DeFi & EthereumCrypto's record funding year is quietly ending its permissionless era
More than $11 billion flowed into digital-asset companies this year. Most of it went to firms that need licenses, partners and gatekeepers.
By Noah Brenner ·
Section
DeFi & Ethereum
Protocol upgrades, onchain lending, layer-2 networks and the economics of decentralized finance.
DeFi & Ethereum
DeFi & EthereumA proposal to burn staking yield splits Ethereum before its next upgrade
EIP-8363 would taper validator issuance as staking grows. The founders of two of the largest staking and lending protocols want it out of the upcoming hard fork.
By Noah Brenner ·
DeFi & EthereumA staking protocol starts calling itself a bank
Ether.fi's latest release adds tokenized equities and loans backed by a basket of crypto holdings, with lending routed through a dedicated Aave instance on an Ethereum layer 2.
By Noah Brenner ·
DeFi & EthereumArbitrum quadruples its contract size limit to court non-Ethereum developers
The ArbOS "Elara" upgrade raises the Stylus code ceiling to 96 KB across Arbitrum One and Nova, opening the network to larger programs written in Rust and C.
By Noah Brenner ·
DeFi & EthereumThe layer-2 race splits three ways: liquidity, volume and users
A brokerage-backed network overtook Base on daily active users within weeks of launch, while Base led on transaction count and Arbitrum held the deepest liquidity.
By Noah Brenner ·