Flash News

TREE NEWS reports: DeFi total value locked rose 38% to $95 billion in the third quarter of 2026, ending three consecutive quarters of decline and marking the first quarterly gain since the 2025 peak. Monad’s TVL climbed 183%, placing it among the top blockchain networks by locked value, while Robinhood Crypto, live for just two months, surpassed $1 billion in TVL.

TREE NEWS update: NEAR Intents said attackers tried to move more than $50 million through the platform and that it froze $503,000 mid-trade, defending the move days after THORChain refused Bitget’s request to cut off the hacker’s wallets. The protocol argued that permissionless “doesn’t mean neutral.”

TREE NEWS reports: A whale identified as 0x362a opened a 5x leveraged long position of 4,135 ZEC, worth $5.8 million, on Aster. The position is showing an unrealized loss of more than $450,000 as ZEC has fallen over 18% from its recent high.

TREE NEWS update: Kinetiq, Hyperliquid’s largest protocol by TVL at about $1.3 billion, has launched the testnet of Elysium, an Arbitrum Orbit-based L2 that settles to HyperEVM and uses HYPE as native gas. Kinetiq targets 300 million gas per second and 100-200 millisecond blocks, roughly two orders of magnitude above HyperEVM. Mainnet is planned in about one month, with 50% of sequencer fees used to buy back and burn KNTQ.

TREE NEWS update: Ethlabs said its CCIP 2.0 upgrade reduces Ethereum transaction confirmation waits to seconds, a faster-transfer option that requires users to opt in. The company said Ethereum’s full-finality guarantees and CCIP’s default wait time remain unchanged.

TREE NEWS reports: Block trades in put options accounted for one-third of total options volume as the market entered a correction.live. Implied volatility across major tenors fell slightly versus the prior two weeks, with IV now near 35% after barely rising during the recent rally. The options data is consistent with a mid-bear-market bounce, with the market expecting little volatility.

TREE NEWS update: Jumper, the cross-chain swap app incubated by Li.Fi, opens its JUMP token sale on Legion at 9pm Beijing time on September 29 and closes October 2, targeting $2M with a $3M cap at a $75M fully diluted valuation. The token is priced at $0.075, with 4% of supply on offer, 50% unlocked at TGE, and a TGE expected in Q4 2026. Subscriptions are paid in USDC on Ethereum.

TREE NEWS reports: SharpLink Gaming staked a further 42,074 ETH, worth $112.8 million, on September 29. The company now holds 892,127 ETH valued at $2.4 billion and has accumulated 27,945 ETH, or $75 million, in total staking rewards.

TREE NEWS update: NEAR Intents said it blocked $50 million tied to the hackers behind the Bitget incident, stating the cross-chain protocol actively prevents stolen funds from being laundered. The move draws a contrast with THORChain, which maintains it does not selectively censor transactions.

TREE NEWS update: Chainlink launched CCIP 2.0, adding custom verifiers and faster cross-chain transfers. Existing integrations continue to operate with full-finality defaults, while the new token-pool controls require an opt-in contract upgrade. The release is Chainlink’s latest update to its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol.

TREE NEWS update: Polygon will run a two-month program lifting the gross POL staking rate to 7.7%, funded by fees and compared with a roughly 3% baseline. The boost rewards stake held during the window rather than when the fees accrued.

TREE NEWS update: The Compound Foundation denied allegations that it misused V2 reserves, after records showed 344,780 COMP was added to its voting power ahead of a $52 million V4 budget vote. The proposal already had enough support to pass without those tokens, the records indicate. The Foundation rejected the misuse claim.

TREE NEWS reports: Prediction market predict.fun put the odds of Polymarket launching an official token before the end of this year at 7%, indicating traders see it as unlikely. The probability was posted on X and reflects current market pricing on the event.

TREE NEWS update: Chainlink has launched CCIP 2.0, a version of its cross-chain interoperability protocol that lets banks and institutions run their own security checks on cross-chain transfers. The release comes five months after a rival setup lost $292 million to hackers in the Kelp hack. The upgrade gives institutions control over how transfers are validated before they are executed.

TREE NEWS update: The Arbitrum Foundation announced the Arbitrum Security Program on September 29, offering smart contract audit subsidies to teams building on Arbitrum. The program covers applications on testnet, mainnet projects, projects migrating from other blockchains, and dedicated Arbitrum chains.

TREE NEWS reports: Ether.fi is winding down its core restaking business and pivoting to a crypto neobank model as restaking yields dry up and smart-contract risk rises. Restaking protocols held about $10.02 billion in deposits on September 8 but generated only roughly $99,977 in fees over the past week, versus $51.87 billion and $27.35 million for liquid staking. Excluding ether.fi, five liquid restaking protocols posted combined gross profit of about $953,000 in Q2 2026, down from $2.18 million across the prior three quarters.

TREE NEWS update: Polymarket vice president Josh said the team is building a full central limit order book (CLOB) in Rust, which it calls the root of most of the platform’s current problems. In October it plans to complete a full order lifecycle in a test environment; in November all production traffic will be mirrored to the new trading cluster for result comparison, with market makers given test access and two full migration rehearsals before the official switch.

TREE NEWS update: Aave founder Stani posted on X that the Aave App now lets users deposit assets directly from the Ethereum mainnet, and released a Ghost Pass code for early access. The announcement was made on September 29. No further details on supported assets or rollout timing were given.