Record Stablecoin Adoption, Robotic Commerce, And DeFi Insurance

Key Narratives – the hottest topics in DeFi

Chart of the Week – the most eye-catching DeFi charts I can find

Tokenization News – tracking the mass migration of assets onchain

DeFi x AI – developments in AI-powered finance

From the Marketplace – latest news from DEXs, money markets, vaults, and more

Best of the Rest – any other news that caught my attention

Centrifuge launches officially licensed tokenized S&P 500 index on Aerodrome

PreStocks (private equity trading app) generated more volume than previous 5 months combined

Superstate tokenizes Galaxy shares (NASDAQ:GLXY), Kamino lets you borrow against them

1B monthly USDC transactions in March

200.4M transactions on the Ethereum network during Q1 

$37M in daily tokenized stock volume on Solana

Linux Foundation partners with x402 Foundation

ZyfAI launches security-focused Agentic Vaults

Virtuals is powering robotic commerce

The fund’s ticker is deSPXA and it’s officially licensed by S&P Dow Jones Indices

DeSPXA brings the initial version of the onchain fund, Janus Henderson’s SPXA, to more DeFi apps

Tokenized assets are not beneficial unless they can actually take advantage of onchain benefits – permissionlessness, composability, programmability 

deSPXA is initially available on the Base network as collateral for loans on Euler and Morpho, trading on Aerodrome, and more

Will use LayerZero to expand beyond Base to more networks to make it even more accessible (LayerZero currently connects 160+ blockchains – I covered them here)

First launch was on Base via the Aerodrome DEX – the second largest DEX on Base behind Uniswap with ~$340M in liquidity, but the first in terms of revenue passed to depositors ($6.19M in past 30 days)

Total daily volume on 3/30 was a record $37M

Volume of tokenized public shares (xStocks and Ondo) was ~$24M

Private equity volume from PreStocks was ~$13M

PreStocks volume in March (as of 3/30) was $304.9M – more than the prior 6 months combined – leading up to SpaceX’s IPO announcement

xStocks offers 141 tokenized stocks and ETFs across Ethereum, Solana, and more

The first xStock to be listed on Morpho is SPYx – and you can borrow Agora’s AUSD stablecoin against it

The initial incentives made this market actually pay borrowers a rate of 10% APY – for more information, check out last week’s Mid-Week Market Check

Talos offers financial services such as portfolio construction and execution for institutions

Ondo is the largest stock tokenization platform with over $550M in AUM

Now, institutions on Talos will be able to access Ondo’s unmatched variety of 200+ tokenized stocks and ETFs 

I covered Talos’ other recent partnerships with Nasdaq (covered here) and xStocks (covered here) 

Ondo also just surpassed $3B in total tokenized assets – AUM

Galaxy (NASDAQ:GLXY) holders can now have their shares tokenized on Solana 

GLXY is the first NASDAQ-listed stock to be tokenized on a major public chain 

Holders can borrow USDC against their tokenized shares on Kamino – Solana’s largest lending app

Here’s what happened (you can also watch it here):

All actions were communicated, paid for, and settled via x402 and USDC on the Base network

Robonet allows people to program agents to perform custom trading strategies and backtests in plain language – no code needed

Initially live on Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Polymarket

Users can also deploy a public vault for their trading strategies, allowing anyone to deposit – crowdsourced asset management

Vault managers can also charge fees based on performance, and depositors can see transaction history and strategy parameters

Recent DeFi attacks (USR stablecoin depeg, Drift $280M+ exploit) have put the spotlight back on safety

Most vaults are run manually – according to ZyfAI, only $40M out of $20B in onchain capital allocation is managed automatically

Unlike people, Agent Vaults are watching for potential threats 24/7

Here’s an example of one moving funds because it could sense a problem – that problem turned out to be the USR depeg 

They also automate repetitive manual work (NAV updates, withdrawal processing, strategy rebalancing, claim fulfillment)

The first Agent Vault will be a USDC yield optimizer 

You can now create a trading agent on the Public trading app 

Public has over 3 million users (most recent public number from 2022 – could be much higher now)

Agents can automate users’ money management and trades across stocks, options, crypto, bonds, and more

Public posted a walkthrough of how this works here

Zerohash brings these agents onchain, enabling DeFi investing strategies for Public’s large customer base

Aave is DeFi’s largest app by AUM, with $23B+ in deposits and $17B+ in loans outstanding

They also became the first DeFi app to issue $1T in loans

While v1 - v3 pooled all loans together, v4 features much more risk-minimizing infrastructure

v4 contains 3 initial hubs that support different collateral types for different risk profiles 

Will expand to more Hubs, supporting customized implementations for institutions/asset managers

Maple is one of the largest DeFi lenders with over ~$2.2B in outstanding loans

This shows the progress that DeFi has made over the past couple years – 18 months ago, RWA lending markets were virtually non-existent

Now, DeFi apps such as Maple can handle 9-figure transactions in a single day!

81% increase over Q1 2025

53.1M more transactions than second-highest quarter

Covered Vaults were designed and built in collaboration with industry leaders, including:

Designed to protect multi-billion-dollar markets

Here’s how it works, using Morpho as an example

Powered by Nexus Mutual underwriting capital which is locked onchain with verifiable solvency

The first 12 Covered Vaults are now live with a combined $18M in cover capacity (and plans to scale to 10+-figure coverage):

The IMF released a report which stated that “tokenization constitutes a structural shift in financial architecture rather than a marginal efficiency improvement”

Bank of Canada published a report focusing on Aave v3, stating that it “operates continuously, transparently, and with minimal overhead, demonstrating the potential of protocol-based credit markets”

x402 is an early mover in agentic payments infrastructure, driving millions of dollars of onchain volume per day

Founding members of the x402 Foundation include Coinbase, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Visa, Stripe, MasterCard, Shopify, and many more

Linux is known for promoting open source software – so this is a major move to brand x402 as an open source platform where anyone can contribute