A16z has thrown its weight behind the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in a growing federal-state standoff over prediction markets, opposing state regulators that try to shut down platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.
The venture capital heavyweight submitted the letter on Thursday in response to the CFTC’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking on prediction markets. It argues that state-level crackdowns, ranging from cease-and-desist letters to criminal charges, are creating barriers that undermine the federal agency’s mandate to provide “impartial access to its markets and services.”
In recent weeks alone, the CFTC has filed lawsuits against Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin, claiming that those states overstepped by trying to regulate markets that fall under federal jurisdiction. A16z backed that position, arguing that forcing exchanges to block users based on their state of residence directly conflicts with the CFTC’s impartial access rules.
“Being forced to deny impartial access to users in states that seek to license or prohibit certain event contracts will likely severely circumscribe available liquidity,” the firm wrote.
Related: Prediction market battle gets closer to Supreme Court
CFTC gets to define gaming: A16z
State attorneys general have countered that platforms offering contracts on sports outcomes and political events are running unlicensed gambling operations. A16z pushed back on that framing, arguing that the CFTC, not state legislatures, holds the authority to define what constitutes “gaming” under federal commodities law, given the agency’s decades of oversight over event contracts.
Beyond the jurisdictional fight, a16z also made a case for the social value of prediction markets, describing their pricing mechanisms as a distinct form of price discovery that surfaces crowd intelligence on uncertain outcomes. The firm also showed support for blockchain-based platforms, claiming that the onchain auditability of transactions makes regulatory oversight more effective.
Kalshi and Polymarket trading volume. Source: Token Terminal
The letter arrives amid the growing popularity of these platforms. As Cointelegraph reported, monthly trading volume reached $25.7 billion in March, with more than 80% of users classified as retail, defined as those trading less than $10,000.
Related: Kalshi, Polymarket among 27 prediction platforms banned in Brazil
Polymarket wants back into the US
Polymarket is in talks with the CFTC to lift the ban that has kept American users off its main platform since a 2022 settlement, in which the company paid a $1.4 million penalty and agreed to block US customers over unregistered event contracts.
A full return would require a formal commission vote, though the process may move faster given that four of the CFTC’s commissioner seats are currently vacant.
Magazine: How to fix suspected insider trading on Polymarket and Kalshi
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Crypto analyst Iso Ledger has warned XRP investors and holders to take a closer look before depositing funds into earnXRP, a new yield product tied to Upshift and the Flare Network. While others discuss the possibility of earning steady passive income through this new system, Iso Ledger shows more caution. In a recent breakdown, the analyst explained what happens when a holder deposits their XRP, focusing on fees, expected returns, and the risks involved.
EarnXRP Shows Slow Returns And High Fees
In an X post on April 29, Iso Ledger explained that while earnXRP may look attractive and profitable at first, the yield system is riddled with issues that delay actual returns and introduce high costs for XRP holders. The analyst showed that before any yield is earned, users already lose a portion of their XRP through multiple fees built into the process.
To show this, Iso Ledger broke down each step that occurs and the exact costs involved when holders deposit 1,000 XRP. He noted that the process starts by converting XRP into FXRP, a wrapped version on the Flare Network. He stated that just minting XRP to FXRP takes a small fee cut of about 0.5-1%.
After that, users have to deposit their 1,000 XRP into the Upshift vault, which takes another fee, leaving them with only 993 FXRP. On top of that, there is a network and service fee of about 1.149875 XRP. Moreover, when it’s time to exit, users also face a redemption fee of about 0.5%. Altogether, the total round-trip cost comes to about 13 XRP on a 1,000 XRP deposit.
Iso Ledger compared this cost to the expected yield for earnXRP. While the vault claims to target returns as high as 10%, he noted that a more realistic estimate placed profits at only 4% a year. This would mean users gain only about 40 XRP annually on a 1,000 XRP deposit. Based on this, the analyst said it would take holders roughly four months just to recover the initial fees before they see any real profit.
Iso Ledger also noted that increasing the deposit size does not change this result. Whether a user deposits 1,000 or 10,000 XRP, the percentage fees stay the same. He also added that the break-even timeline remains unchanged, and larger deposits still face the same delay before users turn any profit.
