🧵#DeFi 2026 Predictions Thread 🤌 (Thoughts on ecosystem and community macro trends, in no particular order) ⤵️

Today we are announcing that S&P Global has entered an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin. Onchain finance is growing from an emerging market into core financial infrastructure, and the standards and rails our team and community built are becoming the rails of global finance. OpenZeppelin smart contracts facilitated over $37 trillion in value transferred, with the vast majority of the largest DeFi protocols, blockchain networks, stablecoins and tokenized funds relying on them. With S&P Global, we expect to accelerate the impact of onchain finance, backed by more than a century of trust in global markets, benchmarks, and risk frameworks. To our clients and to all the users of OpenZeppelin open source tools: • OpenZeppelin Contracts and all our open source applications and tools remain open source, free, and publicly maintained on GitHub. Building open source standards stays a core priority. • Audits, engineering work, and ecosystem programs continue with the same team, brand, quality, and customer experience, with what will be the added benefit of S&P Global's research capacity, market data, and institutional reach. For the last decade, OpenZeppelin has set the security standard for onchain finance. Today begins a new chapter for that mission, together with one of the most trusted names in global markets. Read the full announcement: openzeppelin.com/news/spglob…

A proposal to wind down Balancer and distribute the treasury to BAL holders is live on the forum, authored by Marcus Hardt. Discussion is open; a Snapshot vote is expected to happen from 25 to 29 September. Nothing changes today: pools and withdrawals work as they do now. Any wind-down action waits for the vote.

Crypto card spend hit $1.1B in August. Where does your money sit before the swipe? We read 18 programs' terms ⚠️ KAST treats deposits as a sale. Seven cards share one Puerto Rico issuer. $468M/month settles via Rain, drained Aug 28 ⤵️ defiprime.com/crypto-cards-w…

Plasma One invites. Got a few invite codes to share. First come, first served 👇 GGQ9ZU Y7FJNK U6CBME L4EKLS YNL5EH 9CTXT9 Btw you can order Physical Card from Plasma nowadays.

Today, MetaMask begins its next chapter as an independent company. Consensys Software Inc., the company behind MetaMask, is rebranding as MetaMask, fully focused on the consumer platform. The protocols and institutional infrastructure businesses, including Linea, are becoming a newly formed company that will carry the Consensys name forward. 🧵

Liquid Network exploited for ~$320M ⚠️ 4,000 L-BTC created by an Elements bug went through SideSwap's peg-out, and the 11-of-15 federation paid 3,996 BTC. No key was compromised. ~197 BTC now backs ~4,200 L-BTC. The multisig guarded keys, not code ⤵️ defiprime.com/liquid-network…

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Memecoins on Robinhood Chain are now quoted in tokenized shares 📈 We read 432 such pools: they hold 17% of the onchain float across 19 stock tokens and carry 31% of their DEX volume. $BONER holds half of all tokenized $HIMS. On-chain breakdown ⤵️ defiprime.com/stock-paired-m…

A memecoin cornered a tokenized stock this weekend ⚠️ $BONER soaked up ~86% of the tokenized $HIMS float on Robinhood Chain. Onchain HIMS hit $61 vs a $28.84 NYSE close, +112%, until issuer mints crushed it in 2 hours. On-chain breakdown ⤵️ defiprime.com/tokenized-stoc…

The agentic economy is not going to run through the Bank of England. It's going to run onchain. Billions of agents will hold money, lend, borrow and hedge at machine speed. Very soon DeFi will become agent treasury infrastructure.

Stocks have been updated Coinbase Tokenized Stocks are live on Base - Available 24/7, 365 - Composable across Base DeFi - Own the underlying share held in a regulated trust, backed 1:1 Live now, with new stocks coming soon

Term Finance exploited for ~$8.5M ⚠️ Not a hack. A governance proposal from a wallet holding 0.017% of the vault, open six days, zero vetoes cast. Its first action: setTxCooldown(0), deleting the seven-day timelock. Breakdown ⤵️ defiprime.com/term-finance-g…

My first blog post since 2019!

Interesting: the SEC poised to roll out a pair of major initiatives in the coming days that could further turbocharge the US crypto industry as a landmark digital asset bill stalls in Congress. Scoop via @pattersonscott

Who is actually accruing the value created in crypto? This started as a conversation on the @Blockworks TG group with @santiagoroel and a few others. Venture in crypto has shrunk a lot! and imo the main reason is that on-chain revenue pools have been far smaller than anticipated. From Blockworks data, total on-chain revenue was roughly $8B in 2025, so I wanted to see how much off-chain/Centralized companies are capturing from this industry by comparison. So consider the off-chain pool: public companies like coinbase, Gemini, BitGo, Bullish, plus crypto revenue from Robinhood, Galaxy etc and private players like Binance, Tether, FalconX, Anchorage, etc. The result surprised me: off-chain companies generate ~$70B roughly, consider roughly a range between 60B to 100B, 8.5x more than on-chain protocols and L1s. To put that $8B in perspective: even if you give on-chain protocols generous 70% EBITDA margins and a 30x multiple, the entire addressable market cap today is ~$168B ($8B × 70% = $5.6B EBITDA × 30x). That's the whole on-chain pie, less than a single mega-cap tech company. Do the same for centralized companies at a more realistic 40% EBITDA margin: $70B × 40% = $28B EBITDA × 30x = ~$840B of justified market cap. Even with lower margins, that's 5x the entire on-chain ecosystem. And to put even that in perspective: the entire centralized crypto industry, all of it combined, is basically worth one OpenAI or Anthropic. The breakdowns are telling too. On-chain, L1/L2 chains take almost half the pool (~49%), with launchpads/trading apps and DEXs/perps splitting most of the rest. Off-chain, it's exchanges and brokers dominating at ~66%, with stablecoin issuers second at ~19%, everything else (market making, payments, infra, asset mgmt) is single digits. Both worlds are extremely concentrated at the top of the same funnel: trading and the rails to do it. From a venture perspective, you were often better off investing early in L1s and traditional exchanges than in most tokens. It was a bit simpler than we thought. To me the common denominator: off-chain companies sit much closer to the end user than protocols and L1s. They own that relationship and monetize it well. They abstract away crypto's complexity: trade, stake, store, manage without ever touching a coldcard or metamask app and people pay up BIG for that. On-chain is clearly in a bear market, but the lesson for protocols, L1s, and on-chain primitives is to build and verticalize more. Get closer to the end user. One caveat: this is an approximation, done with Claude's help. Many of these companies don't have public earnings, so the private side (Binance, Tether, and especially "other private") is mostly an educated guess. Directionally though, the gap is hard to argue with.

EIP-8363 would burn a rising share of validator rewards until Ethereum's consensus yield hits zero at half the supply staked. At today's 41.8M ETH the burn already computes to 57%: 2.57% → 1.09%. Core devs heard it Aug 6, left it off the inclusion list, and advised the author to consider withdrawing it. defiprime.com/ethereum-taper…