firms that can provide competitive liquidity. Members receive trading rebates across all Solana venues, priority RPC access, early access to asset launches through Asset Express, and invites to quarterly closed-door briefings. Jupiter Exchange is the program’s featured venue partner; VIP enrollment closes June 18.
Firms below the volume threshold can qualify through time-limited campaigns. The first campaign opens on SpaceX tokenized equity, starting Friday. The choice of SpaceX as the debut asset places Solana directly in the pre-IPO derivatives race: Trade.xyz launched a synthetic SpaceX perpetual on Hyperliquid in May; Bybit and Kraken followed in June with 1:1 equity-backed SpaceX exposure via Backed Assets’ xStocks, bringing the active venue count to four before Thursday’s announcement.
The Frontier Traders website cites all-in fees of 0.4 basis points on SOL/USDC versus 2.6 basis points for Binance VIP 9, a 6.5x gap the Foundation frames as the case for routing institutional volume to Solana. The site also cites BisonFi Prop AMM generating more than $6 billion in trailing 30-day onchain volume, nearly three times Binance’s figure for the same period.
The program arrives as the Solana ecosystem applies pressure on Hyperliquid’s institutional perp share from multiple angles. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko backed a new perp DEX last month specifically aimed at pulling volume back to Solana. Frontier Traders layers direct financial rewards on top: firms in the program collect rebates from the Foundation for trading onchain, with structured access to the protocols shaping Solana’s market structure.
Surging oil prices and rising producer inflation have pushed traders to price in a stricter US Fed monetary policy.
Massive spot Bitcoin ETF outflows in June show the cryptocurrency is currently failing to act as a stock market hedge.
The Nasdaq 100 Index dropped 7.5% in the seven days leading up to June 10, wiping out $2.7 trillion in market value. The fallout represents more than twice the entire Bitcoin (BTC) market capitalization and has put traders on alert, especially as inflation data feels the heat from high oil prices. Traders now fear that Bitcoin support near $60,000 stands at risk.
Nasdaq 100 futures (left) vs. Bitcoin/USD (right). Source: TradingView
The ongoing war in Iran has driven Brent crude oil prices above $90, prompting investors to fear an economic slowdown and to price in a tighter monetary policy for longer than previously anticipated. Regardless of job market conditions, money available for consumption tends to decline.
The US Labor Department reported Thursday that its producer price index jumped 6.5% from May 2025, the highest level since 2022. Traders now anticipate 40% odds of an interest rate increase by the US Fed by September, up from 5% one month prior, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
Bitcoin futures contracts traded below the 4% neutral premium relative to regular spot markets on Thursday, indicating low demand for bullish leverage. Meanwhile, the upcoming $75 billion SpaceX (SPCX US) IPO was oversubscribed by more than 2x, signaling investors are not yet ready to abandon hope of further tech sector growth.
AI infrastructure companies are in desperate need of cash to fuel their build-outs, which partially explains the negative market reaction. Google (GOOG US) announced plans to raise $80 billion, while Oracle (ORCL US) and Super Micro Computer (SMCI US) followed suit with $40 billion and $7 billion, respectively. The Friday debut of SpaceX shares will likely set the tone for upcoming IPOs.
Selected AI sector stock performances. Source: TradingView & Cointelegraph
It seems premature to deem the AI sector a bubble after SpaceX marked the largest IPO in history at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Moreover, the US stock market reacted positively after US President Donald Trump called off planned strikes on Iran, citing renewed negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Bitcoin’s decline coincided with Strategy’s (MSTR US) decision to temporarily halt its Bitcoin accumulation to reduce convertible debt. As a result, Strategy’s cash position declined to seven months of dividend coverage, while its preferred variable Stretch (STRC US) shares distanced themselves from the $100 level that would allow further equity issuance.
US-listed Bitcoin spot ETFs daily net flows, USD. Source: SoSoValue
The $1.9 billion in outflows from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in June reinforced bearish sentiment, as the indicator serves as a proxy for institutional demand. Presently, Bitcoin can hardly be considered a hedge against an eventual stock market sell-off; the odds of a further correction below $60,000 should not be ruled out.
SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq at 9:30 AM ET Friday under SPCX. The same morning, Ondo’s SPCXon, Kraken’s xStocks SPCXx, a Backpack Securities-issued SPCX token on Solana, and Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO perpetual all settle into a single live tokenized-equity stack.
SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX tomorrow. The same day, a stack of crypto-native tokenized-equity products designed to mirror or redeem against SPCX goes live in parallel.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on Thursday, offering roughly 555.6 million shares for a $75 billion raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation, the largest IPO on record. Crypto-native exposure has built ahead of the bell on rails spanning institutional TRS desks to retail DeFi wrappers: Ondo Finance’s SPCXon, Kraken’s xStocks SPCXx, a Backpack Securities-issued SPCX token routed to Solana through SunriseDefi, and a Galaxy Digital total return swap referencing an on-chain SpaceX perpetual for institutional counterparties.
Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO SPCX perpetual, deployed by Trade.xyz, holds over $190 million in open interest and converts to a standard stock-linked perpetual once Nasdaq trading begins.
Friday’s open is the first time a marquee IPO has had a simultaneous on-chain equity market issued by a regulated brokerage, alongside a separate regulated tokenized-equity wrapper, alongside a live pre-IPO derivatives book waiting to settle into spot.
Ondo Finance SPCXon
Ondo Finance is listing SPCXon through its Global Markets platform, which is designed to bring public equities on-chain the same day they list on traditional exchanges. The product is backed 1:1 by SpaceX shares held in regulated custody and operates as a total-return tracker, with mint and redeem windows available to non-U.S. users via wallets including MetaMask on Ethereum and Solana.
Ondo’s own SPCX allocation registration page is live for retail interest, and DEXTools reported that tokenized SPCX exposure from Ondo, Backed Finance, and Dinari will arrive on Ethereum, Solana, and Base within hours of the Nasdaq open. Ondo and xStocks already lead the tokenized-equity category on Ethereum, per recent Defiant reporting.
Kraken xStocks Settlement
Kraken’s xStocks framework is offering SPCXx, a 1:1 backed tokenized representation of SpaceX equity, to customers in 110-plus supported regions including the European Economic Area, per Kraken’s blog. Eligible users submitted indications of interest at the IPO price range; successful allocations land in Kraken balances on the listing day and trade 24/7 across Kraken and other xStocks Alliance venues.
“From today, someone in 110 countries can register for SpaceX from their phone, and the moment it lists they trade it: nights, weekends, no waiting for an opening bell,” Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in Kraken’s announcement. xStocks are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited against shares in regulated custody, the same legal structure Defiant has previously detailed. xStocks are not available to U.S., UK, Canadian, or Australian users.
SunriseDefi and Backpack Securities Bring 24/7 Solana Redemption
Backpack Securities is issuing a separate SPCX token on Solana, with SunriseDefi routing the asset onchain and Meteora seeding the liquidity layer. Each token corresponds to one real SpaceX share purchased and custodied by Backpack Securities, a regulated U.S. brokerage, and holders can redeem the token for the underlying equity and move those shares to a traditional brokerage through ACATS and DTCC settlement rails. The mechanics were confirmed via the Solana Foundation’s official account and amplified by Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
SunriseDefi is built on Wormhole and has coordinated more than $360 million in spot volume across six prior tokenized launches; for SPCX it brings the asset to Solana DeFi from the first moment of listing.
Galaxy Digital’s Total Return Swap for Institutional Counterparties
Galaxy Digital said it structured a total return swap referencing a perpetual contract linked to SpaceX’s market-implied valuation, an institutional pattern that sits alongside the retail and DeFi-native wrappers going live the same day. A total return swap is a bilateral derivative in which one party pays the total economic return of a reference asset and the other pays a financing leg, so counterparties get the price exposure without holding the underlying.
The transaction is cash-settled and does not provide ownership of, rights to acquire, or delivery of SpaceX securities, with Galaxy noting it conducts security-based derivatives activity solely with eligible institutional counterparties.
“How does a TradFi hedge fund gain synthetic exposure to private-company valuation trends before a public listing? Onchain, via derivatives instruments already traded by institutions,” Galaxy wrote, describing the swap as a structure that lets institutional clients access SpaceX valuation moves through the same on-chain perpetual venues fueling retail tokenized-equity demand.
