Crypto Cards 2026: Who Holds the Money Before the Swipe
Crypto card spend passed $1.1 billion a month in August. Underneath the volume, the same question keeps surfacing: once you top up, who actually holds the money? We read the...
Nick Sawinyh
DeFi Blog
Interviews with DeFi projects, analytics, and important news about decentralized finance.
Nick Sawinyh
Liquid Network: $320M Pegged Out, Every Key Intact
Someone pegged 3,996 BTC out of Blockstream's Liquid sidechain through a valid SideSwap order, and the federation's 11-of-15 multisig signed the withdrawal. No key was compromised. The L-BTC came from...
Nick Sawinyh
Inside the Stock-Paired Memecoin Boom
On Robinhood Chain, memecoins are increasingly quoted in tokenized shares instead of stablecoins. We read the pools directly and found 432 of them, holding 17% of the onchain float across...
Nick Sawinyh
A Memecoin Cornered a Tokenized Stock
A memecoin paired against tokenized Hims & Hers equity absorbed most of the token's onchain float over a weekend and pushed it as much as 112% above its NYSE close....
Nick Sawinyh
Term Finance: $8.5M Approved by Silence
An attacker queued a routine-looking vault parameter change on Term Finance, waited six days for nobody to veto it, and walked out with 2,841 ETH and 1.68 million USDC. The...
Nick Sawinyh
EIP-8363: Ethereum's Tapered Issuance Burn
A draft EIP would burn a rising share of validator rewards until net consensus yield reaches zero at half the ETH supply staked. It landed two days before a fork...
Nick Sawinyh
The Ostium Exploit: Drained by a Fake Bitcoin Price
An attacker drained roughly $11.86M in USDC from Ostium by opening a Bitcoin position against a fabricated $5,000 price and closing it near $60,000. The chain shows it plainly, and...
Nick Sawinyh
Robinhood Chain: Open Rails, Fenced-Off Asset
Robinhood launched a permissionless L2 built for tokenized stocks. Its flagship asset is a US-blocked debt security with no ownership rights. The gap between the rails and the product is...
Nick Sawinyh
Onchain Prop Firms: The House Edge, On the Table
Funded-trader firms have always quietly bet against some of their own customers. The onchain prop firms now launching on Hyperliquid are putting that conflict on the table, and turning it...
Nick Sawinyh
HIP-4 vs Polymarket: Who Resolves Reality?
Hyperliquid's HIP-4 outcome markets put prediction trading inside an exchange. The contest with Polymarket is less about fees than about who gets to call the truth.
Nick Sawinyh
Polymarket's $600K Drain Was a Key Compromise
An attacker drained ~$600K from a dormant Polymarket ops wallet on Polygon. It got labeled a contract exploit. It wasn't, and the difference matters.
Nick Sawinyh
Ethereum's Missing Fighter
Dankrad Feist argues Ethereum is losing because no organization is economically tied to ETH and willing to fight for it. A look at his proposal, the staking-revenue funding mechanic, and...
Nick Sawinyh
T. Rowe's Kroger: Tokenization's Real 2026 Win Is Access
T. Rowe Price's David Kroger on why the cost-savings story for tokenization is overhyped, what's actually onboarding TradFi capital, and the vault-vs-ETF condition for 2031.
Nick Sawinyh
The EF's Spring 2026 Reshuffle
Five senior Ethereum Foundation exits, a March Mandate that triggered sign-or-leave reports, and a scoped-down Glamsterdam fork. What's verified, what isn't, and what's actually at stake.
Nick Sawinyh
The Echo eBTC Exploit on Monad: $77M Minted, $870K Stolen
An attacker minted 1,000 eBTC on Monad, roughly $77M of fake wrapped Bitcoin, and stole ~$870K of real WBTC against it on Curvance. The rest is stuck on-chain.
Nick Sawinyh
Fluid's $8.2M Bad-Debt Cleanup, and the Governance Fight It Triggered
Fluid used a pre-approved credit line to sweep up Resolv bad debt, then drafted the governance vote to repay it. The cleanup worked. The process is the story.
Nick Sawinyh