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.
Tether Investments said it led a $1.4 billion funding round for Neura Robotics, a German startup developing AI-powered humanoid robots, in what it called one of the largest investments into physical AI on record.
The funding, announced Wednesday, was projected to value Neura between $9 billion and nearly $12 billion when it first became public last November. Other participants in the round included Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon and NVIDIA, Neura said in a post on its website.
Neither Tether nor Neura responded immediately to a CoinDesk request for further information.
“AI is moving from the digital world into the physical world,” David Reger, founder and CEO of Neura Robotics, said in a statement. The company recently said it aims to produce 5 million robots by 2030 with about $1.2 billion orders already.
Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, is building its own technology right into Neura’s systems. The robots will receive their own independent digital wallets, allowing them to be paid automatically the moment they finish a job. They will also be able to make electronic payments to other machines, cutting out human managers, paperwork and bank delays.
Under CEO Paolo Ardoino, the El Salvador-based company is spending in a range of industries outside of the immediate crypto sector. Its growing portfolio includes investments in agriculture, brain tech and sports. The company made over $10 billion in profit in the first nine months of 2025 by investing rese
SpaceX (SPCX) shares will begin trading on Solana the same day the company is expected to list on Nasdaq, according to Sunrise, a tokenization infrastructure provider, and Backpack Securities, a regulated brokerage and crypto trading platform, which are launching a tokenized version of the stock called SPCX.
The token, issued by Backpack, represents ownership of underlying SpaceX shares and can be redeemed for those shares through Backpack’s brokerage platform. The firms say eligible shares can also be converted back into tokens, creating a bridge between traditional brokerage accounts and blockchain-based markets.
The launch attempts to bring newly listed U.S. equities onchain from day one. Backpack says SPCX holders will have a direct redemption path to the underlying security.
SPCX will trade on Solana around the clock, including outside traditional market hours. The token can be held in self-custody wallets and traded across supported Solana-based venues.
The announcement comes as interest in tokenized real-world assets continues to grow across the crypto industry. Stablecoins have become one of blockchain’s most successful use cases, and several firms are now betting that equities could follow a similar path if tokenized shares can be made accessible to a global investor base.
Banks are focusing on pulling stablecoins and tokenized forms of more traditional financial instruments into one integrated package to meet growing institutional demand for multi-asset flexibility.
Rather than waiting for a single winner to emerge, large asset managers and corporate treasuries are demanding a multi-instrument setup in which stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and tokenized money market funds all run on the same infrastructure.
“The demand from institutional clients is consistent: they are not waiting for any single instrument to prevail,” Thomas Eichenberger, chief strategy officer and deputy group CEO at Swiss-based digital asset bank Sygnum, told CoinDesk on Thursday in an email.
“They are asking how tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and tokenized money market funds can be combined and made interoperable, so a treasury function can move between them — permissioned settlement, 24/7 cross-border flows, yield with on-demand liquidity — under one regulatory framework they already trust,” he added.
Sygnum, which describes itself as the world’s first digital assets bank, partnered late last year with Swiss banking powerhouse UBS and PostFinance, a subsidiary company of the state-owned Swiss Post, to test blockchain payments between institutions on Ethereum.
The 2026 World Cup begins on June 11, and TopNod today launched ‘TopNod Million Cup’, a free-to-play World Cup prediction campaign.
The non-custodial wallet announced the TopNod Million Cup, a tournament-long prediction game launched in partnership with Pharos. The campaign allows users to make football predictions with free points instead of cash while competing for a prize pool of up to $1 million.
The launch comes as paid prediction markets are seeing heavy World Cup activity.
Polymarket’s 2026 FIFA World Cup winner market has generated more than $1.6 billion in total trading volume since launch, while its wider World Cup section tracks multiple tournament-related markets.
Kalshi is also offering World Cup-related prediction contracts, including markets tied to individual games and the tournament winner. CBS Sports recently described Kalshi as a platform where users can trade event contracts during the 2026 World Cup.
TopNod is taking a different route.
Instead of asking users to trade contracts or stake money, the wallet gives users free initial points after they download and register on the TopNod app. Users can then use those points across hundreds of prediction-based events covering the tournament.
The campaign includes match winners, goal counts, player performance and other event-based outcomes.
Correct predictions return users’ points and allow them to share points lost by incorrect predictors. Incorrect predictions are added to the relevant match pool and distributed among users who picked correctly.
TopNod says points cannot be purchased or traded within the platform.
That design is central to the product’s positioning.
Paid prediction markets aggregate conviction through capital, meaning prices can be influenced by traders willing to commit more money. A free points-based format may capture a broader fan signal, although it does not provide the same real-money price discovery as platforms such as Polymarket or Kalshi.
The campaign also adds an AI layer.
TopNod said its built-in AI will generate prediction probabilities and reference recommendations for matches using historical data, real-time odds and team dynamics. The feature gives users a machine-generated view alongside their own judgment.
That creates a human-versus-AI element throughout the tournament.
“TopNod’s vision is to make non-custodial wallets the best entry point for the public to connect with the next generation of the internet,” Jacky Zhu, CEO of TopNod, mentioned in a statement shared with AlexaBlockchain.
“With the TopNod Million Cup, we’ve brought together the world’s most resonant sporting event, an entertaining prediction experience, and cutting-edge AI technology. This is not only a carnival for football fans, but also a solid step forward for mass adoption of Web3 applications,” Jacky added.
The initiative matters because sports have become one of the most accessible consumer entry points for crypto and Web3 apps.
For many users, a free World Cup prediction game is easier to understand than self-custody, tokenized assets or DeFi.
TopNod is using the tournament as an onboarding funnel, with gameplay serving as the first interaction before users explore the wallet’s broader digital-asset features.
TopNod is a non-custodial wallet focused on tokenized real-world assets, including gold, silver, U.S. equities, ETFs and Treasury bonds. The wallet has gained over 1 million users in 4 months.
Its partner Pharos is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain focused on real-world assets, stablecoins and cross-chain liquidity.
Circle has also said USDC and its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol are coming to Pharos, positioning the network around compliant financial applications.
The model sits between two existing categories.
On one side are real-money prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, where users trade event contracts and market prices are treated as implied probabilities. On the other side are traditional free predictor games, which focus on engagement, leaderboards and social competition.
TopNod’s version borrows from both.
It has the points mechanics and accessibility of a free fan game, while using Web3 distribution, wallet onboarding and AI-assisted forecasting as differentiators. Its success will depend on whether football fans see enough entertainment value to keep playing after the initial prize incentive.
The campaign is now live through the TopNod wallet on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Eligible users can claim free points daily, join prediction events with a minimum entry of one point, complete tasks such as check-ins and referrals, and compete for a share of the prize pool based on their final points ranking.
The above article “TopNod Challenges Polymarket and Kalshi With Free World Cup Prediction Game” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/topnod-challenges-polymarket-kalshi-with-free-world-cup-prediction-game/
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Disclaimer: The information provided on AlexaBlockchain is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Read complete disclaimer here.