Risks Tied To EarnXRP Smart Contracts And System Structure
Beyond fees and potential returns, Iso Ledger highlighted several risks tied to EarnXRP. He explained that the system runs on smart contracts, which can sometimes have bugs or be targeted by hackers and bad actors. He also pointed to the risk of impermanent loss, where changes in market conditions can cause the value of a user’s funds to drop while they are locked in the system.
Iso Ledger also noted that EarnXRP carries trade risks when users borrow and deploy assets across markets. If the price gap between those markets gets smaller, returns can drop. To top it off, withdrawals on EarnXRP can take up to 72 hours, meaning users may not be able to access their funds quickly enough.
He raised another concern, noting that because FXRP is a wrapped asset, it depends on a bridge system. Iso Ledger claimed this dependency adds another layer of risk for XRP holders, as bridges have been known weak points in crypto systems. This concern echoes past incidents like the Kelp DAO exploit, where over $290 million worth of restaked Ether was stolen after a hacker exploited weaknesses in the rsETH bridge used by the protocol.
Furthermore, Iso Ledger added that after publicly auditing Upshift one week ago and sending five questions, only one response was made so far, “on it,” showing a lack of clear communication and transparency. He said he would rather wait for XLS-66d, an upcoming upgrade that could offer similar yield options directly on the XRP Ledger without needing wrapped assets or bridges.
XRP trading at $1.38 on the 1D chart | Source: XRPUSDT on Tradingview.com
Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com
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Wasabi Protocol is the latest victim in what appears to be a record bad month for DeFi hacks.
On-chain perpetual futures protocol Wasabi has been hacked with attackers draining over $5 million across Ethereum, Base, Berachain, and Blast, blockchain security firm PeckShield reported on X from their alerts account earlier today, April 30.
Wasabi acknowledged the incident on X, urging users to avoid using the protocol while investigations are under way:
“We’re aware of an issue and are actively investigating. As a precaution, please do not interact with Wasabi contracts until further notice.”
In a follow-up post, the team confirmed it had engaged professional on-chain security responders, including SEAL 911 and Blockaid.
Peckshield’s main X account added that it appears that Wasabi’s admin key has been compromised.
In response to Wasabi’s X post about the ongoing incident, on-chain investigator ZachXBT called out the protocol for reportedly using a single external owned account (EOA), referring to a user-controlled wallet managed by a private key, instead of more secure setups, like a multisig: “Why did a single EOA seemingly have so much control without basic safeguards?
DeFi’s Worst Month Yet?
The hack caps off a brutal month for DeFi, marked by two major exploits and over twenty smaller incidents. The former head of DeFi at Monad wrote on X today that April 2026 has turned out to be DeFi’s worst month in terms of losses from hacks and exploits:
“April 2026 was the worst month ever in terms of DeFi exploits — ~$635M lost in total, 28 incidents in 30 days.”
The month’s two largest incidents in terms of dollar losses were the Drift and Kelp DAO hacks. On April 1, Solana-based perpetuals exchange Drift Protocol suffered roughly $270 million in outflows, spanning more than 15 distinct token types, in what The Defiant reported as a North Korean state-linked operation six months in the making.
Then, on April 18, an attacker, also suspected of being North Korean state-backed, exploited a LayerZero bridge on Kelp, forging a cross-chain message that tricked the protocol into minting 116,500 rsETH with nothing locked on the source side. The attacker then deposited the unbacked rsETH into Aave as collateral and borrowed approximately $236 million in real WETH, as The Defiant reported.
The response to the Kelp incident has included an unprecedented collective effort among DeFi protocols and individuals, dubbed DeFi United, which has raised over $300 million to restore the backing of Kelp’s rsETH.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
This past week, just over 100 Ethereum core contributors gathered above the Arctic Circle — in Longyearbyen, Svalbard — for the Soldøgn Interop: a week of intense work on the Glamsterdam network upgrade.
Soldøgn followed last year’s Berlinterop, but returned to the format used by Amphora 🏺, Edelweiss 🏔️, and Nyota ✨: a single-track week of focused, multi-client progress toward a specific upgrade — in this case, hardening Glamsterdam.
By Friday, the group had delivered on its three core goals: alignment on a post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor of 200M, stable ePBS implementations running with external builders, and final EIP-8037 repricing numbers locked in. Meaningful progress was also made on Hegotá features like FOCIL and native account abstraction, as well as a slew of other topics.
