Finance, Macro & Geopolitics. check Highlights for my work 🔖
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Maple's total AUM sits at $4.77 billion as of September 24, up from $4.46 billion just a week earlier, roughly $310 million in net new AUM in seven days.
As per the @maplefinance data, the growth is broad-based rather than concentrated in one product.
syrupUSDC leads at $2.9 billion, up from $2.59 billion.
syrupUSDG rose to $381.21 million from $355.71 million.
Maple Institutional climbed to $860.41 million from $834.31 million.
syrupUSDT is the outlier, dipping to $628.26 million from $678.08 million.
Three of four products growing while the institutional tranche keeps expanding is a healthier signal than one product carrying the whole number.
Protocol revenue has recovered every month since bottoming in May. August closed at $1.47 million in monthly protocol revenue, up from the May low, with June and July printing sequential gains before it. That's three consecutive months of revenue expansion after a dip that ran from the January 2026 peak through spring.
The buyback program is where the thesis gets specific. August saw $147,098 deployed to acquire 676,293.73 SYRUP at an average price of $0.2175.
ethereum:0x643c4e15d7d62ad0abec4a9bd4b001aa3ef52d66 price has increased more than 1.45x from its June low of $0.15 to August's $0.2175 average, and the program keeps buying through that range rather than pausing.
The case for SYRUP going into the next cycle rests on real cash flow backing the token, not emissions. SYRUP accrues value through a buyback funded by actual protocol revenue, which is itself funded by real credit spreads on close to $4.8 billion in AUM now. That's a structurally different setup heading into a bull market: rising AUM increases revenue, rising revenue increases buyback size, and buyback demand compounds against a token supply that isn't being diluted by liquidity mining.
Institutional credit protocols with recurring revenue are rare in this cycle, most of the AUM growth in DeFi still comes from restaking and points programs rather than actual lending spreads.
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Hope y’all liked it
@Castanoartzz
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@thelearningpill
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@TheDeFiKenshin
@Tom_Degen68
@Kruys_Collins
Maple's total AUM sits at $4.77 billion as of September 24, up from $4.46 billion just a week earlier, roughly $310 million in net new AUM in seven days.
As per the @maplefinance data, the growth is broad-based rather than concentrated in one product.
syrupUSDC leads at $2.9 billion, up from $2.59 billion.
syrupUSDG rose to $381.21 million from $355.71 million.
Maple Institutional climbed to $860.41 million from $834.31 million.
syrupUSDT is the outlier, dipping to $628.26 million from $678.08 million.
Three of four products growing while the institutional tranche keeps expanding is a healthier signal than one product carrying the whole number.
Protocol revenue has recovered every month since bottoming in May. August closed at $1.47 million in monthly protocol revenue, up from the May low, with June and July printing sequential gains before it. That's three consecutive months of revenue expansion after a dip that ran from the January 2026 peak through spring.
The buyback program is where the thesis gets specific. August saw $147,098 deployed to acquire 676,293.73 SYRUP at an average price of $0.2175.
ethereum:0x643c4e15d7d62ad0abec4a9bd4b001aa3ef52d66 price has increased more than 1.45x from its June low of $0.15 to August's $0.2175 average, and the program keeps buying through that range rather than pausing.
The case for SYRUP going into the next cycle rests on real cash flow backing the token, not emissions. SYRUP accrues value through a buyback funded by actual protocol revenue, which is itself funded by real credit spreads on close to $4.8 billion in AUM now. That's a structurally different setup heading into a bull market: rising AUM increases revenue, rising revenue increases buyback size, and buyback demand compounds against a token supply that isn't being diluted by liquidity mining.
Institutional credit protocols with recurring revenue are rare in this cycle, most of the AUM growth in DeFi still comes from restaking and points programs rather than actual lending spreads.
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BUNT retweeted
1|7 Privacy coins are shaping up to be one of the strongest trades of this cycle.
Of the 68 tokens on my privacy map last year:
• 50 are up 70%+ in the past 30 days
• 43 outperformed BTC & ETH combined
Here’s the full 2026 Privacy Thesis Report ↓
Privacy wars are thickening.
Privacy-focused tokens now collectively secure $61B in market cap, and are moving over $4.98B in trading volume daily
...even during quiet market windows.
This ecomap visualizes the networks underpinning that demand. Let's explore them ↓↓
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BUNT retweeted
Q: What does "overcollateralized" look like in practice?
A: A borrower posts more value than they borrow, and if the market moves against them, they post more, or the position gets closed.
