VeChain's Interstellar upgrade is now live, delivering greater EVM compatibility, modern tooling for builders, and stronger foundations to scale.

The release lands new EVM opcodes and cryptographic precompiles via VIP-255, alongside core protocol improvements including EIP-2935. Together they cut the infrastructure friction developers face when building on the network.

Interstellar caps a three-part rollout detailing the changes under the hood, from opcodes and precompiles to the underlying protocol layer that ties them together.

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Plume Vaults' institutional yield tokens are moving cross-protocol, plugging RWA collateral into two of DeFi's largest venues within a single week.

Strata Markets is now tranching nOPAL, backed by a $600B+ credit card transaction market via BlackOpal. Senior nOPAL (srnOPAL) is live on Pendle, letting users fix or trade protected yield from short-term Brazilian credit card receivables, with added rewards from Strata and Plume.

In parallel, Aerie Capital launched a new Morpho market on Ethereum mainnet, allowing nALPHA, nOPAL, nBASIS, and nFALCON to serve as collateral. Holders can borrow stablecoins or run looping strategies inside one of Ethereum's largest lending environments.

The expansion rides institutional cover: Plume's General Counsel outlined tokenization's four superpowers in Bitcoin Suisse's Crypto Wealth Management Report 2026, framing RWA as structured for onchain capital.

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Payward, Kraken's parent company, plans to bring compliant onchain perpetual futures to US clients, using builder-deployed markets on the Hyperliquid blockchain through its CFTC-regulated entities.

Rather than build a venue from scratch, Payward will tap Hyperliquid's builder-deployed markets, a model that lets outside teams spin up perp markets on the network while routing through Kraken's regulated US wrappers. Hyperliquid has grown into one of the largest onchain perpetuals venues by volume, and the tie-up gives US traders a compliant path to that liquidity. Payward is pursuing the rollout through CFTC-regulated entities, positioning the offering inside existing US derivatives rules.

The plan puts Kraken among a growing set of regulated players racing to plug into onchain derivatives, as brokers and exchanges look to meet perp demand without stepping outside US compliance.

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Tron founder Justin Sun unveiled the Justin Sun Prize, a Nobel-style award that pays up to $1 million for each major mathematics problem that is solved and formally verified.

Unlike the Nobel, which has no mathematics category, the prize is awarded per problem rather than once a year. Each award is split between whoever solves a given problem and whoever converts the proof into machine-verifiable code, and a winner can be a person, a team, an AI, or all of them together. The program launched with 66 recognized problems, a list Sun says will keep expanding over time.

The inaugural $1 million top prize went to an OpenAI team for the existence and smoothness problem of the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations, with the formalization completed by GPT-6 Astra.

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Nine early-stage projects that hit our radar this week, real products rather than memecoins, most launched in the last few months. The theme is onchain markets: prediction-market tooling, tokenized equities, and a cluster of fresh builds on Robinhood Chain. Follower counts are small on purpose, you are seeing these early. With a link to each.

1/ pve.trade (Trading Intelligence)

An all-in-one market terminal for active traders: options flow, gamma exposure (GEX), stock data, news and alerts in a single dashboard. Early and still rolling out, with parts of the terminal marked coming soon.

2/ SpreadCore (Prediction Arbitrage)

A Polymarket versus bookmaker arbitrage terminal. It scans 9+ sportsbooks against Polymarket in real time, locks the spread, and executes on your own funded accounts from one interface.

3/ Synthdata (Forecasting Infra)

A Bittensor subnet (SN50) producing probabilistic price forecasts, full distributions rather than single points, exposed via API. It powers Polymarket and Kalshi bots and vol-mispricing dashboards; Mode's AI Quant is built on it.

4/ Omnibook (Prediction Markets)

"Putting markets back in prediction markets." One order book for binary contracts on any asset, from one minute to one year, where the venue holds no position. Backed by Entrepreneur First.

5/ Starcap (Space RWA)

The tokenized layer for private space equity, launching Q4. It holds real equity in top private space companies, normally oversubscribed and inaccessible, and represents it onchain through one token, $SPACE. Pre-launch, so treat the timeline as a plan.

6/ Pink Sheets (Tokenized Stocks)

The first OTC trading desk on Robinhood Crypto. An off-pool block desk where thin stock tokens and large positions settle atomically between counterparties via quoted auctions. Powered by $PINK. Very early: no public website yet, just the X account.

