Stablecoins, tokenized assets and payment infrastructure accounted for most of the major updates, while security issues resurfaced across DeFi and shared EVM tooling. Banks, fintechs and blockchain networks added new regulated products, RWA rails and token-economy mechanisms.

Recent Updates & Developments

- World Liberty received conditional approval for a national trust bank

- Base launched tokenized U.S. stocks for non-U.S

- JPMorgan & major banks are reconsidering stablecoin launches

- Solana advanced proposals to cut issuance and increase burns

- LayerZero launched institutional market infrastructure with ATLAS

- Revolut is preparing a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin

- Hyperliquid activated reserve-funded HYPE buybacks and burns

- Grayscale launched the first U.S. Zcash ETF

Europe builds real euro coins (Revolut, Qivalis, SocGen) as MiCA pushes USDT out. The US giants dodge stablecoins entirely and build tokenized deposits, same money on-chain, locked inside the bank.

From enemy to issuer, and a quiet fight over who owns settlement.

nOPAL is now live on Bybit RWA Earn, 80M users can now tap into Brazil's $3T credit-card market. The mechanic: BlackOpal buys future card payments at a discount (true sale, registered with Brazil's Central Bank), settled through Visa and Mastercard. That discount becomes on-chain yield.

~15% APY, 3x what T-bill RWAs pay (~4–5%), because you're taking emerging-market credit + FX risk, not farm emissions. Backed by Nest on Plume: $76.2M TVL, $1B+ processed, DTCC working-group member.

OpenAI believes it is approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI), with Chief Research Officer Mark Chen estimating the company is “80% of the way” there.

Sam Altman said OpenAI expects to have an internal system he would consider AGI by the end of 2026, marking one of the company’s clearest timelines yet.

The progress is reportedly being driven by Astra, OpenAI’s next-generation model designed for autonomous research. In one demonstration, 16 AI agents divided a research-level math problem, coordinated their work and assembled a proposed proof.

Astra can reportedly work on research tasks for extended periods, with Altman expecting it to eventually “invent new things” in ways that materially contribute to scientific discovery.

If OpenAI’s timeline holds, 2026 could mark a major transition from AI that assists with knowledge to AI capable of creating new knowledge itself.

Read the full TIME interview

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Travala has notified users of a data breach involving unauthorized access to customer records, exposing email addresses, names and cryptographically hashed passwords.

Travala says plaintext passwords, funds, private keys and 2FA credentials were not compromised.

The affected data may also include phone numbers, date of birth, nationality and certain identity-document details, according to the company’s breach notification.

Users are being advised to review their security settings and remain alert to phishing attempts, especially those using leaked personal information.

Despite the breach, $AVA remains up more than 40% since the start of August.

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Flop Labs has revealed the first details of FLOP tokenomics, with no VC allocation and no presale.

20.4% of total FLOP supply is allocated to the airdrop for miners, validators, agents and early community members.

Flop Labs and the Flop Foundation will each receive 8 FLOP per block alongside the 96 FLOP block reward. Both allocations follow the network’s halving schedule and sunset after year 10, reaching 5.7% of total supply each by then.

The Foundation will also receive a portion of FLOP confiscated from dishonest miners and validators, with funds supporting network development and efforts to reduce block times to sub-one second.

Further airdrop details and an AMA hosted by Arthur Hayes are expected next week.

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Nara raised a $500K pre-seed from YZi Labs, the fund formerly known as Binance Labs, following its graduation from EASY Residency Season 4 in Bhutan.

Nara is building NaraUSD, a yield-bearing dollar asset backed by cross-border payment financing: it tokenizes real payment flows to target non-correlated, double-digit USD returns. The raise follows YZi Labs' 10-week EASY Residency program, whose Season 4 cohort spent its second half on the ground in Bhutan's Gelephu Mindfulness City, with up to $500K available through the Builder Fund. On Demo Day the team pitched to CZ, seasoned investors and the King of Bhutan.

The deal fits YZi Labs' thesis that stablecoins and payment rails are becoming core financial plumbing, extending its bets into yield-bearing dollar products tied to real-world flows.

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Bitfinex Securities opened a $50M offering of ALKN, a tokenized nickel product from Luxembourg's Alkemya backed by a $1.6B stockpile of high-purity nickel wire held in Swiss custody.

ALKN is a listed instrument of Alkemya Metacore, the Luxembourg parent, with a Singapore commercial entity (GTX) and Swiss custody. Proceeds fund Alkemya's operating subsidiary, Green Transitional Metals, to commercialize engineered nickel for EMI shielding, aerospace and defense, semiconductors, power and industrial systems, green hydrogen and metals recovery. It is billed as one of the first tokenized nickel products and the first tokenized commodity under El Salvador's digital-asset framework, with primary subscription open to eligible investors until October 15.

The deal extends the drive to put physical commodities on-chain, giving investors regulated, blockchain-based exposure to an industrial metal tied to the energy transition.

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Moonwell, the Base lending protocol, was drained of roughly $8.7M in an exploit flagged by security firm PeckShield.

Moonwell is a Base-native money market. The protocol has been hit before by oracle price-feed manipulation, where a mispriced collateral feed lets an attacker borrow far beyond an asset's real value: a February 2026 incident drained about $1.78M through a bad cbETH price, and an earlier wrsETH mispricing left roughly $3.7M in bad debt. The root cause of this latest $8.7M drain had not been confirmed as the incident was still unfolding.

The repeat pattern keeps lending markets that depend on external price oracles among DeFi's most exploited primitives, renewing pressure on Moonwell's risk and feed design.

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Better and Coinbase made their token-backed conforming mortgage generally available, letting Coinbase One members pledge BTC or USDC to cover a home down payment instead of selling holdings.

The product pairs a Fannie Mae-backed home loan with a separate down-payment loan secured by Bitcoin; both carry the same interest rate and term and are repaid as one monthly payment. Borrowers must pledge BTC worth at least 250% of the down-payment loan, transferred to Better's custodial account on Coinbase Prime, with USDC also supported. Coinbase One members approved for eligible products earn a lender credit of 1% of the mortgage value, capped at $10,000.

Demand is already strong: a waitlist opened in June generated over $260 million in projected loan volume, with 76% of applicants already Coinbase One members and 60% planning to buy within six months.

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