The Galaxy structure rounds out the institutional layer of the same stress-test Ondo SPCXon, Kraken xStocks, and the Backpack-SunriseDefi Solana token are putting on the retail and DeFi-native side: pricing for a single equity event is now discoverable across regulated tokenized wrappers, on-chain perpetuals, and bilateral institutional swaps, all settling against the same underlying reference.
Hyperliquid Pre-IPO Perp Settles Into Spot
The largest on-chain pre-IPO market for SpaceX sits on Hyperliquid. Trade.xyz deployed the SPCX-USDC perpetual on May 18 at a $150 reference price implying a $1.78 trillion valuation, and the contract now accounts for 94% of HIP-3 open interest on Hyperliquid per Arkham Intelligence. At Thursday morning, SPCX on Hyperliquid was implying a $2.01 trillion valuation at $154 per share, roughly 14% above the IPO price. Active positions transition to a standard stock-linked perp once Nasdaq trading begins, in the same conversion path the Cerebras pre-IPO contract took in May.
What to Watch at the Bell
The xStocks and Backpack tokens both depend on shares purchased through normal IPO channels landing in regulated custody before allocations are minted on-chain; the time between Nasdaq’s first print and the first on-chain mint is the gating telemetry for both products.
Ondo’s SPCXon will publish daily custody attestations once live, per its Global Markets design. The Hyperliquid perp converts mechanically once SpaceX’s spot price is established, and the reference rate that perpetual settles to is also the rate Galaxy’s institutional TRS will mark against.
Whether the cross-product basis between SPCXon, SPCXx, the Solana SPCX token, the Hyperliquid perp, and Galaxy’s swap reference tightens through the first 24 hours is the cleanest test of how well the crypto-native tokenized-equity stack actually mirrors the underlying equity.
The Fidelity Digital Dollar stablecoin deployed Curve Finance Stableswap LP positions and Uniswap LP positions simultaneously in a single Ethereum block Thursday evening, with Curve founder Michael Egorov noting the same-block execution as evidence of DeFi operational expertise.
The Fidelity Digital Dollar reportedly deployed liquidity to both Curve Finance and Uniswap in a single Ethereum block Thursday evening, with an on-chain watcher flagging the move as the Fidelity-branded stablecoin’s first foray onto permissionless DeFi rails.
LytninCrypto, an on-chain data tracker, posted the discovery Thursday, noting that the FIDD liquidity adder wallet set up Curve Finance Stableswap LP positions and Uniswap LP positions simultaneously. Curve founder Michael Egorov responded within six minutes. “Same block to both protocols, wow,” Egorov wrote on X. “@Fidelity do know how to use DeFi!”.
Fidelity Digital Assets has made no public statement specifically about the Curve or Uniswap deployment.
The Issuer and the Token
Fidelity Digital Assets, National Association, a federally chartered subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, issued FIDD in February. The stablecoin is backed 1:1 with cash and short-term US Treasuries, built on the ERC-20 standard on Ethereum, and designed for GENIUS Act compliance. Monthly reserve reports are published by the subsidiary on its website. Fidelity targets both institutional on-chain settlement and retail payments with the token.
The asset manager’s blockchain trajectory has built steadily: Fidelity filed to tokenize an on-chain Treasury fund, runs both a spot Bitcoin ETF and a spot Ethereum ETF, and added staking to its Ethereum ETF application. FIDD extends that posture to active liquidity infrastructure.
What the Same-Block Deployment Tells Us
Deploying liquidity to both Curve and Uniswap inside a single Ethereum block requires coordinating transaction calls in advance, typically through a scripted multi-call contract. Doing so in one block eliminates any window where FIDD would sit on one venue but not the other, a hygiene detail that matters for price consistency at launch. Together the two pools give FIDD coverage across the two deepest permissionless liquidity layers on Ethereum. Curve processed $34.6 billion in trading volume in Q1 2026, per earlier The Defiant reporting.
The Broader TradFi-DeFi Picture
The GENIUS Act, signed into law last year, created a compliance path for federally regulated stablecoin issuers and accelerated institutional launches. Stablecoin supply grew by $18 billion in the month following the Act’s passage, per prior The Defiant reporting.
