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Today's News Recap
Bitcoin Breakout - Bitcoin hit new highs above $120K, fueled by ETF inflows, pro-crypto legislation, and rising regulatory optimism.
Ethereum Surge - A massive short liquidation cascade occurred as Bitcoin's price spike triggered over $1.3 billion in liquidations.
Memecoin Moves - Regulatory shifts in the U.S. and EU, including "Crypto Week" and MiCA, are reshaping crypto with new stablecoin issuers, stricter compliance, and renewed policy debates.
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Messari Protocol Reporting
Messari's protocol reports give you a deep dive on the foundation and state of top crypto protocols, including key metrics and notable events. See the complete list of protocol reports here and get a preview of our latest report below.
Operates Arbitrum One (general-purpose, DeFi-focused L2) and Arbitrum Orbit (customizable L2s and L3s)
Hub for tokenized RWAs and TradFi integrations, hosting products from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Robinhood
ArbitrumDAO via ARB token; onchain proposals and treasury control
Over 48 Arbitrum Chains live, ~$14B in combined TVL, and >1M weekly active users
Cosmos-based L1 optimized for asynchronous, offchain AI computation
Native token ($WARD) to launch alongside the public release of the Warden App
Warden App offers a chat-based, voice-enabled smart wallet and crypto assistant with 2M beta users already onboarded
New Asynchronous Verifiable Resources (AVRs) — AI modules or plugins that dApps can call and verify onchain
Identity & Privacy Infrastructure: Middleware / Identity Verification
Use palm biometrics and ZK proofs to verify users’ liveness and uniqueness without storing raw biometric data
Verified users generate non-transferable Human IDs to attest to traits like age, location, or access
Acquired Moongate to integrate onchain ticketing—tickets are bound to Human IDs, preventing scalping and fraud
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Two Bits
The Quiet Standard: Veda’s Bid to Become Vault Infrastructure
By: Wandile Banda
In DeFi’s institutional turn, the focus has moved from protocol abstraction to infrastructure commodification. Veda is positioning itself for that transition.
The protocol quietly underpins some of DeFi’s most widely used vault strategies, including those behind tokenized yield products like eBTC and sDAI. In June, it raised an $18 million Series A led by CoinFund, with support from Coinbase Ventures, Animoca, and BitGo. Angel investors included Anchorage Co-Founder Nathan McCauley, Ether.fi’s Mike Silagadze, and Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal, names that suggest this isn’t just another permissionless playground.
At its core, Veda offers a modular architecture for vault construction, what it calls “BoringVaults.” Think composable vault primitives with enterprise features like whitelists, curator roles, pause switches, and real-time strategy routing. If Yearn was the gigabrain farm of early DeFi, Veda is the SDK that product teams plug into so they don’t need one.
The numbers back it up: $3.9 billion in TVL (USD), 100,000+ users, and integrations across Aave, Morpho, and Bybit Web3. What’s more important is what Veda unlocks. A wallet could offer liquid BTC staking without running its own vault. A fintech could tokenize a Solana-native product without worrying about the Solana part.
Yet, there’s a tension. Veda is not trying to be a yield aggregator, it’s trying to invisibly mediate financial logic across chains and custody standards. That means Veda’s brand disappears, and defensibility becomes a question of embeddedness. Will custody partners like Fireblocks default to Veda when building vault-linked UX, or will they build their own?
The bet is that vaults become infrastructure. That builders won’t want to audit, rebalance, and route liquidity across 10 chains every time they want to launch a new tokenized product. If that holds, Veda can become the default interface layer between assets and strategy.
However, if the abstraction becomes too easy and anyone can replicate it with LLMs, onchain SDKs, or pre-audited templates, then vault infra gets commoditized in a different way. The edge shifts from depth to distribution. Veda is quietly absorbing the vault layer. It may already be the standard. The deeper Veda integrates into custody systems and product rails, the more likely it becomes a default layer. Not because people talk about it, but because they build on it.
