🧵#DeFi 2026 Predictions Thread 🤌 (Thoughts on ecosystem and community macro trends, in no particular order) ⤵️

the SEC just proposed rescinding Rule 611 of Reg NMS, the trade-through rule that has defined US equity market structure since 2005 this is a tradfi story, yes, but this is also one of the biggest unlocks yet for tokenized stocks 👇

Morpho Association has raised $175M to build the open credit network for the world. Co-led by @paradigm, @a16zcrypto, @RibbitCapital with strategic participation from @apolloglobal, @vaneck_us, @circle_ventures, and @Ledger @Cathayinnov. The round also included participation from @variantfund, @wmt_ventures, @preludexyz, @IOSGVC, @HashKey_Capital, @sbigroup, @Bpifrance, @mirana, @bamazizimesh, NJJ Capital and 10 other strategic partners. The funding will help accelerate Morpho's position as the foundation for onchain credit.

DATs killed crypto.

0xPPL is winding down. after 4 years of building the onchain super app, we're sunsetting the product. here's what that means for you👇

Beyond Hyperliquid, the race for 2nd and 3rd place is crowded with perpetuals exchanges that are largely indistinguishable from one another and lack a clear wedge.

HIP-4 isn't really a fee war with Polymarket. That's the sideshow. The real question: who gets to resolve reality? UMA's token vote (see the $200M Zelenskyy "suit" market) or Hyperliquid's validators (see JELLY). Both capturable. Pick your poison. defiprime.com/hyperliquid-hi…

He isn't wrong here.

Polymarket's $600K Drain Was a Key Compromise defiprime.com/polymarket-key…

If I had to critique Ethereum, hindsight 20/20 moving to PoS we dispersed the largest GPU network on earth right before GPUs became the world's scarcest resource. But that's such a niche point no one's going to talk about it. Otherwise they're doing fine tbh.

Today we’re sharing difficult news: we have made the decision to wind down Everclear (Foundation / Labs and building the product).

On Ethereum's Missing Fighter defiprime.com/ethereum-align…

What’s interesting is that all the recent negative CT narratives haven’t moved ETH’s price at all. The market simply doesn’t care.

2026 is shaping up to be a great year for a crypto market purge.

I think Ethereum’s original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made from Dencun on. The ultrasound money thesis was a good one and with Dencun (or the L2 roadmap generally) they should have stopped to say that this was going to hurt the ultrasound money thesis and consider how to preserve it. Most people, like David, don’t want to believe in something that isn’t also putting up points on the scoreboard. When the main offering becomes ideology/communism and money/tokenomics/capitalism are overlooked, the peasants are going to revolt — as they’ve been doing for two years now. Look at the public reaction to Tomasz: broad praise, a sense of hope, excitement, the price pumping … only for him to be gone a year later with the new ED being someone who cannot even be found online except for a Wayback Machine url with his name that has some really questionable statements on it (and I should say the EF denied that this website, which was taken down a few weeks after he was appointed to the board, is his). They’re going to be really mad at me for even mentioning that but in the place of a void, these are the kinds of things people will glom onto. Then there was the manifesto — I mean, mandate, which they backtracked on forcing people to sign. (Btw, this is the second bit of news that seems to relate to Bastian. And now the third would be all these departures. There’s nothing else for us to point at and say about him — when I searched for his name on Google News just now only 14 links came up. He seems to be some kind of invisible hand behind the scenes.) I don’t think ideology and capitalism/tokenomics/number go up are mutually exclusive. I think you can have CROPS values and also consider how each step of the roadmap affects the tokenomics and even have teams for BD/ecosystem growth. It feels like the EF doesn’t realize the moment that crypto is in. The competition is only just starting. We are in the phase of real world adoption. The Ethereum Foundation’s CROPS principles are great ones, and they are worth fighting for. But the EF seems to want to sit back on its laurels and act above it all when all its competitors are all getting down and dirty on the field to gain market share. Maybe it is the right approach. I don’t know. I’m just saying that more competitive people won’t align with it. And so they will leave … and community members will as well. I personally don’t think it’s good for Ethereum if its most competitive people depart. Ethereum’s unwillingness to stop the brain drain will only benefit its competitors — or spawn new ones. Giving a shit about price and tokenomics and BD doesn’t hurt CROPS. It just helps ensure that these principles get spread to more people and that other chains that don’t have these principles don’t get a leg up. All the commentary may be pointless. It seems Vitalik tried what everyone wanted and it didn’t align with his vision, so he brought in a new person he felt more comfortable with. It makes me sad to see people become so disaffected with Ethereum, but maybe this is V’s Brian Armstrong/no politics at Coinbase moment where he lays down what the EF will work on and asks everyone else to leave. That was the right move for Coinbase, but I view them as fundamentally different issues. We’ll see whether Ethereum maintains its lead with a foundation that isn’t willing to fight for it.

Syndicate Labs is winding down. After five years building onchain developer infrastructure, the rollup market has fundamentally shifted, making this decision necessary. Here's what this means for the network, token holders, and developers building with Syndicate.

We’ve raised $50M led by @dragonfly_xyz to go all in on RWAs and bring TradFi liquidity on-chain. Today, we're launching Phase 1 of our RWA rollout to stress-test our infrastructure before bringing 100 TradFi markets on-chain this summer.

Ethereum lending dashboard is live. rld.fi Full coverage of 6 protocols and 1336 markets: AAVE, Spark, Morpho, Fluid, Compound, and Euler. Trace credit risks in real-time: flows, rates, allocations, ltv distributions, and data for >205k individual positions.

situation: all three ef protocol leads have left

BREAKING: The SEC is set to release its so-called "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks which will pave the path for trading digital versions of securities, per Bloomberg. Details include: 1. In a "surprise move," the SEC is leaning toward allowing the trading of tokenized assets 2. These tokenized assets would be tradeable on decentralized crypto platforms 3. The move could "reshape the landscape of the American stock market" 4. This would also be one of the US' biggest shifts into crypto infrastructure yet Tokenized assets are rapidly expanding.