Gauntlet has closed a $125M Series C led by SBI Holdings as it pushes deeper into onchain finance and institutional infrastructure.

The company says the new capital will help expand its platform, grow the global team, and broaden stablecoin coverage beyond USD and EUR to include MXN, JPY, and more. Gauntlet currently curates more than $1.5B in supplied assets across its vaults and works with over 150 fintechs and institutions.

SBI said the investment aligns with its long-term strategy to bridge traditional finance with digital assets, including plans for a yen-denominated stablecoin in 2026.

Aave Labs is introducing Stable Vaults, a new all-in-one infrastructure layer for embedding fixed-rate stablecoin yield into consumer products.

The system is already powering the Aave mobile savings app and is now open for any business to build on. Stable Vaults aim to solve one of DeFi’s biggest challenges: turning volatile onchain lending rates into a predictable rate users can actually rely on.

With Stable Vaults, companies can integrate Aave-powered yield, or any ERC-4626 vault strategy, without building yield infrastructure from scratch. The operator decides which stablecoins to support, which strategies to use, and what fixed rate to offer.

Stable Vaults enable businesses to easily offer fixed-rate stablecoin yield across use cases ranging from neobanks and payment platforms to exchanges and fintechs.

The production-ready infrastructure is already deployed in the Aave App and supports secure cross-chain functionality via Chainlink Price Feeds and CCIP.

🔎 Recent Updates & Developments

– Robinhood launched its Layer 2 on Arbitrum

– Kraken is pursuing a European banking license

– Coinbase obtained a U.K. MiFID license

– GRVT set July 21 for its token launch

– BNB Chain unveiled an AI-focused Layer 1

– Ethereum scheduled Glamsterdam with up to 78% lower fees

– Tether is bringing native USDT back to Bitcoin via RGB99

The EU's crypto rulebook fully kicked in on July 1. One week later, the regulated market has a clear #1: Kraken.

$416M in spot liquidity — nearly half of all MiCA-regulated liquidity, and 2.4x its closest rival. Kraken alone runs deeper than Coinbase and Crypto com combined.

The exchanges that went all-in on EU compliance early now own the market. In regulated Europe, being big globally means nothing. Being licensed and liquid means everything.

Zapper, one of DeFi's earliest portfolio dashboards, will wind down on August 3, 2026 — closing its website, mobile apps and API. CEO Seb Audet said the team weighed its options and chose an orderly shutdown.

At its peak Zapper served ~2 million monthly users and processed over $13 billion in transactions, after raising roughly $16.5M from Framework Ventures, Sound Ventures and others since 2019.

Audet admitted the goal of making DeFi truly accessible fell short, but said Zapper still helped make the onchain economy far easier to navigate for a great many people.

World.xyz, a decentralized prediction market that debuted on Solana barely a week ago, is migrating to Robinhood Chain — the new Layer 2 that Robinhood only launched on July 1.

The team called it a “tactful pivot” made after 24 hours of deliberation, thanking the Solana foundation and community on its way out. Solana diehards weren't impressed — Raydium mocked the exit, and Phantom simply replied: “i still like solana.”

Robinhood launched its own chain on Arbitrum — and for the first time, Arbitrum's DAO earns from a network it doesn't even settle. Every Arbitrum-stack L2 that settles outside Arbitrum One/Nova now returns 10% of net revenue: 8% to the DAO treasury, 2% to the developer guild.

ARB jumped ~14% in 24 hours on the news. Week one brought ~$57K in protocol revenue — a modest run-rate today, but a genuine structural shift: from a pure governance token to one with a real, recurring on-chain revenue path.

Hyundai Card and Hyundai Motor completed a stablecoin remittance pilot, moving $20,000 between the automaker's U.S. and Mexican units in about 7 minutes — versus 3–4 hours by traditional bank wire.

Phase one ran on Avalanche with Tether's USDT (via Axiym), while a European phase with Circle and Visa is set to begin in late July.

Hyundai Card now plans to expand stablecoins across settlements and fund transfers for Hyundai Motor Group's overseas units — a notable TradFi step onto onchain payment rails.

Binance Wallet has integrated Plume Network's nBASIS vault, giving self-custody users direct access to tokenized Invesco and Bitwise funds — its first structured RWA yield product.

Users deposit stablecoins and earn roughly 3.5% from two institutional funds behind one vault: Invesco's tokenized U.S. government-securities fund (USTB) and Bitwise's crypto carry fund (USCC).

Both funds were tokenized by Superstate — USTB holds over $860M in assets and USCC over $170M.

GRVT, the licensed ZK-powered hybrid derivatives exchange, confirmed its native token GRVT will go live on July 21 — putting an official date on its long-awaited TGE.

GRVT has expanded its community token allocation to 28%, with Season 2 participants receiving an 18% share.

GRVT now ranks as a top-5 perpetuals DEX, with around $1.3B in 24h volume and roughly $40B over the past 30 days.