Have a question for us to answer? ↓
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You were warned, CT turned extremely bullish. When everyone knows its UpOnly we ain’t going up :)
When the crowd turns super bullish, i book my partial profits
Long term bullish on BTC & ETH
Once a wise man @yashascore said nobody ever went broke by booking profits 🫣
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BUNT retweeted
As DeFi assets continue to mature, I think trust + quantifiable risk assessment will become increasingly important infrastructure for the next leg of adoption.
It's easy to surface yield onchain, but what's much harder is answering the real question when you start allocating capital.
What are the true (seen & unseen) risk am I actually taking to earn it?
A 10% APY across two vaults can represent completely different exposures across smart-contract risk, collateral quality, liquidity, counterparty risk + potential loss severity.
Retail capital can sometimes operate on reputation + headline APY.
Institutional capital generally can't.
Funds, treasuries + professional allocators need a defensible framework for comparing opportunities, quantifying downside + ultimately justifying why capital should be deployed in the first place.
That's why I think @CredoraNetwork is such an important component of @redstone_defi's increasingly verticalised stack.
Rather than simply assigning subjective scores, Credora translates DeFi risk into quantifiable probabilistic outputs:
1. Assets are assessed through Probability of Default (PD)
2. Markets use Probability of Significant Loss (PSL) derived from 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations alongside additional risk factors specific to the exposure
Those probabilities are then mapped onto the familiar A+ → D rating framework, calibrated using 30+ years of historical default data from S&P, Moody's + Fitch.
More importantly, this isn't limited to tokenised RWAs or stablecoins.
Credora's coverage extends across tokens, lending markets + vaults, including the crypto-native structures that traditional rating frameworks often aren't designed to assess.
Its ratings are already distributed directly into major DeFi venues including Morpho + Spark, while its public platform covers 160+ vaults, 250+ markets + 60+ assets.
IMO, this is an underrated prerequisite for DeFi's maturation.
TradFi didn't scale institutional credit markets purely because assets existed + yields were attractive.
It developed an entire infrastructure around pricing, ratings, risk models, reporting + settlement that allowed different pools of capital to understand what they owned and operate within defined mandates.
DeFi increasingly needs its own version of those rails.
And this is where the strategic fit with RedStone becomes much clearer.
RedStone tells protocols what an asset is worth.
Credora helps allocators understand the risk of owning or lending against it.
Combined with RedStone's broader institutional infrastructure, that pushes the stack beyond simply providing oracle feeds towards something much closer to an end-to-end financial intelligence layer.
Pricing → risk assessment → collateralisation → liquidation → settlement.
Each additional layer makes the others more valuable.
And IMO that's ultimately where the acquisition becomes particularly strategic.
As more institutional capital moves onchain, the opportunity isn't simply to provide data to more assets.
It's to become the infrastructure through which those assets are priced, understood, trusted + ultimately allocated to.
The next leg of DeFi adoption requires more than yield, it requires making risk legible enough for serious capital to participate at scale.
DeFi always surfaces APY, but risks don’t get the same treatment.
That’s why risk rating agencies are now developing their methodologies for the blockchain era.
How does Credora compare to others?
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NEAR Intents has moved $32.1 billion in cumulative trading volume, as per @tokenterminal data.
As per Token Terminal The week of September 14 came in at $1.047 billion, the strongest weekly figure since weekly volume first crossed the billion-dollar mark in early October 2025.
The mechanism is intents-based execution paired with confidential settlement.
Onchain transparency was marketed for years as a trust primitive. For institutional flow, it's the opposite: it broadcasts strategy to every market participant watching the mempool.
Traditional venues solved this with dark pools and OTC desks. NEAR's bet is that this becomes table stakes for any chain trying to hold serious trading volume, the same way MEV protection went from nice-to-have to baseline expectation.
As per @NEARProtocol own data, confidential Intents TVL crossed public TVL on September 21 for the first time: $113.2 million confidential versus $110.3 million public, out of $223.6 million total.
near:native is also stacking distribution on top of the base rail. NEAR now lets users buy tokenized US stocks and ETFs, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL and other megacaps, plus QQQ, funded with stablecoins or any supported crypto from 30+ chains, with no brokerage account.
The tokens are @Ondo total return tracker structure, meaning holders get price exposure and reinvested dividends net of withholding tax, fractionalized so a single dollar buys a slice of NVDA.
Trades route through the same confidential execution layer, so equity positions carry the same privacy the crypto-native product already has.
Hyperliquid-powered confidential perps are now live on the same account too, funded from any chain the user already holds assets on, no broker, no bridge, no second account.
That's three products, tokenized equities, spot intents, and perps, sitting on one confidential settlement layer, funded from one deposit.
