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Protocol Progress - 1inch unveils protocol letting multiple DeFi strategies share the same capital.
Africa Adoption - Africa embraces Stablecoins via IOTA to unlock $70B pan-continent trade tech.
SOL Staking - SOL Strategies to provide staking services for VanEck’s Solana ETF.
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DeFi TVL up ~29% QoQ to $423.5M; average NFT USD volume up ~562% QoQ—best levels since early 2022
Halo2–Plutus verifier enables ZK proof verification in smart contracts
Midnight (privacy partner chain) expands with Google Cloud/Mandiant support and broad custody integrations
Lending (Liqwid), DEXs (Minswap, WingRiders, Splash), synthetics (Indigo), and growing stablecoin set (USDM, USDA, iUSD, DJED; USDC bridged)
Decentralized marketplace for data services, starting with storage on IPFS rails; paid, verifiable storage and retrieval
Total fees $793k (+14% QoQ) driven ~99.5% by penalties; base/batch fees near zero after deprecations
Utilization rose to 36% as smaller/inefficient miners exited post–v27 “Golden Week.”
2,491 onboarded datasets (+3%), with 925 at >1,000 TiB—ongoing archival/scientific/enterprise adoption
AVAX mcap up 67% QoQ to $12.7B; first >$10B quarter of 2025, led by institutional initiatives
Two AVAX-focused vehicles (AVAT and AVAX One) announced with $1.1B committed (targeting $1.7B)
Grove Finance launched a $250M onchain credit strategy; RWA TVL on Avalanche up 252% QoQ to $677M
Avg daily txs across C-Chain + Avalanche L1s up ~137% QoQ to 36.5M; daily active addresses up ~277% QoQ to 19.8M
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On Friday, November 14, Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA) announced a plan to launch a digital payments system in collaboration with JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM). The announcement was made on CNBC, where Alibaba’s president, Kuo Zhang, told the network that this partnership aims to facilitate cross-border payments for the company’s e-commerce networks. Zhang also noted that 24/7 uptime and a reduction in payment fees were the primary drivers for this move. According to Zhang, the payments infrastructure will launch in December 2025, alongside a new AI feature known as “Agentic Pay” that streamlines the connection between buyers and sellers on the platform via smart contracts.
Notably, Zhang draws a distinction between Alibaba’s system and other stablecoin-based payment systems. In the interview, he explains that the system his company aims to create tokenized bank deposits, rather than stablecoins, which are commonly reserve-backed and issued by non-bank entities. In doing so, he believes that businesses on Alibaba will reap the benefits of improved efficiency, as tokenized fiat payments can be integrated more seamlessly into the platform’s existing commerce workflows and infrastructure.
This distinction may have an additional benefit. Kathleen Kinder of CoinLaw posits that because Alibaba is using tokenized bank deposits rather than stablecoins, which are commonly issued by private companies like Tether’s USDT, the company’s use of blockchain technology doesn’t come into conflict with China’s regulatory crackdown on stablecoin usage. Despite the hard stance in Mainland China, however, Hong Kong has begun to delve into the growing sector. On July 29, 2025, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) announced a comprehensive regulatory framework for domestic stablecoin issuers.
While JPMorgan and particularly its CEO, Jamie Dimon, have expressed concerns around Bitcoin and crypto assets as an investment vehicle over the years, the firm has leveraged the advantages of blockchain technology for nearly a decade. In 2016, JPMorgan launched Quorum, a private blockchain that was later acquired by ConsenSys in 2020. Following the sale, JPM launched Onyx, a dedicated business unit focused on blockchain and digital currencies. This move highlighted a shift in the company’s thinking; as then-head of global wholesale payments, Takis Georgekapolous put it, “We are launching Onyx because we believe we are shifting to a period of commercialization of those technologies, moving from research and development to something that can become a real business.” Onyx has since rebranded to Kinexys, the network underlying Alibaba’s efforts to build out its new system. According to JPMorgan, Kinexys has processed over $1.5 trillion in transaction volume since its inception.