7/ Cerebro (AI Infrastructure)

An economic layer for AI inference: a share of every trading fee is converted into AI credits holders can spend across models, agents and apps, expanding from inference rewards into a launchpad and an open compute marketplace. Live on Robinhood Chain ($CEREBRO).

8/ Brim (Onchain Treasury)

A (3,3) treasury with a floor that never dilutes and a redeem button: premium funds the yield, reserve funds the floor, nothing mints unpaid. Fair genesis via "First Fill", no presale, no VCs, no team allocation. A Ripe DAO ecosystem project on Robinhood Chain.

9/ Nomu (Web3 Commerce)

Spend-to-earn commerce on Solana: buy products and earn as they sell, with every sale funding onchain buybacks. Real brand collaborations (MonkeDAO, Rekt, Raposa Coffee), backed by Colosseum, no VC allocations.

The pattern this week: onchain markets are maturing fast, from prediction-market arbitrage and forecasting infra to tokenized equities and private-market access, with another cluster of builds landing on Robinhood's new chain. These are early-stage projects, several pre-token or pre-launch, so higher upside comes with higher risk. Do your own research; nothing here is financial advice.

Which one are you watching?

Since October 2025, Arc's testnet ran a full economy: 3.43M real wallets, 48.3M contracts deployed, 10.9M tokens created, 42.2M stablecoin transfers.

The throughput held: 740.9M transactions across 62.4M blocks, 95.2% successful, at a $0.0038 average fee. On Arc, USDC isn't a token, it's the gas. 4.89M holders proved the model before mainnet.

Arc, the stablecoin-native Layer-1 built by Circle, launched its public mainnet, positioning itself as an "Economic OS for the internet" with USDC as the native gas token and deterministic sub-second finality.

Arc arrives as a full-stack financial platform rather than a bare chain, shipping assets, applications, interoperability, and Circle platform services from day one. It is EVM-compatible and provides infrastructure for lending and borrowing, trading and liquidity, onchain FX, payments and settlement, tokenized assets, and agentic economic workflows, tied together with CCTP, Gateway, CPN, and StableFX. Eleven founding validators, including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, and ICE, secure the network.

More than 190 institutional and ecosystem teams are already building on Arc, one of the most institutionally backed genesis cohorts the industry has seen, as Circle pushes stablecoins deeper into regulated finance.

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Deutsche Bank went live with a crypto custody service for institutional clients, offering banks and asset managers secure, regulated storage for cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The German lender built the platform with Bitpanda's technology unit and continues to work with Swiss custodian Taurus, in which Deutsche Bank is both an investor and a client. The move fits a broader strategy to grow fee income from digital assets, mirroring similar efforts at its asset-management arm DWS. It marks one of Europe's largest banks stepping directly into crypto custody as institutional demand for regulated infrastructure keeps building.

The launch lands as European banks race to meet client demand under clearer digital-asset rules, positioning custody as the entry point before broader trading and settlement services follow.

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X launched its Cashtag Partner Program in the US, adding a Trade option to Cashtags for stocks, ETFs, and crypto. Tapping a supported Cashtag now surfaces price charts and related posts, with a Trade button that routes users to a partner platform to execute.

Transactions are not settled natively on X. Selecting Trade opens the chosen partner's mobile app or web interface, where the user logs in or registers to complete the order. The first batch of partners spans both brokerages and crypto exchanges: Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Moomoo, and Interactive Brokers. X frames the program as a way to connect market discussion and discovery with the ability to act on it, without forcing users to leave the conversation to hunt for a broker.

X said its Cashtag trading pilot generated an estimated $1 billion in global trading volume within three days of launch, an early signal of how much intent already sits inside ticker chatter on the platform.

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Liquid Compute emerged from stealth with a $15 million seed round, unveiling plans to build the first CFTC-regulated orderbook for trading compute.

The startup has pending applications before the CFTC for Designated Contract Market (DCM) and Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) status, aiming to run a regulated venue for both cash and physically settled compute contracts. Its thesis is that compute behaves like electricity rather than oil, heterogeneous and impossible to store, so it is building a short-term spot market to underpin a cash-settled derivatives layer, modeled on power grids like PJM and ERCOT. It has already worked with Susquehanna International Group, BGC Group and Wintermute to seed OTC trading for AI startups, neocloud providers and lenders.

The round was co-led by Chemistry and FirstMark Capital, with participation from K8, Night Capital, UFO Holdings, TrueBridge, Brainchild Holdings and Y Combinator, plus angels including Dmitry Balyasny and operators from CoreWeave, Jane Street and OpenAI.

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