Adding Curve and Uniswap pools as FIDD’s primary liquidity layer plants a regulated, Fidelity-issued dollar instrument inside the same DeFi composability stack that permissionless protocols use.
io.net is tying its token economy more closely to customer revenue.
The decentralized GPU network said today that it expects to burn at least 12 million IO tokens over the next year under a new tokenomics framework called the Incentive Dynamic Engine, or IDE.
The first burn is scheduled for June 11, the company’s third anniversary.
The move comes as io.net reports its strongest commercial traction to date.
The company said it has closed an $8 million enterprise contract, its largest agreement so far. The deal is expected to contribute about $650,000 in monthly on-chain network earnings.
io.net also said a second enterprise deal is in advanced stages.
The company has been positioning itself as a decentralized alternative to hyperscale cloud providers, offering GPU capacity for artificial intelligence workloads through a distributed network of suppliers.
That positioning has become more relevant as demand for AI compute continues to rise.
Large technology companies are spending heavily on data centers, chips and cloud infrastructure to support AI models. Goldman Sachs has estimated that 2026 capital spending by major AI hyperscalers has climbed above $500 billion in consensus expectations.
The pressure point is clear.
AI companies need more inference capacity, while access to high-performance GPUs remains concentrated among a small number of cloud providers.
io.net says its network is now processing up to 4 billion AI tokens per day. The company also says it has become the leading DePIN-native inference provider on OpenRouter, a platform that routes AI model requests across different providers.
OpenRouter currently lists io.net as a provider for multiple open-weight models.
The token burn is designed to connect that usage to IO supply.
Under the IDE, at least 50% of post-payout network revenue in IO tokens is permanently destroyed. The company says this shifts tokenomics away from inflationary incentives and toward a demand-linked model.
In simple terms, higher customer usage would lead to more token burns.
That is different from many DePIN models, where suppliers are often paid through token emissions before there is enough customer demand to support the network.
The supplier side is also central to the redesign.
io.net said the IDE pegs supplier payouts to a stable US dollar value. The goal is to reduce the risk that GPU providers leave the network when the IO token price falls.
That has been one of the core weaknesses in token-incentivized infrastructure networks.
When token prices decline, supplier rewards can fall in dollar terms. That can reduce available compute capacity and weaken customer trust.
io.net says built-in reserves are meant to absorb volatility in either direction.
The company said the model was stress-tested by CryptoEcon Lab, a third-party tokenomics research firm, under scenarios including a 55% demand collapse and a 50% token price crash. Supplier returns remained stable in those simulations, according to io.net.
“Most token economies in our space are still built around the hope that prices go up. Ours is built around the certainty that people are paying to use the network. That’s a fundamentally different foundation,” said Gaurav Sharma, CEO of io.net.
The burn target is also meaningful against IO’s current circulating supply.
CoinMarketCap data shows roughly 346.46 million IO tokens in circulation. A 12 million-token burn would represent about 3.5% of that amount, though the final impact will depend on future emissions, market supply and actual network revenue.
The broader question is whether io.net can sustain enterprise demand.
Decentralized compute networks have long argued that idle or underused GPUs can be pooled into a cheaper and more open alternative to centralized cloud infrastructure. But the sector has often struggled to prove consistent revenue at enterprise scale.
io.net’s latest numbers suggest that inference, rather than only training, may become a more practical use case for decentralized GPU supply.
Inference workloads are recurring. They also scale with real application usage.
That makes them more suitable for revenue-linked token models than one-off compute campaigns.
Still, execution risks remain.
Enterprise AI customers usually require reliability, predictable pricing, compliance controls and support. Centralized cloud providers continue to dominate that market because they offer integrated infrastructure and established enterprise relationships.
io.net’s pitch is that decentralization can reduce dependence on those providers.
The company says distributed GPU infrastructure can also reduce single points of failure and give developers access to compute without waiting for allocation from major cloud platforms.
With the IDE now live, io.net is also preparing for a more automated compute market.
The company said it is building toward an “agentic” future in which AI agents can autonomously procure, deploy and manage infrastructure through its Agent Cloud platform.
The significance of today’s announcement is narrower but more measurable.
io.net is trying to prove that a crypto infrastructure token can be tied to paying customers, not only speculative emissions.
