TREE NEWS update: Nectar Group, the developer of bitcoin income platform HoneyB, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round at a $30 million valuation. The company builds a platform focused on generating yield from bitcoin. No lead investor or other participants in the round were disclosed.
TREE NEWS update: NEAR Protocol launched NEAR Business, a confidential multisig treasury management platform for crypto-native teams and institutions, supporting payroll, vendor payments, cross-chain swaps and fund allocation across more than 35 blockchains including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, with over 200 assets. Cross-chain transfers run through NEAR Intents, and the platform operates on NEAR’s private sharding infrastructure so transaction details stay confidential but auditable. It is free to use, charges a 0.35% swap fee and is currently invite-only.
TREE NEWS reports: Ethereum staking reached a record 43.8 million ETH in the third quarter, nearly 36% of the total supply, even as staking yields fell to 2.63%. Solana staking also set a record at 440.5 million SOL, Bitwise said.
TREE NEWS reports: Ethereum staking reached a record 43.8 million ETH by the end of the third quarter, equal to 35.90% of total supply. Net inflows into staking totaled 1.99 million ETH in the quarter, the sixth consecutive quarter of net inflows. Gross staking yield fell to 2.63% from 2.81% the prior quarter, while active validators dropped to 881,000 from about 1.1 million, which Bitwise attributed to node operators consolidating validators after the Pectra upgrade.
TREE NEWS update: Optimum, an MIT-incubated network, said its block propagation layer mump2p is now live on Ethereum mainnet, with 16 node operators and about 1.4 million ETH in stake running it. Ether.fi has made mump2p standard across its validator set, the network said.
TREE NEWS update: Ether.fi has mandated that all of its node operators run Optimum’s mump2p software on Ethereum mainnet, the MIT-born startup said. Sixteen node operators are now using mump2p for more than 1.4 million ETH in staked assets, with blocks arriving faster than over Ethereum’s default gossip layer.
TREE NEWS reports: Crypto futures markets saw $297 million in liquidations over the past 24 hours, with $128 million in long positions and $168 million in shorts liquidated, CoinGlass data shows. BTC liquidations totaled $76.10 million and ETH $100 million. The largest single liquidation was a $11.96 million BTCUSDT order on Binance.
TREE NEWS update: Lulo said its Boost deposits face a 6.4% drawdown tied to exposure to Neutrl, while protected deposits remain unaffected. Neutrl’s redemption contract is offering 0.51 USDC per NUSD. The disclosure marks a loss for Boost depositors and a discount on the NUSD redemption route.
TREE NEWS update: Celestia has activated Fibre, enabling direct validator uploads for rollups. The initial release supports 128 MiB blobs and up to 200 Fibre submissions per block, using smaller uploads and a slower block cadence than its terabit benchmark.
TREE NEWS update: 1inch is winding down its crypto card and has urged users to withdraw balances by Dec. 18, the company said. Existing cards and accounts remain accessible for now, but the issuer and provider — not 1inch — control when card functionality ends. The move affects holders of the 1inch card, which let users spend crypto at merchants.
TREE NEWS update: Blockchain.com has launched options trading on seven cryptoassets, with buyers funding contracts in USDC and unable to exit positions before expiry. US and UK residents are among those excluded from the offering.
TREE NEWS reports: Victims recovered $9.8 million of the $1.18 billion traced across 60 crypto exploits between January and August, Blockaid found, and every dollar frozen or returned came through governance or validator action rather than issuer blacklists. The security firm’s data indicates issuer-level blacklisting recovered nothing in those incidents.
TREE NEWS reports: Stablecoins now move more than $400 million per hour on average, with off-hours transfers dominating activity. At current growth rates, stablecoin adjusted transfer volume is on track to reach $1.5 trillion per quarter by the end of 2027, the report said.
TREE NEWS update: Liquid has restored Bitcoin swaps while peg-outs remain frozen, with reserves still covering about 85.8% of outstanding L-BTC, leaving a roughly 603 BTC shortfall. The network confirmed the swap restoration but did not say when peg-outs would resume, leaving holders unable to redeem L-BTC for BTC at full backing.
TREE NEWS reports: The exploiter behind the April 1 Drift hack has sent $61 million in ETH to Tornado Cash while retaining $194 million, the on-chain movement shows. The attack caused about $295 million in losses and was later attributed to a North Korean threat group in a Mandiant investigation.
TREE NEWS update: Mesh has signed a deal with Visa to let users pay directly from crypto and stablecoin balances held in participating wallets, with Mesh acting as program manager and a Visa credential set up in the background. Neither company has said when the service will launch. The arrangement is designed to enable card-free payments from wallet balances.
TREE NEWS reports: The attacker behind Drift Protocol deposited 25,700 ETH worth $61.56 million into Tornado Cash over the past two hours, ending a two-month lull in moving the more than $270 million stolen in ETH. The address still holds 81,864 ETH valued at $195 million.
TREE NEWS reports: Lido engineering lead Dima Gusakov warned that delegated staking protocols face front-running attacks during Ethereum’s Glamsterdam hard fork transition. Glamsterdam introduces builder deposits using 0xB0-prefixed withdrawal credentials that share the deposit queue with validator deposits around the fork, letting malicious node operators capture staker funds into their builder accounts and preventing the corresponding validators from activating. The fix proposal, consensus-specs #5735, was closed as “not planned,” so staking protocols must run their own pre-deposit checks.
TREE NEWS update: Binance Wallet launched a CopyTrade feature that lets users follow wallets selected from a leaderboard or entered manually, setting buy amounts and take-profit and stop-loss parameters for automatic execution. Users can start or stop copying at any time, and the feature supports tokens including meme coins and bStocks.
TREE NEWS update: 1inch is winding down its 1inch Card program, closing new user registrations while existing cards and accounts remain usable for now. Holders are advised to withdraw or spend card balances by Dec. 18 at the latest. Funds are not held by 1inch but sit in e-wallets issued by licensed e-money institution Monavate, with account closures, KYC and personal data handled by card service provider Crypto Life.