Why Svalbard?
Svalbard is one of the few places on Earth where anyone, regardless of nationality, can live and work without a visa. It’s also home to the Global Seed Vault and the Arctic World Archive, two cold-storage facilities tunneled into the permafrost outside Longyearbyen. Between them they hold backups of crops, books, films, manuscripts, and source code that humanity might need a thousand years from now, including a snapshot of Ethereum’s source code. Last but not least, from late April through August, the sun doesn’t set in Svalbard. It has 24/7 uptime, just like Ethereum, which core devs made the most of during the week!
Harden Glamsterdam, Scale Ethereum
The week’s goal was to harden Glamsterdam implementations and derive a target for a post-upgrade gas limit floor. Raising the gas limit safely is a multi-dimensional problem and Glamsterdam tackles several of them: how blocks are built and proposed, how much headroom client implementations have under load, and how state-creation costs scale alongside throughput.
In practice that meant ending the week with a stable multi-client Glamsterdam devnet running the latest ePBS, repricing and block access list specs, along with benchmarking data to anchor a credible gas limit proposal.
Most of the time was spent heads down writing code, often until the early hours of the morning, punctuated by breakout sessions to align on design decisions and discuss longer-term roadmap items.
Three EF teams provided infrastructure for the week: EthPandaOps shipped ethIQ and a panda MCP server to support teams’ agentic workflows; Protocol Support set up soldogn.xyz as the single source of truth for interop goals, schedule, and notes; and the EF Digital Studio team captured the week on film. Expect the very first interop documentary 🔜!
ePBS
Beyond cleaning up the proposer/builder relationship, ePBS restructures slots by adding deadlines for block construction, payload reveal, and attestations. This makes explicit how much time can be allocated for execution, increasing the head room we have to raise the gas limit.
Teams kicked off the week aiming for a 4 EL × 4 CL Glamsterdam devnet by Monday evening. The first attempts surfaced enough issues to push the target to Tuesday, when a 4×3 configuration ran stably enough for stress testing to begin.
From there, the rest of the week was an ePBS hardening cycle: stress test, expose edge cases, fix, repeat. A Tuesday-morning Builder API breakout substantially simplified the spec around validator registration, the bid/header/commitments flow, the trust model for builder payments, and circuit-breaker behavior. Mid-week debugging zeroed in on cross-client edge cases — notably around execution-request invalidation of beacon requests, where a new test suite revealed a gap across every client implementation. By Thursday morning, CL teams were reporting stable ePBS while EL-side bid pathways were still being debugged; those resolved through Thursday into Friday. Two questions remain genuinely contentious for ACD: whether a request signature should commit to the receiving builder, and how to keep a 1 ETH-staked-builder design resilient against P2P Sybil-based liveness attacks.
By Friday, nearly all clients were running together on glamsterdam-devnet-2 with the external builders pipeline tested end-to-end!
BAL Optimizations
If ePBS is the consensus-layer side of the Glamsterdam scaling story, the execution layer counterpart has two dominant pieces: gas repricings and Block-Level Access Lists. By giving clients enough information about a block’s read/write set up front, BALs enable parallel execution, batched I/O, and parallel state-root computation, all of which determine how big a block clients can comfortably handle.
The Soldøgn BAL track ran on its own devnets, separate from the Glamsterdam ePBS chains, so optimization benchmarks weren’t entangled with consensus-layer stabilization work. Each optimization sat behind its own feature flag so the week’s measurement work could compare them in isolation rather than as a single bundle. The BAL benchmark dashboard and leaderboard surfaced each client’s worst-case scenarios across the test suite — by focusing on raising the slowest paths first, teams could lift the gas limit floor across the board, not just for the fastest implementation.
Gas Repricings
Glamsterdam includes a number of EL gas repricings, calibrating costs to better match resource usage at higher throughput. EIP-8037, the state-creation gas cost increase, sits at the core: it raises the price of writing new state so that a higher gas limit doesn’t translate into unbounded state growth.
Heading into Soldøgn, the 8037 spec carried dynamic per-state-byte pricing tied to the block gas limit, which made testing combinatorially painful (one fuzz matrix per gas limit band) and benchmarking nearly intractable. Teams agreed early in the week to drop dynamic pricing in favor of a fixed cost_per_state_byte, with future repricing handled at fork boundaries rather than within a fork.