The next test will be whether enterprise demand keeps growing after the first burn.
IO token price declined 5.39% in the past 24 hours. IO was trading at $0.1675 at the time of writing.
The above article “io.net Ties Token Burn to Real AI Demand After $8M Enterprise Deal” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/io-net-ties-token-burn-to-real-ai-demand-after-8m-enterprise-deal/
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SpaceX has priced its shares at $135, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, setting the stage for one of the most closely watched public market debuts in recent years.
The company sold 555.6 million shares at that price, raising $75 billion, making it the largest IPO ever, easily topping Saudi Aramco’s $30 billion in 2019.
The Elon Musk-led aerospace and satellite company is expected to begin trading on Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SPCX, giving public investors their first opportunity to buy shares. Based on the offering price, SpaceX will enter the public markets with a fully-diluted valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion.
The valuation is a pricey one, given SpaceX produced roughly $19 billion in revenue last year, driven by launches, government contracts and its rapidly growing Starlink satellite internet business.
Also notable is the company’s sizable bitcoin BTC$62,866.08 holdings. SpaceX held 18,712 bitcoin as of March 31. That would be valued at just under $1.2 billion at BTC’s current price around $63,500.
El Salvador — often called Bitcoin country —continues to refine its immigration framework to draw high-value foreign talent and capital, including families. Decreto 531, effective March 31, 2026, reduced the physical presence requirement for temporary residents from nine months to 90 calendar days per year, consecutive or accumulated. This adjustment targets entrepreneurs, investors, and remote professionals whose work involves frequent travel.
On paper, this new minimum requirement for residency status places El Salvador in a very competitive place compared to other tax haven-style nations. But what are the benefits of becoming a Salvadorian Tax resident, and is it really as easy as it sounds?
The Upside of El Salvador
El Salvador offers one of the most attractive tax regimes in Latin America for individuals with foreign-sourced income. The country operates a territorial tax system, meaning only income generated within El Salvador is subject to taxation.A major 2024 income tax reform explicitly exempts foreign-source income for both residents and non-residents. This means that independent remote workers, such as content creators, developers and entrepreneurs with foreign source income, can enjoy 0% Salvadoran income tax on those earnings, regardless of the amount.
There is also no capital gains tax on Bitcoin under the Bitcoin Law, no wealth tax, no inheritance or gift tax, making it particularly advantageous for those holding or transacting in BTC.
For entrepreneurs incorporating locally, Bitcoin and digital asset-related activities enjoy broad exemptions. Standard corporate income tax is 30% (or 25% under certain revenue thresholds), which is considered competitive across the board, but this is specifically on local profits. Qualifying businesses in free zones, involved in technology hardware or software exports and international services laws, can access 15 years of corporate tax exemptions, such as no income tax and no withholding, no VAT, no import tariff duties on equipment, tools and machinery, and no capital gains tax.
These tax incentive laws are clearly designed to draw talent and capital to the country and develop a manufacturing, software and hardware industry that exports services to the rest of the world and improves the local economy.
Quality of Life
The security enjoyed in the country after Bukele is undeniable. Katie Ananina, who helps families and individuals throughout the world acquire second passports via CitizenX, wrote favorably about El Salvador for families looking for a plan B.
The highlights of her six-week on-the-ground experience in the country with young children and while pregnant highlighted the country’s dramatic safety transformation. She noted that her family could walk day and night freely in both beach towns and San Salvador without fear. Practical daily life elements stood out positively: access to quality grass-fed beef and organic food options, reliable local driver networks via WhatsApp, and solid private and international school choices in San Salvador.
According to her research, healthcare includes a mix of public and private services, with homebirth legally supported through licensed midwives and the DoctorSV app aiding appointments and telehealth.
The Downsides and Tradeoffs of El Salvador
While full tax residency (triggered by more than 200 days of presence) provides the cleanest official status, many with primarily foreign income benefit substantially from the territorial framework even under the lighter 90-day immigration residency requirements. The wording and laws on this front are somewhat confusing, but Ananina clarified to Bitcoin Magazine that, as far as El Salvador is concerned, residents can start benefiting from the Salvadorian territorial tax regime on day one. The problem is whether the country of origin the person comes from agrees; most countries don’t usually give up their tax-generating citizens without a fight.
