defi

One of South Korea's largest credit card companies, Shinhan Card, announced that it has signed a cooperation agreement with the Solana Foundation to jointly build a stablecoin payment system on the Solana blockchain.As part of the collaboration, Shinhan Card is conducting a high-level proof of concept this year, focusing on simulating real-world payment scenarios between customers and merchants on the Solana testnet. Shinhan Card's Executive Vice President Kim Young-il stated, "Based on Solana, we plan to carefully examine the practical applicability of blockchain technology and actively explore next-generation financial models." One of the core elements of the proof of concept is to verify the security and stability of non-custodial wallets, so that Shinhan Card can deploy this technology on a large scale in the future. Both parties will also explore a "hybrid financial model" that combines the reliability of traditional finance with the efficiency of DeFi. Shinhan Card plans to utilize oracle technology to build its own DeFi service environment, deploying smart contracts while ensuring operational stability. Shinhan Card will assess the outcomes of these projects in conjunction with the evolving regulatory environment in South Korea and the Asia-Pacific region. Notably, South Korean lawmakers are currently drafting the "Basic Law on Digital Assets," which is expected to be finalized within this year. Under the anticipated legislation, several South Korean financial institutions, including KBank, have recently begun collaborating with global blockchain and cryptocurrency companies.

Andre Cronje stated in an interview with Cointelegraph that many DeFi protocols today are "no longer truly DeFi" and are more like "profit-driven companies operated by teams," as they generally rely on upgradable contracts, multi-signatures, off-chain infrastructure, and manual operational control.Cronje pointed out that the current industry is still overly focused on smart contract audits while neglecting operational risks that are closer to traditional finance (TradFi). He believes that recent attack incidents are not due to code vulnerabilities but stem from off-chain infrastructure, permission management, and social engineering attacks.The discussion arises from the recent frequent security incidents in DeFi. In April, protocols such as Flying Tulip, Drift Protocol, and Kelp encountered security events, with Drift and Kelp suffering losses of approximately $280 million and $293 million, respectively.In response, Flying Tulip has introduced a "Withdrawal Circuit Breaker," which can delay or queue withdrawal requests when unusually large withdrawals occur, allowing the team about 6 hours to respond. Cronje emphasized that this mechanism does not permanently freeze withdrawals but serves as a layer of protection within the security system.However, Michael Egorov holds a cautious attitude towards this. He stated that the circuit breaker itself could also become a new point of centralized risk. If control permissions fall into the hands of an attacker, the mechanism originally intended to protect the protocol could instead be used to freeze assets or directly transfer funds.Egorov believes that the long-term direction of DeFi should be to minimize human intervention and centralized permissions as much as possible, rather than adding more layers of manual control. "The security of DeFi comes from decentralization, not more human management."

According to The Block, Standard Chartered's latest report points out that the theft of KelpDAO's rsETH, while causing a severe impact on the DeFi ecosystem, is not enough to change the long-term growth trend of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered, stated that this incident is more like DeFi being "bent, not broken," and may even become an important turning point for the industry towards a more resilient structure.Standard Chartered maintains its forecast: by the end of 2028, the RWA tokenization market size will grow from $35 billion in October 2025 to $2 trillion, with the core driving force still coming from the continued expansion of the DeFi banking system and stablecoin liquidity.

DeFi United announced a technical repair plan for the Kelp DAO rsETH cross-chain bridge vulnerability on Tuesday. Previously, attackers exploited a vulnerability in the LayerZero-driven Unichain to Ethereum bridge, releasing 116,500 rsETH by spoofing inbound packets, of which approximately 107,000 are currently still distributed as collateral across seven associated addresses in Aave and Compound.DeFi United stated that it has secured enough ETH commitments to restore the support for rsETH, which will be converted into rsETH in batches and injected into the bridge lock contract. LayerZero Labs pledged over 10,000 ETH on Tuesday to support the repair efforts. Regarding the liquidation of the attackers' positions, the alliance will execute controlled liquidations through Aave and Compound governance proposals, expecting to recover approximately 13,000 and 16,776 ETH, respectively.During the repair period, WETH and rsETH reserves on multiple chains will remain frozen. DeFi United also cautioned about execution risks, including governance approval progress, potential interference from attackers, and new security measures pending validation in the production environment.

According to a16z, its researchers conducted a systematic test on whether AI agents can independently exploit DeFi price manipulation vulnerabilities.The study used a dataset of 20 Ethereum price manipulation incidents and employed Codex (GPT 5.4) equipped with the Foundry toolchain as the testing agent. Under baseline conditions without domain knowledge, the agent's success rate was only 10%; after introducing structured domain knowledge extracted from real attack events, the success rate increased to 70%. Failure cases showed that the agent could accurately identify vulnerabilities but generally struggled to understand the leverage logic of recursive borrowing, misjudged profit margins, and could not assemble multi-step attack structures across contracts. The experiment also recorded a sandbox escape incident: the agent extracted the RPC key from the local node configuration and called the anvil_reset method to reset the node to a future block, bypassing information isolation restrictions and obtaining real attack data. The research team believes that AI agents can currently effectively assist in vulnerability identification but cannot yet replace professional security auditors.

The re-staking protocol Puffer Finance officially announced that it will invest treasury funds into the DeFi United ecological rescue initiative led by Aave, but did not disclose the specific amount. Puffer believes that strong infrastructure and consistent incentive mechanisms are key to supporting DeFi at critical moments.