The accounting model itself took a more iterative path. The Monday breakout moved state-gas accounting from mid-execution to end-of-call-frame; a Tuesday follow-up closed out account creation costs, code deposit costs, and CREATE-transaction reverts; Wednesday surfaced reservoir refund/refill edge cases that forced a rethink. The Thursday breakout reverted accounting to opcode level, having concluded that the real complexity sat in the reservoir model, not in the accounting computation. By Friday the spec had stabilized on bal-devnet-6, with the BAL track delivering the final repricing numbers.
This whole arc highlights one of the most important aspects of interop: the ability to resolve complex spec, implementation, testing, debugging, and design issues in hours instead of weeks. At their best, interop weeks can compress a month of asynchronous progress into each day!
By Friday, the three threads converged on the headline number for the week: a credible 200M post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor. This significant increase is possible because ePBS structures the slot to give execution more time, BAL optimizations give clients the throughput headroom under that structure, and 8037 ensures the higher gas limit doesn’t translate into runaway state growth.
Other Glamsterdam Threads
Beyond ePBS, BALs and repricings, most of the remaining Glamsterdam scope was hashed out across breakout sessions.
CL teams finalized decisions on smaller Glamsterdam EIPs: EIP-8061 (exit/consolidation churn increase) was included in glamsterdam-devnet-1; EIP-8080 (exits via the consolidation queue) was declined for inclusion; EIP-8045 (slashed-validator duty removal) was scoped down to proposer duties within the look-ahead window only; and EIP-7688 (SSZ stable containers) remains in Glamsterdam scope but is held out of glamsterdam-devnet-1 while the team works through bounded gossip-message size for attestations under progressive lists.
A Wednesday-morning EL/CL sync architecture breakout deferred EIP-8237 out of Glamsterdam in favor of preserving optionality for a longer-term “top-up sync” architecture in a future fork. In its place, the room agreed to draft an EIP that normalizes forkchoiceUpdated / newPayload / getPayload sequencing, specifies a snap-sync initiation handshake, and tightens valid/invalid consistency between the engine API surfaces.
Hardening was a constant theme of the week. A Thursday session covered fork-choice compliance testing frameworks, the Diamond repo of reproducible CL edge-case scenarios, and buildoor, PandaOps’s external-builder testing tool, demoed mid-session to a long stream of attack scenarios attendees suggested on the spot.
Beyond Glamsterdam
Several breakouts looked toward Hegotá and the forks that follow.
A deliberately proposal-agnostic session on native Account Abstraction kicked things off, working through the requirements and constraints any future design must satisfy. Feature-set goals like alternative signature schemes, aggregation, batching, recovery, gas sponsorship, flexible nonces, and keystore wallets sat alongside hard constraints around public-mempool compatibility, statelessness, and L2 DoS resistance.
A Thursday FOCIL breakout focused on implementation updates: early prototypes were already functional, with multi-client interop and a dedicated FOCIL devnet as the immediate next steps. Two notable design decisions were also made: disabling FOCIL during 2-epoch non-finality (mirroring proposer-boost circuit-breaker behavior), and adopting an index-based bookmark approach for compatibility with frame transactions / EIP-7702.
Further out, a long-running ETH P2P track sketched a QUIC-based replacement for libp2p with privacy-by-default and slot-aware integration, alongside an erasure-coded broadcast prototype that simulated ~6× faster propagation than GossipSub on 2.4 MB payloads. The CL track also surfaced strong sentiment toward eventually deprecating consolidations entirely — declaring a final fork that supports them, then forcing exit-then-redeposit afterwards — as the cleaner long-term answer to validator-set state growth.
ACD Process
On Wednesday afternoon, Nixo and Ansgar, the two ACDE co-leads, ran a session to collect input from core contributors about the ACD process. The session revisited the headliner construct, debated the pros and cons of having a strawmap, and formalized EIP SFI criteria. The room broadly wanted to keep headliners but loosen the EIP-vs-theme rigidity, accepting “theme + candidate EIP” as a viable pattern. The straw map’s per-fork year assignments past 2026 were flagged as overcanonicalized and likely to be softened. A new four-point SFI definition was put forward, with ACDT signaling readiness and ACDE/ACDC retaining the final call. A new prioritization-ordering process — produced after CFI decisions and reflected in the meta-EIP — will replace SFI’s old role of driving devnet inclusion, starting with Hegotá.
