Welcome to this week’s edition of DeFi In Five!
This is where we give you a rundown of the latest developments in DeFi (with added context so you know why it matters!)
Every issue is packed with the newest, most notable news in tokenization, AI, markets, and more.
Here’s what you can expect each week:
Chart of the week – the most eye-catching DeFi charts I can find
Market pulse – an overview of market conditions, yield, and narratives
Featured project – teams that are building the future of our industry
Tokenization news – tracking the mass migration of assets onchain
DeFi x AI – the latest developments in AI-powered finance
From the marketplace – the latest news from DEXs, money markets, vaults, and more
Best of the rest – any other news that caught our attention
Tons of bullet points
📰 Key Narratives Covered
Tokenized stocks
Who said DeFi had to be all about crypto? Blockchains can support just about any asset, and right now there’s a ton of attention around tokenized stocks.
In fact, there are now $1B worth of stocks represented on blockchains!
And major exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase are competing to become the platform of choice to trade onchain stocks — with or without leverage.
BTC Yield
Think of DeFi as a giant app store where you can easily mix, match, and add to any app. This is called composability.
It allows for virtually unlimited innovation — you can even take an asset like BTC and give it yield.
That’s exactly what platforms like Lombard Finance are doing alongside professional onchain asset managers.
AgentFi
Moonpay joins the long list of top fintech names implementing AI agents, joining Coinbase, Stripe, and more.
x402 activity is heating back up as agent-to-agent commerce increases its presence onchain.
As I noted last week, x402 volume is back on the rise. This volume is fully generated by AI agents who automatically pay for data that they need to make financial decisions.
For example, an agent could scan price data of multiple assets on multiple platforms 24/7, and use that data to make trading decisions on your behalf.
The dominant player in x402 transactions right now is Virtuals Protocol, which lets anyone create and manage their own personal DeFi agent.
This ecosystem map also shows the rapidly-growing number of projects building x402-compatible products
📊 Token Performance
To filter out market noise/dead tokens and avoid heavy concentration of derivatives (staked tokens, vault tokens, etc.), we track our own “DeFi20 Index,” which equally weights 20 assets from leading DeFi projects spanning multiple sectors:
Lending – AAVE, SKY, MORPHO, KMNO, EUL
Trading/Derivatives – UNI, HYPE, PENDLE, JUP, CRV, AERO
Tokenization – ONDO, CFG, SYRUP
Yield/Asset Management – ETHFI, ENA, FF
Infra – CC, ZRO
AI — VIRTUAL
This is an important time to watch the market, as it may currently be showing us which assets are going to outperform once we’re in a sustained uptrend.
If that’s the case, the tokens in the DeFi20 Index are looking like great candidates — just as we expect.
While they’ll likely be go up or down more than the broader market during any sharp move, it’s nice to see some major outperformance over the past week.
Here are the DeFi20 leaders and laggards from the past week:
And here’s how the DeFi20 Index stacks up against the rest over the market over the past week:
DeFi20 Index: +12.4%
Altcoins (total market w/o top-10 assets): +3.6%
Broader DeFi (based on CoinGecko): +4.6%
Total Market: +4.5%
📈 Yield Tracker
Tracking the best yields in DeFi for major tokens (BTC, ETH, SOL) and stablecoins.
We filter for pools/vaults w/$10M+ in assets, and note if the posted yields are inflated by extra rewards/incentives.
Majors:
Stablecoins:
When it comes to the intersection of DeFi and AI, Virtuals is one of the most important projects in the entire space. Since its launch in October 2024, Virtuals has undoubtedly been the leading platform for AI agent-driven DeFi, or “AgentFi.”
There are many different parts to Virtuals, but today we’ll focus on their ACP platform, which is driving adoption for agent-to-agent commerce.
ACP: The Onchain Financial Hub For Agents
Virtuals’ Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) is used to create and manage AI agents that can collaborate and transact with each other across different apps and blockchains.
Think of agents as an “active” form of ChatGPT that, in addition to simply finding and regurgitating data, can actually act on it. This allows them to perform a wide (and rapidly growing) variety of services online.
Essentially, this creates an active onchain “world” of AI agents – instead of people acting as the primary transactors and communicators, everything is done by agents that are continuously taking in new data and learning from it.
The ACP economy contains two types of agents:
Merchant agents offer specialized services and get paid for them.
Client agents browse merchant agent services, choose one that can help them, and pay for their work.
Payments among these agents are conducted via the new x402 payment standard, making Virtuals one of the primary generators of x402-driven volume.
Driving x402 Growth
Recently, ACP has gained significant traction as a leading “facilitator” (infrastructure that lets agents transact/communicate with each other) for onchain x402 payments.
As you saw in the Chart of the Week, not only is x402 volume growing, but it’s being driven by Virtuals, who dominates the market with ~80%+ share. Specifically, this volume is being generated on Virtuals ACP.
