Daily Briefing

Tokenized Apple and Nvidia stocks can now be used as collateral to borrow USDC on the Aave lending protocol. The listing extends real-world-asset collateral into DeFi credit markets, enabling a borrow-against-equity product on Aave.

The move widens the range of accepted collateral on a major DeFi lending protocol from crypto-native assets to tokenized equities, linking equity exposure to onchain credit for the first time in this form.

CleanSpark closed a $2.276 billion note offering at a 7.875% rate, with proceeds earmarked for construction and to reimburse earlier equity contributions at its Sandersville, Georgia data center, which carries a 20-year lease.

The deal ties a large, long-dated debt raise to a site held under a 20-year lease, extending institutional capital into bitcoin-mining data center capacity that had previously been funded with equity.

The notes carry a 7.875% coupon, and the proceeds cover construction costs at the Georgia site while reimbursing prior equity contributions. Sandersville is a 150 MW facility.

Anza announced on Sept. 25 that Alpenglow, its consensus overhaul for Solana, is live on devnet, a day after the separate testnet completed its transition, and the Solana Foundation’s upgrade page lists the upgrade as active on both networks. Mainnet activation remains unscheduled.

Alpenglow targets roughly 150 milliseconds for finality, against about 12.8 seconds under the existing system, which could shorten the wait for an exchange to release deposited funds or a payment app to confirm a sale to a merchant. Because validator votes move out of blocks, reported transaction totals will also shrink even if user activity is unchanged.

Validators will exchange votes directly instead of recording them as transactions inside blocks, allowing agreement in one or two voting rounds, and the Solana Foundation has told data providers to adjust their comparisons. The 150-millisecond figure comes from simulations rather than live-market results, and wallet processing and exchanges’ own deposit checks can add further waiting time; applications that only send transactions and read account balances require no migration.

Evercrest Technologies, the company behind KelpDAO, has sued LayerZero Labs, its Canadian affiliate, and CEO Bryan Pellegrino in British Columbia over April's $292 million rsETH exploit, alleging negligent misrepresentation, negligence and defamation and seeking aggravated and punitive damages. Evercrest says Kelp users have withdrawn more than $650 million since the attack; Pellegrino has called the suit meritless.

The filing asks a court to settle a responsibility dispute over who bears losses when an application-configured security setup and a provider's RPC infrastructure fail together. Customers have already acted independently: by Aug. 4, projects tied to roughly $14.5 billion in assets had announced moves from LayerZero to Chainlink's CCIP.

LayerZero's verifier now refuses to sign on any channel where it is the only required signer, and by Aug. 4 the company had moved default pathways on both versions of its endpoint to a minimum of three verifiers, while applications can still build custom setups at the protocol level. LayerZero said in May that letting its own verifier act alone on high-value transfers had been a mistake, and it maintained the incident touched about 0.14% of the applications on its network. Evercrest alleges LayerZero approved the single-verifier setup in writing, telling Kelp in February 2024 there was "no problem" with a default configuration, and that it warned another developer, USDT0, about default verifier risks while withholding a comparable warning from Kelp; LayerZero says the choice was Kelp's, noting the application had previously used a two-of-two configuration before moving to one-of-one. Those allegations have yet to be tested in court.

Binance took a $100 million equity stake in Circle and expanded its existing partnership into a five-year arrangement, giving USDC a broader distribution channel through one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. Analysts told CoinDesk the deal aligns Binance's interests with Circle's growth, similar to Circle's distributor-shareholder model with Coinbase.

Analysts said the tie-up could strengthen USDC's reach in emerging markets, while Clear Street analyst Owen Lau said it "optimizes the relationship and further aligns Binance's interests with Circle's."

According to Kaiko, Binance offered 140 USDC-quoted spot markets when the first partnership was announced in December 2024 and now has 329, while monthly USDC trading volume on the exchange has roughly doubled from the $20 billion–$40 billion range to consistently above $80 billion. USDC has a market capitalization of about $74 billion, second to Tether's roughly $140 billion USDT.

Binance listed Hyperliquid's native HYPE token, and the asset fell 4.5% following the listing, according to Yahoo Finance and 24/7 Wall St.

A Binance listing gives HYPE access to one of the largest centralized exchange user bases and order books; in this case the token traded down rather than up on the news, bucking the widely observed "listing pump" pattern.

The reported move is a 4.5% decline, and coverage of the event is limited to the headline-level price reaction.

Bitcoin ETFs recorded $2.4 billion in weekly net inflows, their largest weekly figure since October. The inflows pushed the funds' 2026 year-to-date net flows back above zero.

The weekly inflow reversed bitcoin ETFs' 2026 year-to-date net flow position, which had been roughly $5.8 billion in the red about two months earlier.

ETF flow figures are net numbers, comparing money entering a fund with money leaving it over a given period. An inflow does not guarantee a price increase, since bitcoin's price is set across a much larger global market.

IBM announced on Sept. 24 a beta connection between its Digital Asset Haven platform and SWIFT's shared ledger for tokenized deposits, using an ISO 20022 Messaging Adapter that lets participating institutions instruct ledger transactions through standard payment messages. IBM also announced a separate on-premises Haven beta that runs the platform and its key management inside a client's own IBM Z or LinuxONE data centers.

According to IBM, the adapter lets banks use the ISO 20022 payment messages they already exchange to test transfers of bank-issued tokenized deposits, keeping familiar formats and compliance processes. The on-premises beta is positioned by IBM as giving regulated institutions direct control over the infrastructure used for custody and transaction management as they evaluate digital-asset services.

Transfers on the ledger can move around the clock, but final settlement still relies on existing mechanisms such as real-time gross settlement systems, so a tokenized-deposit transfer can occur ahead of the final settlement step. IBM says the on-premises option uses the same architecture, APIs and workflows as Haven's SaaS and hybrid deployments, and that institutions already in SWIFT's program have tested tokenized deposits on the shared ledger with Haven.

AlphaFi, a DeFi protocol on the Sui network, is winding down operations after an oracle error forced it to disable new deposits and loans. The Sui Foundation is supporting the wind-down, and Slush wallet users have been instructed to immediately exit four affected strategies through withdrawals.

Users whose funds are allocated to the four named strategies are being directed to withdraw immediately, making the oracle failure a direct user-fund event within the Sui DeFi ecosystem rather than an abstract technical fault.

New deposits and loans on AlphaFi are disabled, and the exit instruction covers four specific strategies accessed through the Slush wallet. The wind-down is being carried out with Sui Foundation support.