On the call-coordination side, Alex Stokes announced he will be taking a three-month sabbatical starting next week, with Pari covering ACDC moderation in the interim and Barnabas filling in for ACDT. All told: Nixo and Ansgar chair ACDE, Pari is interim on ACDC, and Mario, Barnabas, and Danceratopz rotate ACDT moderation.
Everything Else
In addition to all of the above, teams used the in-person time to make progress on everything from better test harnesses (compressing Hive feedback loops from hours to minutes), to engine-API plumbing improvements (gossip dedup, batched calls, and light-client-driven head discovery), to hard tradeoffs around client diversity, and many other topics. The full list of session notes is available at soldogn.xyz.
Next Steps
From here, teams head home to take what was prototyped during the week and make it production-ready. Expect the next several weeks to be heads-down on hardening client implementations against the new specs, finalizing test coverage, and turning Soldøgn’s draft PRs into merged code.
As always, the final decisions for values such as the 200M gas limit target and final repricing numbers will be made and shared publicly on AllCoreDevs calls. Expect these to be the major topics of the next week!
Thank you very much to everyone who came all the way up to 78°N and made this week a success! Special shout out to EthPandaOps for whipping the group into shape every day, and to everyone who worked under the midnight sun to make sure we hit our daily goals — including the Ethrex crew, joining us for their first interop. It was an incredibly productive week, and luckily we’ll have a full short film to remember it by ☀️
Zest Equity, a digital transactional infrastructure company powering private-market transactions, today announced the appointment of Zeid Barghouti as Senior Executive Officer of its FSRA-regulated entity, ZE Transaction Solutions Limited (“Zest ADGM”).
Barghouti, Senior Executive Officer of the ADGM-based entity since its inception, leads business development and partnerships at Zest Equity, driving commercial growth across the firm’s SPV platform and overseeing the regulated entity through which the firm’s escrow and arranging services are delivered from the ADGM.
As Head of Business Development and Partnerships, Barghouti leads commercial growth across Zest Equity as a group, with responsibility for strategic partnerships, client relationships, and market expansion across MENA. In his new role as Senior Executive Officer, he oversees Zest ADGM and will support the continued development of its escrow and transaction facilitation solutions for private markets.
Barghouti brings an established record in regulated financial services across the Gulf region. Prior to Zest Equity, he served as Senior Executive Officer at Capital Investments DIFC Ltd, and held senior treasury and financial institutions roles within Capital Bank Group. He holds an MBA from the University of Manchester and a BSc in Business Management from the University of Surrey.
The appointment reflects Zest Equity’s commitment to building institutional-grade leadership as the company scales its digital transactional infrastructure across private markets. Since its founding, Zest Equity as a group has digitized more than USD 230 million in transactions across over 200 deals, and has received authorisation from the FSRA for Zest ADGM to offer both its Zest Arrange and Zest Escrow products.
“Zeid has been instrumental to the commercial development of Zest Equity, and the regulatory remit he now assumes is the natural next step as we scale the digital infrastructure underpinning private-market transactions,” said Zuhair Shamma, Co-founder and CEO of Zest Equity. “His combination of regulatory experience and commercial acumen is exactly what this stage of the business demands. His leadership will be central as we scale the institutional infrastructure private markets require.”
“Zest Equity occupies a distinctive position in the regional private markets landscape and Zest is a genuine foundation for institutional growth in the region’s private markets,” said Barghouti. “I look forward to contributing further to its development and to the firm’s broader commercial expansion across the region’s private-market ecosystem.”
Zest ADGM is regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and delivers the firm’s payment services and arranging deals in investment services to clients across MENA and beyond.
The Ethereum Foundation has completed a third over-the-counter (OTC) sale of ETH to BitMine Immersion Technologies, offloading another 10,000 ETH at an average price of $2,292 per coin, worth roughly $22.9 million.
“This sale funds the Ethereum Foundation’s core operations and activities, including protocol R&D, ecosystem development, community grant funding and more,” the Foundation wrote in a Friday post on X.
