Financial Institutions and Crypto Brokers

OKX, the world’s third-largest crypto broker by monthly trading volume, officially launched its spot and derivative trading platform in Australia. Spot trading will be available to all Australian users, while the derivative market will be open only to verified wholesale clients. A total of 85 crypto assets and 170 crypto spot pairs will be available for trading.

Robinhood’s crypto division announced a new Solana staking feature in Europe. Users can now stake their Solana directly through the app in exchange for rewards. Additionally, new customers will benefit from a bonus program, receiving a 10% bonus in USDC for their purchases during the first 30 days.

Millennium Management, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, revealed in its recent financial report that as of March 31, it held $1.94 billion in spot Bitcoin ETFs. This includes $844.2 million in BlackRock IBIT, $806.7 million in Fidelity FBTC, $202 million in Grayscale GBTC, $45.0 million in Ark ARKB, and $44.7 million in Bitwise BITB. These holdings represent only 3% of the hedge fund’s $64 billion in assets under management.

Project Investments

Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, raised $45 million in an investment round led by Founders Fund, with notable participation from Vitalik Buterin. The platform allows users to bet on the outcomes of almost any real-world event.
Humanity Protocol, a web3 digital identity startup, secured $30 million in funding led by Kingsway Capital, with a valuation of $1 billion. The protocol uses palm scanning to verify someone’s online identity, which is stored using decentralized technology and protected by zero-knowledge proofs. The company plans to launch its own token for fee payments.

Blockchain Developments, Partnerships, Web3, and DeFi

Kain Warwick, co-founder of Synthetix, launched a new front-end platform called Infinex, which unifies decentralized finance applications on a single interface, making DeFi more accessible. The platform also provides an Infinex account with cross-chain capabilities and passkey authentication, and it will eventually offer social login options.

Immutable Games announced that its flagship mobile fantasy RPG, “Guild of Guardians,” will launch worldwide on both Apple and Android devices. To celebrate and encourage engagement, the launch includes a $1 million prize in the game’s GOG token. The game already has over 1 million pre-registered users.

On-chain data shows that over one million new tokens have been created in the crypto market since early April, most of which are memecoins. Notably, 372,642 new tokens were launched on the Ethereum network, 88% of them on the Base layer-2 blockchain, which has seen its total value locked (TVL) increase by approximately 630% since early 2024. The Solana network also hosted over 640,000 new tokens, of which 466,914 were memecoins.

pSTAKE Finance, supported by Binance Labs and built on the Babylon Bitcoin staking protocol, introduced its liquid staking protocol as the latest development in Bitcoin-native decentralized finance. The project aims to simplify the Bitcoin staking process and offer additional yield-generating opportunities for Bitcoin.

Mastercard and Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong (SCBHK) successfully completed the first live test of the Mastercard Multi-Token Network (MTN). Launched in June 2023, the MTN is built on a private blockchain. The recent proof-of-concept test tokenized carbon credits under the supervision of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) Fintech.

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the world’s largest securities settlement system, announced the completion of a pilot program with blockchain oracle Chainlink (LINK) and several major US financial institutions. The Smart NAV project tested the transfer of net asset value (NAV) data to any private or public blockchain using Chainlink’s CCIP interoperability protocol.

The Fantom Foundation released details of its new layer 1 blockchain, Sonic Network. This blockchain will connect to Ethereum via a native layer 2 cross-chain bridge. FTM token holders will be able to transfer their tokens to the Sonic network at a 1:1 ratio, converting them to S tokens, which will represent Fantom 2.0.

Regulatory Actions and Hacks

A Dutch court sentenced Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev to 64 months in prison for laundering $1.2 billion in crypto assets through the Tornado Cash mixer between July 9, 2019, and August 10, 2022. The platform’s co-founder, Roman Storm, faces similar charges in the United States for his role in developing the controversial software.

Sonne Finance, the first decentralized lending protocol on Optimism, announced that it suffered an attack resulting in approximately $20 million in losses. The exploit was due to a vulnerability in one of Sonne’s Compound v2 forks. The company has paused all markets on Optimism, while those on Base remain operational.

In China, police dismantled an underground illegal bank that used the USDT stablecoin for various currency exchanges, conducting transactions worth about 13.8 billion yuan ($1.9 billion). The criminal group primarily served those looking to purchase assets abroad or smuggle pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

The bankruptcy court approved Genesis’s reorganization plan, allowing the bankrupt crypto lender to return billions of dollars in digital assets and cash to its creditors. According to Genesis’s proposal, affected parties may recover up to 77% of their crypto assets in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.