As a general rule, countries consider someone a tax resident if they spend more than 6 months within the country, but also have property, family, official residential address and phone number there, among other tests. Ananina, who clarified that she is not a tax lawyer or specialist, said that in her experience, in the case of a contest between the country of origin and El Salvador about a person’s tax residency, El Salvador is likely to yield.
As such, individuals and families looking to benefit from the residency tax benefits of El Salvador need to also understand the nuances of their country of origin’s tax residency laws as well.
The Local Economy
The local economy of El Salvador is also still in its early stages of development. The minimum monthly wage is between $270 and $409 per month, depending on the industry. This means that foreigners looking for local work in the country might find it hard to adjust if they are coming from wealthier nations. However, foreigners looking to hire local talent can get significant upside from the low wages.
The Bitcoin economy specifically is as seasonal as the quality of the beach in El Zonte, which disappears in the summer due to rising tides, scaring away the tourists and dampening the surf scene. In contrast, between October and March, many foreigners return to the country for a series of Bitcoin conferences and to enjoy the waves as the sand returns to the popular beach towns.
There’s a variety of Bitcoin-related companies that operate in the country throughout the year, and are headquartered or licensed in the country, like Tether, Boltz, Ocean Mining, and a long tail of startups and financial services companies. But as far as events and the social scene, the seasonal nature of the country remains a known trend.
On the AI front, El Salvador made international news earlier this year with a conference that attracted top talent from all over the world. The SovAI Summit was hosted on April 20–21, 2026, at the National Palace in San Salvador. The event, backed by the Bukele government, positioned the country as an emerging hub for sovereign AI, infrastructure, and innovation, blending discussions on AI sovereignty, compute resources, decentralized technology, and regenerative agriculture. Top guests and speakers included Carl Meacham, Head of Sovereign AI & Business Development at HydraHost, along with participation from major tech representatives from Google, Dell, and NVIDIA, among others.
Ether (ETH) traders are increasing their leveraged long positions despite ETH price being down 44% in 2026. Ether’s futures open interest at Binance has climbed to a record 3.7 million ETH, with the exchange accounting for more than 44% of total Ether futures.
Crypto analyst Darkfost noted that Ether futures activity has improved despite rising uncertainty driven by geopolitical tensions and weakening economic conditions.
The analyst noted that Binance now holds nearly 3.7 million ETH in open futures contracts, marking a new all-time high for Ether open interest on the exchange.
ETH open interest value on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant
Improving risk appetite for long positions also emerged as Binance’s weekly average taker buy-sell ratio increased to 1.0 from 0.95 after months of seller-led activity. A reading near 1.0 points to a more balanced market after a prolonged period of selling pressure.
The trend extends beyond Binance. Across all exchanges, the taker buy-sell ratio has risen to 1 from 0.94 over the past two weeks, indicating that buyers are becoming more active in market orders than sellers.
Ether: taker buy sell ratio across all exchanges. Source: CryptoQuant
At the same time, the speculative activity is accelerating faster than spot demand. Binance’s perp-spot volume imbalance indicator climbed to roughly 0.90, close to a record high, while its 30-day Z-score reached 2.53.
Perpetual futures volume stood near 5.57 million ETH compared with about 290,000 ETH in spot trading. This indicates leveraged participation is expanding far more quickly than activity in the underlying market.
ETH Perp-Spot volume imbalance indicator. Source: CryptoQuant
Related: Audiera’s AI token BEAT beats Bitcoin, Ethereum as price surges 1,500% in a month
ETH liquidation risk remains on both sides
Market analyst Amr Taha highlighted a growing split in exchange positioning. Binance recorded a 30-day open interest increase of 616,400 ETH, its strongest reading since 2019. During the same period, Gate.io posted a decline of 631,700 ETH.
Multi-exchange open interest 30-day change. Source: CryptoQuant
Liquidation heatmaps show nearly $8 billion in short positions clustered between $2,200 and $2,400. Those levels stand out as key liquidity zones if ETH price begins to push higher.