The sale follows a nearly identical 10,000 ETH transaction completed just one week earlier at $2,387 per coin. The Foundation’s first sale to BitMine came in March, when it sold 5,000 ETH at around $2,043. Combined, the Foundation has sold approximately $47 million worth of ETH to BitMine in the past week alone.
Ethereum Foundation sells 10,000 ETH. Source: Ethereum Foundation
The move also comes after the foundation unstaked 17,035 ETH worth roughly $40 million last week, apparently dropping its stated goal of 70,000 staked ETH.
Related: These 3 Ethereum metrics favor an ETH price rally to $6K
EF under scrutiny over ETH sales
The repeated sales have drawn criticism from the community. “Why do you need $46 million in 2 weeks?! How much are you guys burning and what for? Why is no one from the devs taking ETH directly as payment?!” one user wrote in response to the announcement.
The Foundation has faced scrutiny over its ETH sales before, and at one point last year said it planned to limit them. It has since moved to offset some of that pressure by staking a portion of its holdings.
ETH is currently trading at around $2,303, largely flat over the past day, according to data from CoinMarketCap. However, the token is down by more than 53% compared to its all-time high of $4,953 registered in August last year.
Related: Ether treasuries need liquid staking edge to beat ETFs, says Lido exec
BitMine nears 5 million ETH
BitMine, chaired by Tom Lee, is the largest Ethereum treasury company by holdings, with nearly 5 million ETH on its books. The milestone was reached after the firm added 101,901 ETH in its biggest weekly purchase of the year.
The company has also been aggressively staking its holdings, with 83% of its cumulative ETH, around 4.19 million coins worth roughly $9.5 billion, now staked as of Thursday, up from about 70% the previous week.
Magazine: Your guide to surviving this mini-crypto winter
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.
The following is a fintech and wider digital and economic development of the only English-speaking Central American nation. This is the overview of Belize in 2026.
As a small, open economy long reliant on tourism, agriculture and offshore financial services, the country is navigating a shift towards digital finance with caution. They are balancing innovation with regulatory credibility in an increasingly scrutinised global financial landscape.
The only non-Spanish speaking nation of Central America, the country of over 400,000 people, according to the World Bank, has a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at around $6,500. The country’s economy is valued at $3.5billion, with tourism, agriculture (notably sugar, citrus and bananas) and financial services forming the backbone of economic activity.
Digital economic transformation
Belize’s digital transformation is shaped by its dual objectives: modernising its economy while maintaining compliance with international financial standards. Following years of “de-risking” pressures from global correspondent banks, the country has prioritised building a more transparent and resilient financial system.
Internet penetration has reached approximately 70 per cent, with mobile usage higher, providing a base for digital adoption, according to DataReportal.
Digitalisation is increasingly seen as a tool for reducing informality, improving efficiency and restoring confidence in the financial system. Smaller Caribbean and Central American states such as Belize are leveraging fintech not only for innovation, but for rebuilding trust and maintaining access to global financial networks.
Financial services sector
The country’s financial hub is Belize City, where commercial banks, offshore financial institutions and regulators are concentrated. One of the largest banks is Belize Bank, which plays a central role in both domestic banking and digital service expansion.
Belize’s financial services sector is relatively small but internationally connected, with both domestic and offshore components. Digital transformation has been gradual, reflecting the need to balance innovation with regulatory scrutiny.
The Central Bank of Belize has played a central role in guiding this evolution. Key initiatives include:
Modernisation of the national payments system – The Central Bank has worked to enhance payment infrastructure, promoting electronic transactions and reducing reliance on cash.
Promotion of digital payments and financial inclusion – Efforts have focused on expanding access to digital financial services, particularly for underserved populations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Strengthening regulatory frameworks – Belize has prioritised compliance with international standards, including anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) frameworks, while gradually enabling fintech innovation.
Support for mobile and online banking – Banks have been encouraged to invest in digital platforms, improving customer access and service delivery.
The central bank’s approach reflects a measured, compliance-driven strategy, where digitalisation is pursued alongside financial stability and international credibility.
Financial inclusion and fintech
Financial inclusion in Belize is moderate compared to regional peers. Estimates suggest that approximately 60 per cent of adults have access to a formal bank account, with gaps remaining among rural and lower-income populations, according to the World Bank.