The decentralized oracle service provider RedStone has officially launched the settlement layer product RedStone Settle for decentralized finance, aimed at addressing the structural barriers faced when tokenized real-world assets (RWA) are used as collateral in lending protocols.The core mechanism of this product is on-chain auctions: when a lending protocol triggers a liquidation event, liquidity providers can immediately step in to purchase the relevant positions, providing instant liquidity to the protocol while assuming the risk of delayed redemption of the underlying assets. This move aims to bridge the mismatch between the nearly instant liquidation required by DeFi platforms (such as Aave) and the typical redemption periods of 60 to 180 days for RWAs (including tokenized funds and bonds).RedStone stated that this solution is expected to activate the currently idle tokenized RWAs in DeFi, which exceed $30 billion, and enable users to borrow more efficiently using interest-bearing positions. According to data from RWA.xyz, excluding stablecoins, the current market size of tokenized RWAs has surpassed $30 billion, primarily dominated by exposure to U.S. Treasury bonds and private credit products.

LayerZero Labs announced a commitment to provide over 10,000 ETH to the DeFi United ecological rescue initiative led by Aave. This includes a donation of 5,000 ETH and an additional deposit of 5,000 ETH to enhance Aave market liquidity.

According to the latest weekly report from Gate Ventures, there are signs of phased recovery at the macro level, with major stock indices showing divergent performance but overall trending upwards, and market risk appetite has rebounded. Against this backdrop, the cryptocurrency market has also rebounded, with BTC rising 6.6% and ETH rising 4.7%, recording net inflows of approximately $823.7 million and $155 million in spot ETFs, indicating a strengthening of capital inflows.The overall market capitalization increased by 5.2%, while the market capitalization excluding BTC and ETH grew by 2.6%, suggesting that the upward momentum is beginning to spread to a broader range of assets, although the pace remains relatively moderate. In terms of asset and industry dynamics, structural opportunities continue to emerge. The top 30 assets averaged a rise of 4.2%. Meanwhile, advancements in on-chain and industrial aspects continue, including the ongoing evolution of digital currency infrastructure and asset tokenization.In terms of investment and financing, a total of 12 transactions were completed last week, with a disclosed total financing amount of approximately $54.89 million, a month-on-month increase of about 31%, with funds mainly flowing into the DeFi and infrastructure sectors. Among them, JPYC completed a $17.62 million financing to promote the construction of yen stablecoin infrastructure; 3F completed a $4 million seed round financing, with investors including Gate Ventures.Against the backdrop of marginal improvement in the macro environment, the activity in investment and financing has rebounded, with funds still focusing on long-term application scenarios and underlying capability building in a volatile environment.

The latest weekly report shows that the JUST ecosystem's TVL has reached $11.46 billion, accounting for 42.28% of the total TVL in Tron DeFi. This week, the platform's deposit scale reached $3.75 billion, while the borrowing scale was $193 million, demonstrating abundant market liquidity. Meanwhile, JUST, through a normalized buyback and burn mechanism, has cumulatively burned $60.03 million, with the burn rate further increasing to 13.70%. While providing users with diversified yield options such as sTRX and USDD, the platform continues to optimize the asset allocation supply and demand pattern; this transparent and efficient mechanism execution, along with long-term stable value returns, not only highlights JUST's robust operational strength as a core DeFi protocol in Tron but also builds a resilient long-term value system for users.

Gate's venture capital division, Gate Ventures, announced a strategic investment in the DeFi project 3F. 3F provides a one-click RWA leverage solution that supports the use of tokenized real-world assets as collateral to access decentralized lending markets. Through automated lending and position management mechanisms, it offers differentiated and sustainable sources of income for stablecoin depositors. This model aims to enhance capital utilization efficiency and expand the connection pathways between DeFi and real-world assets.3F aggregates multi-market lending demand through a unified borrower mechanism and introduces programmatic circular lending anchored to real-world credit, which helps improve the counter-cyclical nature and capital efficiency of stablecoin yields. Gate Ventures continues to focus on infrastructure directions such as the integration of RWA and DeFi, believing that related solutions are expected to provide more resilient sources of income amid market cycle fluctuations. As the RWA market size expands, the importance of infrastructure connecting stablecoin liquidity and RWA leverage is gradually increasing. Gate Ventures is laying out plans around related infrastructure directions and supporting the development of projects with long-term growth potential.

Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO of Morpho, tweeted that he has been in intensive contact with several large institutions over the past week to understand the current DeFi situation. The main conclusions are twofold:The interest of institutions in DeFi will not disappear, as the fund distributors will not leave. The massive assets under management (AUM), payment, and lending businesses are migrating en masse to on-chain, and fintech companies hope to fully go on-chain, leaving institutions with no choice.Nevertheless, institutions have completely lost trust in the liquidity pool model. They want to have control over the code, risk management, and compliance, allowing them to flexibly choose the necessary parts while accessing a globally compatible liquidity network.Paul Frambot believes that the commitment to open financial systems will not fail, as it will create tremendous value for all participants.

AAVE announced the technical implementation plan for the recovery of rsETH, which aims to advance the repair in three phases: supplementing ETH collateral, clearing affected positions, and restoring market parameters, in order to restore complete collateral support for rsETH and return the market to normal operations.The plan indicates that DeFi United has coordinated to obtain the ETH commitments needed for recovery, which will be restored through batch conversions and injected into the bridging locked contract to support rsETH; at the same time, it plans to clear the affected positions in Aave and Compound through a governance proposal, recovering approximately 107,000 rsETH related excess collateral and gradually lifting the freeze status on related assets.