Bunt's POV
NEAR is now underwriting a lot of surface area at once: regulated-adjacent equity exposure, perps, and cross-chain funding, all routed through NEAR infrastructure. The fee re-acceleration into August suggests genuine demand rather than incentive-driven volume. Whether NEAR becomes the default account for confidential onchain trading that institutions choose is the open question.
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Hope y’all liked it
@hosseeb
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@ilblackdragon
@Flowslikeosmo
@yashascore
@thelearningpill
@0xspicexr
@Eli5defi
@kenodnb
@0xCheeezzyyyy
@tradeguru
@SachinHMx
@TheDeFiKenshin
@Tom_Degen68
@Kruys_Collins
NEAR Intents has moved $32.1 billion in cumulative trading volume, as per @tokenterminal data.
As per Token Terminal The week of September 14 came in at $1.047 billion, the strongest weekly figure since weekly volume first crossed the billion-dollar mark in early October 2025.
The mechanism is intents-based execution paired with confidential settlement.
Onchain transparency was marketed for years as a trust primitive. For institutional flow, it's the opposite: it broadcasts strategy to every market participant watching the mempool.
Traditional venues solved this with dark pools and OTC desks. NEAR's bet is that this becomes table stakes for any chain trying to hold serious trading volume, the same way MEV protection went from nice-to-have to baseline expectation.
As per @NEARProtocol own data, confidential Intents TVL crossed public TVL on September 21 for the first time: $113.2 million confidential versus $110.3 million public, out of $223.6 million total.
near:native is also stacking distribution on top of the base rail. NEAR now lets users buy tokenized US stocks and ETFs, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL and other megacaps, plus QQQ, funded with stablecoins or any supported crypto from 30+ chains, with no brokerage account.
The tokens are @Ondo total return tracker structure, meaning holders get price exposure and reinvested dividends net of withholding tax, fractionalized so a single dollar buys a slice of NVDA.
Trades route through the same confidential execution layer, so equity positions carry the same privacy the crypto-native product already has.
Hyperliquid-powered confidential perps are now live on the same account too, funded from any chain the user already holds assets on, no broker, no bridge, no second account.
That's three products, tokenized equities, spot intents, and perps, sitting on one confidential settlement layer, funded from one deposit.
Bunt's POV
NEAR is now underwriting a lot of surface area at once: regulated-adjacent equity exposure, perps, and cross-chain funding, all routed through NEAR infrastructure. The fee re-acceleration into August suggests genuine demand rather than incentive-driven volume. Whether NEAR becomes the default account for confidential onchain trading that institutions choose is the open question.
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BUNT retweeted
.@GammaSwapLabs V2 Trading Competition just officially begin and will last till Sept 29, 4:00pm UTC.
$5k rewards here up for grabs w/ no 'real' downside either since everything is on testnet.
Some quick recap of how to qualify for rewards:
🔹 100k testnet USDC for every participant (receive via faucet)
🔹 Minimum $100k aggregate volume to qualify
🔹 5min up/down markets on BTC/ETH
🔹 Baseline participation still earns points
Additionally, here's also a little breakdown on the respective categories:
1. Individual Leaderboard
🥇 $1,500 USDC + 2.5x retroactive points
🥈 $1,000 USDC + 2x retroactive points
🥉 $500 USDC + 1.5x retroactive points
2. Team Leaderboard
🥇 Captain: $1,000 w/ Top 20% PnL: 1.5x points
🥈 Captain: $500 w/ Top 20% PnL: 1.25x points
🥉 Captain: $250 w/ Top 20% PnL: 1.15x points
*PS: Join my team (Team Cheddar) to gib me a little boost 😆
3. Highest Volume Team
🔸Captain: $250
🔸 Entire team: 1.1x points
So there's something to play for whether you're competing individually or pushing PnL for the team.
May the best trader + team win 🫡
The GammaSwap V2 Testnet Competition is starting Tuesday 4pm UTC next week!
Sign up below to earn cash prizes along with point incentives 👇
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When the crowd turns super bullish, i book my partial profits
Long term bullish on BTC & ETH
Once a wise man @yashascore said nobody ever went broke by booking profits 🫣
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BUNT retweeted
prediction infra + verifiable outcomes.
This is the direction the next phase of outcome markets needs
Something more than just standalone apps.
That’s the part of the stack @PRDCTR_IO is building:
An appchain for decentralized prediction markets, with predictor(.)io as the first market on the network and ethereum:0xc84782858b7bef5d25182dbac956a6aa463aefe5 as its utility and gas token.
The appchain is live
.@Predictor_io is the first market on the appchain.
.@galacticmarkets, for example is already leveraging the appchain to resolve its prediction markets.