Digital financial services are helping to address these challenges by providing remote access to banking services, reducing transaction costs, and supporting small businesses and informal economic activity. Nonetheless, deeper engagement, particularly in credit, savings and insurance, remains limited.
Belize’s fintech ecosystem is still in its early stages, with an estimated 30 fintech and digital financial service providers, primarily focused on payments, remittances and digital banking.
Key players include the likes of the country’s first digital wallet E-Kyash (by Wallet Factory) and DigiWallet (by Telepin).
The dominant activities in the country remain to be bank-led and telecom-supported. Examples include the likes of: Belize Bank (they are expanding digital banking services and mobile platforms), Atlantic Bank (they are investing in online banking and digital financial services), and Smart Belize (they are supporting mobile-based financial services through telecom infrastructure).
Also, despite still developing, organisations such as the Belize Fintech Association are playing an emerging role in the country.
Conclusion: steady progress in a constrained environment
Belize’s fintech journey is defined by balance. This is between innovation and compliance, ambition and caution. In 2026, digital financial services are gradually expanding access and improving efficiency. While challenges remain, the country is laying the groundwork for a more inclusive and resilient financial system.
April’s exploits were driven less by smart contract bugs and more by social engineering, bridge spoofing, and AI-assisted reconnaissance.
DeFi protocols and crypto infrastructure suffered 28 separate exploits totaling $635.2 million in April, the highest monthly incident count ever recorded by DefiLlama and roughly four times the $167 million stolen across the entire first quarter.
The incident count nearly doubled the previous monthly peak of 15, set just one month earlier.
Monthly Hack Totals – DeFiLlama
In dollar terms, April ranks as the sixth-largest month on record, but the concentration was extreme: the $293 million Kelp DAO bridge exploit on April 18 and the $285 million Drift Protocol drain on April 1 accounted for $578 million, or 91% of the monthly total. TRM Labs has linked both attacks to North Korea, and now estimates that DPRK-affiliated actors are responsible for 76% of all crypto hack losses recorded in 2026, with cumulative theft exceeding $6 billion since 2017.
The Kelp incident, in which an attacker forged a cross-chain message through the protocol’s LayerZero bridge to release 116,500 rsETH against no source-chain backing, triggered the largest coordinated industry response of the cycle, with the DeFi United coalition raising over $300 million to restore rsETH’s backing.
Beyond the two headline events, the long tail of April incidents underscored a broadening attack surface. Rhea Lend lost $18.4 million on April 16 to a fake-collateral exploit, sanctioned Russia-linked exchange Grinex was drained of $15 million in a hot wallet breach the same day, and Wasabi Perps closed the month with a $5.5 million admin key compromise on April 30.
Is AI to Blame?
A growing number of analysts are pointing to AI as a structural driver behind the surge.
TRM noted in its report that North Korean operators appear to be incorporating AI tools into reconnaissance and social engineering workflows, consistent with the multi-month staging behind the Drift attack.
Independent analyst DefiIgnas argued that the broad sweep of smaller exploits also fits an AI-assisted pattern, with attackers likely using frontier models to scan for protocols that are rarely updated, share vulnerabilities with previously hacked projects, and hold at least $100,000 in their contracts. The Sweat Foundation contract on NEAR, drained for $3.5 million on April 29, fit that profile, with its core DeFi feature last updated seven months before the exploit.
The shift away from smart contract bugs toward operational and human attack vectors continued to define the month. Of the 28 incidents tracked, the largest losses stemmed from infrastructure-level compromises rather than code vulnerabilities, with social engineering of multisig signers, bridge message spoofing, and admin key compromises driving most of the damage.
“The Drift hack started with months of relationship-building at conferences before a multisig was compromised. KelpDAO was hit when attackers quietly swapped out server software and waited for the right moment. These are patient, well-resourced operations,” Certora CEO Seth Hallem told The Defiant.
“The fix isn’t more code audits – it’s a whole company approach to threat modeling and security best practices,” he added.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Monument Technology entered into a new partnership with Castle Trust Bank to deploy its cloud-native Banking Platform as a Service (BPaaS). The deal marks Monument Technology’s second major client and its first partnership with a UK-regulated bank.