If you’re unfamiliar with x402, here’s what you should know:
New payment standard for AI agents developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare last May
Allows agents to autonomously pay for things like data, API access, content, etc. as they need it, rather than commit to a subscription plan
Offchain AI agents have to pay for these things with fiat currency and use legacy payment networks
But onchain agents benefit from the instant and cheap settlement of stablecoins
Google, Visa, and Stripe are among the major tech companies already using it
You can read more about x402 here.
ACP's Recent Surge
Since ACP’s inception, the Virtuals platform has earned roughly $70M in revenue, mostly via:
Agent-to-agent transaction fees
Users’ interactions with agents (e.g. asking them to perform a certain task)
Transaction fees when people buy agent tokens
To share that revenue with their community, Virtuals recently began a campaign where $1M is awarded each month to builders who create the most productive agents in the ecosystem.
This campaign has had a noticeable impact on ecosystem activity – agents are interacting with each other more frequently, performing more jobs for users, generating more revenue, and new agents are being created more frequently.
The numbers speak for themselves! Take a look at these ecosystem stats and their 30-day growth rates:
Another metric that shows the impressive growth on ACP is aGDP (agentic GDP), which includes:
Funds paid and received by agents
Service fees paid and received by agents
Trading volume generated by fund-managing agents
Currently, aGDP is approaching $500M, up nearly 5x since mid-November 2025!
The Future Of Virtuals: Robotics & Beyond
Overall, Virtuals is certainly a project to watch in the AgentFi space. While many projects have attempted to create active AgentFi economies over the past 12-18 months, very few have succeeded.
ACP already has an excellent market position in the early stages of x402, which has the potential to become a major part of e-commerce and the broader machine-to-machine (m2m) economy.
Looking ahead, Virtuals plans on increasing their capabilities in the m2m space – one of their largest initiatives is to power robotic commerce.
They took a major step towards this goal last week, when Fabric Protocol’s ROBO agent – which aims to facilitate communication and commerce between robots – launched on ACP. To date, Fabric – which is building infrastructure to enable collaboration between individual robots – is by far the most established project to launch on ACP.
If it wasn’t already obvious, Virtuals is a huge deal. There’s a lot I didn’t cover, and I could probably dedicate an entire series of newsletters to them (one day, maybe!), and I’m excited to see Virtuals’ progress as agentic commerce continues to grow.
Tokenized stock activity is surging
How it works on Coinbase:
Trade most S&P 500 stocks as well as ETFs
Backed by real shares – offered by Coinbase Capital Markets Corp. and cleared/custodied by Apex Fintech Solutions (handles ~800M trades/year)
Available to US users
You can trade fractional shares of (some) stocks
How it works on Kraken:
Not the stocks themselves, but derivatives (perpetual futures) that track their prices and let you have up to 20x leverage
Not available to US users
This follows Kraken’s acquisition of xStocks, the #2 tokenized stock provider behind Ondo Finance (part of the DeFi20 Index)
This move is likely a direct response to Ondo’s own perps announcement earlier this month
Tokenized stock growth hits major milestones
Ondo’s tokenized stock market cap hits $600M
Total tokenized stock market cap hits $1B
Over 180K addresses now hold tokenized stocks
Cap’s tokenized money market fund (WTGXX) is available to WisdomTree users and advisors
WisdomTree is one of the largest players in the financial advisor market, with ~$150B in AUM
Cap also has a unique yield-bearing stablecoin, which derives its yield from a group of professionally-managed strategies (I wrote about it here)
A tokenized fund receives an AAA rating from S&P Global
AAA is the highest rating on S&P Global’s scale
This is the first time an onchain asset has been rated AAA — very positive for DeFi’s reputation among institutional investors!
The fund receiving the rating is ULTRA, which invests in short-term US Treasuries (basically a money market fund) and has ~$140M in AUM
ULTRA is tokenized by Libeara, which so far has tokenized over $1B in government debt and gold
Cambrian Network posted their Q1 Agentic Finance Landscape report
Think of agents as personal assistants for asset management, research (like identifying market trends), and more
For example, some can manage your portfolio (DCA into certain assets, rebalance over time, etc.) and others can provide market insights to help you adjust the underlying strategy
The report shows the range of DeFi agents’ (AgentFi) use cases
From executing transactions (trades, staking, borrowing, etc.) to providing research
And from being rule based (agent relies on math/stats) to AI-powered (LLM-powered)
The top right quadrant in the chart below includes apps where you can tell agents what to do (in normal English) and they’ll not only do it, but improve their strategies and abilities over time
Notable AgentFi projects
Bankr and Giza (both in top right quadrant) lead AgentFi projects in terms of deposits with 900+ each over the past 30 days
YieldSeeker (not included in graphic) and Sail (top left quadrant) both have $100K+ AUM increases over the past 30 days
Over 80 projects building on Base (Coinbase’s blockchain) are using OpenClaw, which allows agents to have their own wallets and pay for their own operations
Bankr has gained traction as one of the top OpenClaw-powered agent providers
Moonpay launches MoonPay Agents
MoonPay is one of the biggest “onramps” in crypto – which means it lets you convert your fiat to crypto
Used by 30M people and 500+ enterprises
MoonPay Agents lets agents create their own wallets and transact autonomously
Supports recurring buys, cross-chain swaps
Is also compatible with x402, which lets agents pay-as-they-go for data to make decisions
Joins major organizations like Coinbase and Stripe in integrating x402-compatible agents
More projects are launching agent-related products
Indexy now lets agents create and trade custom crypto indexes – powered by x402
Symbiosis is connecting major AI platforms like Claude and OpenClaw to blockchains to manage portfolios across 50+ chains
QiDao’s agent-powered clawUSDC puts your USDC deposits to work by rotating funds between the best yields DeFi has to offer
As they say, onchain finance will eventually be dominated by agents running strategies and doing research 24/7 – this space is evolving fast!