Prdctr is one of the outcome markets im exploring on Ethereum.
Every prediction market needs one thing: an outcome nobody can dispute.
Meet the blockchain built to verify it, so results can never be rigged against you.
Join the loyalty program, claim a free node, and earn $PRD yield
hub.prdctr.io
Paid partnership (ad)
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BUNT retweeted
Great piece by @glasscade on @Plasma One and probably one of the more interesting examples of rented liquidity vs retained demand playing out onchain.
Plasma's broader liquidity story hasn't exactly gone according to plan.
Stablecoin supply peaked around $6.35B in Oct 2025, before falling ~84% to ~$1.03B by Sept 8.
Yet beneath that contraction, Plasma One has been moving almost entirely in the opposite direction.
Tracked card spend reached ~$19.9M in August, with:
🔹 Active wallets growing almost 60% MoM
🔹 Transactions increasing 36%
🔹 Spending increasing 31%
And IMO, the composition of that growth matters much more than the headline numbers themselves.
Glasscade attributes 74% of the 3-month increase in volume simply to more active addresses. Meanwhile, volume + transactions per active wallet have actually declined.
At first glance, that might sound negative.
But paired with a rapidly expanding user base, it suggests something quite different: Plasma One is broadening beyond its earliest, heavier crypto-native users towards a larger population making smaller + more ordinary purchases.
In other words, it seems to have solved acquisition before depth of usage.
The next question is naturally whether those acquired users actually stick around, and this is where the data gets more encouraging IMO.
Returning wallets represented ~52% of August's active base, but the important part isn't necessarily the percentage itself.
It's that the absolute returning cohort continues to compound several fold QoQ, while new-user acquisition remains strong enough to maintain an almost 50/50 balance.
New users are still coming in quickly, while increasingly more previous users are coming back.
That's a pretty healthy dynamic for a consumer product still scaling.
But perhaps the most interesting insight is how differently this has behaved from the rest of Plasma.
Much of the billions initially deposited into the ecosystem came through pre-launch deposits, token-sale activity + exchange yield programs.
Those incentives successfully attracted capital.
They didn't necessarily create a reason for that capital to remain.
Plasma One is beginning to demonstrate the opposite.
While the chain's liquidity left, consumer usage stayed + continued growing.
And IMO that's an important distinction between liquidity you rent and demand you actually build.
Plasma One increasingly looks like the latter but ofc, there's still plenty left to prove.
Registrations remain far ahead of actual active usage, while spend + transaction frequency per wallet need to deepen as the product matures.
But the strategic opportunity here is pretty interesting which could serve as a playbook for others.
Plasma One combines spending + yield + XPL-linked membership behind a consumer-facing product that increasingly resembles a crypto-native neobank rather than simply another card.
If the card becomes the habitual entry point, everything else can increasingly be distributed around that relationship.
Maybe the more durable path for Plasma isn't simply convincing capital to sit on a stablecoin chain, its giving consumers a reason to use that stablecoin infrastructure repeatedly in the real world.
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Ethena Added Roughly $0.76B in 30 Days @ethena
As per @tokenterminal ,USDe grew 18.7% over the last 30. As per DefiLlama, USDe circulating supply now stands at $4.88B, ahead of USD1 at $4.3B.
Once the 14-day average USDe supply crosses $7.5B, 95% of the revenue routed through the switch buys ENA on the open market.
Today USDe stands at $4.88B, which means supply needs to grow about 54% to reach the threshold. We could assume it crosses within the next few quarters, driven by future catalysts.
Equity perps: uncorrelated with crypto market conditions.
Crypto perps: funding recovered from negative territory and is trending toward the +8% levels.
Ethena Pay: launched Sep 1, with 30-day card volume of $615,560 (+296%) and daily active addresses moving from 28-60 before launch to 120-165 since.
The supply chart shows why this is a recovery call. As per DefiLlama, USDe peaked at 14.82B in Oct 2025 and is about 67% below that level today.
Reaching $7.5B in 3 months needs about 15% monthly compounding, slightly below what USDe just delivered. Reaching it in six months needs about 7.5% a month.
The trigger is a 14-day average, so it lags spot supply and the crossing shows up a couple of weeks after the spot number does.
Ethena Pay, 30 Days In 👇
As per , Ethena Pay processed $615,560 in 30-day volume, up 296% on the prior 30 days, and $261,811 in the last 7 days, up 35.5%.
That is the highest 7-day growth among the five card programs shown. Lifetime volume stands at $777,796, so about 79% of everything Ethena Pay has processed happened in the last 30 days.
Daily active addresses moved between roughly 28 and 60 from Aug 16 to Aug 31, They have held between roughly 120 and 165 since, with the Sep 14 at 165.