The agreement will see Castle Trust Bank migrate its entire savings business onto Monument Technology’s managed solution. Implementation is already underway, with the project targeted for completion in early 2027.
Modernising the savings ecosystem
Castle Trust Bank, which originally launched in 2012 and became a fully regulated bank in 2020, currently offers a range of savings products, including ISA accounts, alongside specialist property and consumer finance through its Omni business.
By leveraging Monument Technology’s BPaaS—which seamlessly combines core banking, payments, and customer channels into a single solution—Castle Trust Bank aims to reduce its reliance on legacy systems and accelerate product development. This migration forms a core part of the bank’s broader strategy to invest in its technology infrastructure and support future growth, which includes the upcoming introduction of a new Easy Access product range.
A milestone for Monument
For Monument Technology, securing Castle Trust Bank represents a significant milestone. According to the provider, it demonstrates institutional confidence in both the technology and its delivery model for upgrading and transforming established savings businesses.
The BPaaS platform is designed to evolve collaboratively; enhancements and features developed for one client are subsequently made available across the wider client base. This latest deal follows Monument Technology’s confirmation earlier in April that it had successfully completed its first full deployment with the Ecology Building Society, providing a live proof point for the technology within a regulated environment.
Executive insights
Nick Lawler, chief commercial officer at Monument Technology
Nick Lawler, chief commercial officer at Monument Technology, highlighted the growing momentum behind modern, scalable platforms.
“Castle Trust Bank is implementing a Banking Platform as a Service that will allow it to scale more effectively, streamline its savings operations and bring products to market more efficiently. Ultimately, this is about putting in place a platform that will support their business for the long term.”
Nick Bennett, Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Castle Trust Bank, emphasized the strategic importance of the investment for the bank’s future trajectory.
“By moving to a more modern platform, we are better equipped to innovate and enhance our proposition as the UK Savings market continues to evolve, while maintaining a highly resilient and consistent core offering.”
The US CLARITY Act, which aims to provide the US crypto industry with more regulatory clarity, could now move closer to becoming law after new stablecoin yield provisions were published, according to Coinbase chief legal officer Faryar Shirzad.
“It’s time to get CLARITY done,” Shirzad said in an X post on Friday, after US Senator Thom Tillis and US Senator Angela Alsobrooks published the final text aimed at settling the stablecoin yield dispute between the banking and crypto industries, which has centered on whether such yields would harm the banking system’s competitiveness.
“In the end, the banks were able to get more restrictions on rewards, but we protected what matters – the ability for Americans to earn rewards, based on real usage of crypto platforms and networks,” Shirzad said.
Extract of the “SEC 404. Prohibiting interest and yield on payment stablecoins” document. Source: Alex Thorn
The text titled “SEC 404. Prohibiting interest and yield on payment stablecoins” states that no crypto firm may pay “any form of interest or yield” to customers solely for holding stablecoins, akin to a bank deposit or any similar interest-bearing product.
Source: Patrick Witt
However, it allows firms to offer rewards tied to “bona fide activities.” Some industry executives voiced frustration with the ruling. Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz said, “The clarity of not getting risk-free yield on your dollars without using a bank.”
Polymarket traders anticipate 55% odds of CLARITY passing in 2026
It marks a significant step forward for both the legislation and the broader crypto industry, as the stablecoin yield debate had been one of the main roadblocks delaying its passage, despite expectations earlier this year that it would move through Congress.
Source: Toly Yakovenko
“Now that this issue is behind us, it’s time to focus on the broader bill,” Shirzad said.
Traders on the Polymarket crypto prediction market now see a 55% chance of the CLARITY Act being signed into law in 2026, up 9% over the past 24 hours.
Many in the industry are now calling for the bill to be marked up. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said shortly after the announcement, “Mark it up.”
Senate Banking Committee could schedule markup “imminently”
Galaxy Digital head of firmwide research Alex Thorn said the “release of text suggests that Senate Banking will schedule markup imminently, as soon as the week of May 11.”
Related: Spot Bitcoin ETF outflows top $490M: Is BTC’s rally losing momentum?
However, Thorn warned that he expects “the banks to increase their opposition efforts.”
US Senator Bernie Moreno recently said that he anticipates the CLARITY Act to “get done” by the end of May. On April 11, US Senator Cynthia Lummis said, “It’s now or never.”
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