However, near-term positioning remains heavily leveraged on both sides. Roughly $1.72 billion in cumulative long liquidations sits below the current price of $1,500, while nearly $1.90 billion in short liquidation exposure is concentrated near $1,800.
The narrow gap between those pools highlights a market where both bullish and bearish positions carry significant liquidation risk.
ETH liquidation map. Source: CoinGlass
Related: ETH crash to $1K looms if key support breaks: Will futures traders step in?
The steward of the Cardano blockchain is seeding DeFi liquidity, backing an $80M venture fund and signing enterprise deals — a reversal of its hands-off posture that lands as onchain metrics fall and the network’s founder feuds with it over governance.
The Cardano Foundation is stepping out from behind the blockchain’s technical curtain to actively push adoption and seed its decentralized finance markets, a reversal of the supporting role it held for most of the network’s history, Chief Executive Officer Frederik Gregaard said.
“We believe that before we were about enabling adoption and now we’re getting much more focused on actually getting real transactions building onchain,” Gregaard said in a June 5 interview with The Defiant. “In the last six months we started to do some active market making and helped on some AMMs.”
The Cardano Foundation is providing an eight-figure ADA amount in liquidity to key Cardano stablecoin projects through multiple channels, he said. In April, the Foundation deployed ADA liquidity into Cardano-based market maker Flowdesk “to improve market depth, enhancing stablecoin liquidity for USDA and USDM,” Gregaard said.
The Foundation is also serving as constitutional administrator of the Orion Fund, an $80 million venture vehicle run with venture capital fund Draper Dragon whose first treasury tranche the community ratified in April. It also signed a three-year technology agreement with the Brazilian Olympic Committee this month.
The Foundation’s move lands in the middle of an unsettled debate over how involved a blockchain’s steward should be.
In a March mandate, the Ethereum Foundation recast itself as a steward of the network’s more cypherpunk values, as it purposely takes a step back from functions such as marketing, business development and a focus on the ETH price. Other foundations run the opposite way. The Solana Foundation, the Zug-based nonprofit behind one of the highest-activity Layer 1 blockchains, staffs marketing, business-development and institutional-partnership teams that actively court builders and capital. The Cardano Foundation is now publicly picking the more active model.
Ecosystem Turmoil
The repositioning comes as Cardano’s onchain activity contracts, some ecosystem projects have shut down, while token-holder governance has denied key proposals and co-founder Charles Hoskinson partially steps back.
Treasury withdrawals need at least two-thirds of participating delegated-representative stake to pass, and DReps have used that bar to reject or stall some of the largest requests tied to the Foundation, Input Output Global (IOG) and EMURGO. They voted down the 7.8 million ADA Cardano Summit budget in late May, killing the Foundation’s flagship event. They also turned on a request for 32.9 million ADA for IOG’s research budget. The same voters have backed spending they judged better targeted, ratifying the Orion Fund’s first tranche and a developer-tooling budget. Opposition has clustered around demands for tighter, auditable milestones.
Gregaard said the vote rejections are a signal of the governance system working and demanding accountability.
“I actually don’t think it was a problem that the Cardano summit didn’t get voted through. I could potentially, if I wanted, have centralized our voting power and pushed it through, but what we’re really looking at is how do we operate in a world where there are multi-stakeholders and how do we create that accountability?” he said.
Some of the ecosystem’s best-known applications, the analytics platform TapTools and the NFT marketplace JPG.Store, shut down within weeks of each other.
“Extremely many blockchains are artificially keeping some projects or some transactions alive,” Gregaard said. “From my point of view, I think it’s very healthy that there is some change, and I’m mainly looking at the diversity and impact of these projects.”
Onchain Metrics
ADA, the 19th-largest cryptocurrency at about $6.2 billion in market cap, traded near $0.17, down roughly 76% in the last year, versus a decline of about 40% in Bitcoin and Ether, according to CoinGecko.
Gregaard said that “the price doesn’t really reflect what’s happening onchain.”
Total value locked on Cardano stood at about $94 million, down from roughly $141 million a month earlier, ranking the chain 29th among blockchains, according to DeFiLlama.
Gregaard disputed DeFiLlama’s figure. He argued that DefiLlama undercounts Cardano TVL by “billions” because the metric does not capture staked ADA, and that the network runs on native assets rather than locking value inside smart contracts.