There are two new ways to earn yield on your BTC!
DeFi curators (essentially asset managers) Gauntlet and Sentora are bringing yield to BTC
By itself, BTC neither generates yield (like gold), nor is compatible with DeFi apps (because the Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t use smart contracts)
Sentora is the first manager to provide yield for Lombard Finance’s new Bitcoin Earn vault
When you deposit BTC into the vault, it distributes the funds to various strategies run by different managers (currently just Sentora – more managers to be added in the future)
The highest-earning managers the highest percentage of deposits
BTC deposits are routed to top managers by Veda, which powers $5B+ across many vaults including Kraken’s DeFi Earn
Currently generating a 3.3% APY (extremely high for BTC!)
Now available to over 8M Ledger users, who collectively hold ~22% of all BTC
Gauntlet, another curator with over $1B AUM, is now generating yield on Morpho’s lending platform (this one is simpler)
Deposit cbBTC (Coinbase’s DeFi-compatible BTC) into the vault
Gauntlet lends out the cbBTC to earn yield, borrows USDT against it, buys more cbBTC, lends it out, etc.
This “looping” strategy is automatically managed to minimize risk of liquidation to ensure that the maximum amount of yield is safely earned
Currently generating a 1.36% APY
These are perfect examples of how DeFi is composable
You can easily combine various smart contract-based services to bring yield to non-yield-bearing assets like BTC
Lombard’s Bitcoin-compatible tech + Sentora’s asset management + Veda’s allocation infra
This level of collaboration is exclusive to blockchains
Reflect launches Whitelabel feature, allowing anyone to issue yield-bearing stablecoins
Yield-bearing stablecoins are (in my opinion) one of the best use cases of DeFi in general (I also covered them here)
On the outside, you see an asset originally pegged at $1, and accrues interest over time
Professional asset managers handle the operations behind the scenes to provide yield for yield-bearing stablecoin holders
Opens up access to professional income strategies that previously were unavailable for most retail participants
Neutrl’s sNUSD is seeing exponential growth
NUSD can be staked to get the yield-bearing sNUSD stablecoin
It’s a top yield-bearing stablecoin in terms of market cap and yield
$230M+ of NUSD is in circulation
sNUSD is currently yielding ~9.1% annually
SummerFi launches DAO Managed Vaults – high risk-return strategies accessible to everyone
The two initial strategies earn yield on USDC and ETH
Currently, depositors can earn ~7% on USDC and ~3.4% on ETH – plus extra yield paid in Summer’s SUMR token
Strategies are created/managed by Block Analitica (another curator), which currently manages $80M+ across their various products
3 DeFi20 Index projects reach new milestones
Aave crosses $1T in all-time loans
Kamino crosses $1B in total RWA deposits
Officially the 2nd DeFi lending market to accomplish this after Aave did so last week
Sky’s sUSDS yield-bearing stablecoin reaches $5B in market cap
Sky used to be called MakerDAO, the creator of the first decentralized stablecoin (DAI)
USDS is DAI’s replacement (although DAI still exists)
You can stake USDS (which doesn’t earn yield) to get sUSDS, which earns yield
USDS recently reached $10B in market cap, which means about half of all USDS is being staked right now to earn yield
You can now find tons of stablecoin metrics on this new Dune Dashboard
Stats covering 200+ stablecoins across 37 chains
Built in collaboration with Steakhouse Financial, DeFi’s leading curator managing ~$1.5B
Its data will support the upcoming Visa Local Stablecoin Report
Data from Allium show that B2B stablecoin volume is up almost 700% in the past 2 years
The correlation between BTC and software stocks has gone viral in recent weeks — but how valid is this really? Is it something that should factor into your trading decisions? We answered all this and more in last week’s Truth Within Trends piece.
That’s all for this week’s DeFi In Five! Be sure to let us know what stuck out to you, or if we missed any other key events over the past week.
For any questions, comments, or feedback, please email me at [email protected].
And finally, make sure to subscribe below — see you next week!