Bunt's POV
The 18.7% month is a real reversal, and the fee switch gives supply growth a direct link to ENA demand once the $7.5B line is crossed.
That said, the protocol thesis and the token thesis are separate here. Until the 14-day average reaches $7.5B, the switch does not buy ENA, so supply is the gate. Supply in turn depends on funding rates, which is why the equity perps book and the recovery in crypto perps funding carry most of the weight.
Ethena Pay is the smallest near-term contributor. Card volume is about 0.01% of USDe supply, so it supports the case through usage and distribution while the funding catalysts do the supply work.
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Hope y’all liked it
@gdog97_
@CryptoHayes
@AltcoinSherpa
@cryptomanran
@blknoiz06
@TheDeFiPlug
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@thelearningpill
@0xspicexr
@Eli5defi
@kenodnb
@0xCheeezzyyyy
@tradeguru
@SachinHMx
@TheDeFiKenshin
@Tom_Degen68
@Kruys_Collins
Ethena Added Roughly $0.76B in 30 Days @ethena
As per @tokenterminal ,USDe grew 18.7% over the last 30. As per DefiLlama, USDe circulating supply now stands at $4.88B, ahead of USD1 at $4.3B.
Once the 14-day average USDe supply crosses $7.5B, 95% of the revenue routed through the switch buys ENA on the open market.
Today USDe stands at $4.88B, which means supply needs to grow about 54% to reach the threshold. We could assume it crosses within the next few quarters, driven by future catalysts.
Equity perps: uncorrelated with crypto market conditions.
Crypto perps: funding recovered from negative territory and is trending toward the +8% levels.
Ethena Pay: launched Sep 1, with 30-day card volume of $615,560 (+296%) and daily active addresses moving from 28-60 before launch to 120-165 since.
The supply chart shows why this is a recovery call. As per DefiLlama, USDe peaked at 14.82B in Oct 2025 and is about 67% below that level today.
Reaching $7.5B in 3 months needs about 15% monthly compounding, slightly below what USDe just delivered. Reaching it in six months needs about 7.5% a month.
The trigger is a 14-day average, so it lags spot supply and the crossing shows up a couple of weeks after the spot number does.
Ethena Pay, 30 Days In 👇
As per , Ethena Pay processed $615,560 in 30-day volume, up 296% on the prior 30 days, and $261,811 in the last 7 days, up 35.5%.
That is the highest 7-day growth among the five card programs shown. Lifetime volume stands at $777,796, so about 79% of everything Ethena Pay has processed happened in the last 30 days.
Daily active addresses moved between roughly 28 and 60 from Aug 16 to Aug 31, They have held between roughly 120 and 165 since, with the Sep 14 at 165.
Bunt's POV
The 18.7% month is a real reversal, and the fee switch gives supply growth a direct link to ENA demand once the $7.5B line is crossed.
That said, the protocol thesis and the token thesis are separate here. Until the 14-day average reaches $7.5B, the switch does not buy ENA, so supply is the gate. Supply in turn depends on funding rates, which is why the equity perps book and the recovery in crypto perps funding carry most of the weight.
Ethena Pay is the smallest near-term contributor. Card volume is about 0.01% of USDe supply, so it supports the case through usage and distribution while the funding catalysts do the supply work.
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RWA is one of the greatest growth catalysts for @pendle_fi.
NGI+ by @AssetoFinance brings Partners Group’s Next Generation Infrastructure strategy onchain.
The strategy has returned ~19.2% net annualised since Feb 2024 across 500+ real assets.
NGI+ targets 10–12% net annual returns from the operation and appreciation of real infrastructure.
On Pendle, you can:
- Lock a fixed return
- Speculate on NAV growth with YT
- LP and earn swap fees + $PENDLE rewards
One important detail:
NGI+ uses discrete yield distributions.
You MUST hold YT or LP when the distribution lands to receive the yield.
If you exit before the distribution, you receive no yield for that period.
This is an enormous step for RWA x Pendle.
For context about Asseto:
- 60+ investments across 500+ real assets
- Partners Group: ~$185B AUM, $38B+ in infrastructure since 2001
- 48.8% cumulative net return since Feb 2024
- Strategic investment from HashKey Group
- Selected for BNB Chain’s MVB program
- Supported by Hong Kong Cyberport
RWA private infrastructure is now tradeable on Pendle.
NGI+ (26 Nov 2026 maturity), tokenised on @AssetoFinance's infrastructure, brings Partners Group's Next Generation Infrastructure strategy onchain.
With Pendle, you can access fix, trade and speculate this yield.
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