The slide extends to other activity measures, even in ADA-denominated terms Gregaard said provide a fairer read. Cardano’s monthly chain fees peaked above 1.2 million ADA in 2022, and monthly DEX volume topped 800 million ADA in 2023. Both have trended lower since, with recent months running well below those highs, according to DefiLlama data.
Pressed on the weakening DEX volume and transaction counts, Gregaard said the Foundation would now give more attention to onchain activity it had previously left to the ecosystem: “I do think that we need to take a bit more care of the TVL on Cardano, where before I was more focused on actual enterprise usage and replacing some existing systems.”
Stand on Adoption
Gregaard framed the change as a maturing of the Foundation’s mandate. “The Cardano Foundation’s role was never about adoption; that was mainly Charles’s company, IOHK, and Emurgo in Asia,” he said. “But we’re taking a larger stand on adoption.”
In a written response to follow-up questions, Gregaard said the direction flows from the Cardano 2030 vision, a strategy framework developed by the Intersect member organization with input from more than 700 participants.
An onchain “info action” asking delegated representatives to endorse the framework passed with 67.8% support in January, representing 3.77 billion ADA. The vote was a non-binding signal rather than a mandated roadmap, Intersect said at the time.
The Foundation has been moving in that direction for months. Its budget review process, published in April, scores proposals against five pillars derived from the 2030 strategy. The Foundation also took over stewardship of Project Catalyst, Cardano’s onchain funding program, from Input Output Global. And it registered as a delegated representative, building a stake of 360 million ADA in delegated voting power.
A Treasury-Funded Venture Bet
The Orion Fund is the largest single expression of the pivot. The vehicle, managed by Draper Dragon and accelerated through Draper University, targets real-world asset and institutional DeFi startups building on Cardano. The Foundation said it holds no role in managing the fund or its investments, instead supporting the administrative framework, including an ownerless special-purpose vehicle called Arouet Holdings designed to route returns back to the treasury.
Funding runs through the treasury, not the Foundation. The first tranche, a withdrawal of 50 million ADA, was ratified onchain when voting closed on April 14 with about 73% of participating delegated-representative stake in favor, clearing the two-thirds supermajority that treasury actions require. The full $80 million target depends on later tranches that each need separate governance approval, capped at 175 million ADA in total.
Reaching Beyond DeFi
The Foundation is also pushing use cases outside trading. In addition to the Brazilian Olympic Committee already mentioned, the Foundation highlighted its Project Swaminathan in India, an agricultural initiative run with Syngenta Foundation India, which has registered roughly 15,000 farms onchain, anchoring satellite-verified land and crop data to Cardano.
An onchain funding proposal for the project cited about 10,500 farm registrations as of May 5, at roughly 500 per day across districts in Maharashtra. Gregaard cited the farm work, along with enterprise relationships he said include Petrobras and European financial infrastructure firms, as evidence of adoption that does not depend on token speculation. Those enterprise figures are the Foundation’s own and could not be independently verified.
On interoperability, Hoskinson announced a LayerZero integration at the Consensus Hong Kong conference in February, and the connection went live in March through the Cardano Pentad, the group of core entities that includes the Foundation, Input Output Global, EMURGO, Intersect and the Midnight Foundation. The integration links Cardano to more than 160 blockchains. Gregaard described it in the interview as a recently announced bridge to larger ecosystems such as Ethereum.
A Quieter Role for Charles
Against community speculation that Hoskinson is leaving, Gregaard described the founder as one contributor among many.
Hoskinson posted “I’m taking a break” on June 3, walked it back a day later, and used a video address to criticize the Foundation’s governance and warn of a “wave of failures” among Cardano projects.
“He basically transferred from being a founder and CTO of the whole project to being a contributor on equal footing with many others,” Gregaard said, adding that Hoskinson is “building new technology” and remains a “large thought leader.”
Cardano’s Leios scaling testnet is due to launch on June 23, a technical milestone the network has tied to higher throughput.
Further Orion tranches will return to onchain votes, testing whether DReps will keep funding the venture bet. Gregaard said he plans to present the Foundation’s enterprise work, including its blockchain-based financial audit, at the Point Zero Forum in Zurich.
