Banks don't put customer money on public blockchains. Every balance and every payment would be visible to anyone. Track 1 of @MidnightNtwrk's roadmap is built to change that. Midnight calls it Institutional Issuance & Settlement. The goal: regulated money and assets on-chain, without broadcasting who holds what. Q4 2026: • Tokenized deposits: bank money as tokens, 1:1 with cash at the bank • Shielded contract tokens: balances and transfers stay private • Enterprise key support • Serialization standards Q1 2027: • Programmable shielded assets: private assets with their rules built in • Institutional-grade key security • Real-world asset issuance, plus RWA standards This is already moving. In March, UK bank Monument announced it plans to bring up to £250m of retail deposits onto Midnight as tokens. Only the bank and its customers can see the transaction data. Would you hold your savings as a tokenized deposit if only you and your bank could see it?

➥ $AERO is heading into its biggest upgrade yet, but the real opportunity is in the revenue model @aeroxyz + @VelodromeFi are scheduled to merge into Aero on October 21 expanding from their existing eco into a unified DEX across seven chains that's a pretty significant shift for a protocol that built its position around Base i went through the latest numbers, trailing the latest 30D: → $15.67B DEX volume → $11.72M trading fees → $7.85M protocol revenue → $381M TVL ~41x monthly trading volume relative to TVL, with ~67% of fees recorded as protocol revenue but there's another detail worth watching dashboard shows: → 30D volume: +10.7% → 30D fees: -33.3% → 30D revenue: -45.1% trading activity is growing, but monetization is moving in the opposite direction that's why the Aero upgrade matters here imo beyond expanding distribution across chains the architecture introduces MEV internalization as another potential revenue source instead of relying entirely on swap fees and liquidity incentives the protocol aims to capture more value from the trading flow it already facilitates and for $AERO holders, the veAERO model already provides a route to trading fees through vote-locking still, i'm not treating the merger as an automatic bullish catalyst more chains mean more competition for liquidity token emissions remain important, stronger volume doesn't necessarily translate into better returns for holders let see whether Aero can reverse the decline in fee generation while maintaining its trading vol after the migration if MEV revenue and cross-chain expansion improve the economics i'd become more interested in adding $AERO exposure

I spent some time with the @Stacks Q3 report, and I keep coming back to 97%, that's the share of stBTC supply already posted as collateral on Zest. That matters because of where stBTC comes from.. Bitcoin Staking went live this quarter, and the first two bonds (fixed windows where BTC is locked to earn BTC yield) brought in about 735 BTC, with 230 BTC in the Genesis Bond from names like 21shares, HashKey Cloud and UTXO Management, and 505 BTC in Bond 2. Stacking DAO's stBTC, a liquid token that represents staked BTC, took 483 of that 505 BTC, so most of the new Bitcoin entered through a token that could be put to work right away, and it was. Zest now holds $122M in deposits and $42M in borrows, and weekly DEX volume reached a 12-month high of $16.7M with Bitflow leading. Staked Bitcoin is being lent against and traded within weeks of arriving, which tells me the apps were ready for it before the capital showed up. Staked $STX rose from 392M to 493M, about 26%, but 392M was the amount holders restaked after the PoX-5 hard fork unlocked everyone, so a good part of this is people returning alongside some new capital. It still matters because STX now acts as the capacity that lets BTC bond, which means more STX staked leaves more room for Bitcoin to come in. Daily active users averaged around 1,010 and the network added roughly 12K new users, so the capital is growing faster than the user base for now. In Q4 I will be watching whether the monthly bonds keep growing and whether that Bitcoin keeps finding places to work, since that is where the loop either holds up or stalls read the full report: stacks.co/blog/q3-2026

New proposal: The Flip 🥞 LPs on PancakeSwap v3 and Infinity would keep 88% of swap fees, and CAKE emissions would be cut by ~69% Read the full proposal and share your feedback with us 👉 forum.pancakeswap.finance/t/… What would change: 🔹 LPs on v3 and Infinity keep 88% of swap fees, up from 66–68% on most pools, across all 11 chains 🔹 CAKE emissions drop from 22,500 to 7,000 per day, with those 7,000 going to the Pantry, our new ecosystem growth fund 🔹 v2 stays the same and keeps burning CAKE, so CAKE stays deflationary

~59% of deposits in @aave's new V4 markets sit in partner-shaped hubs. V4's hub-and-spoke design lets partners build lending markets around their own users. Three partner-focused hubs stood out in Q3: EtherFi Cash, Global Dollar and Coinbase Stocks. Together, they hold ~$409M of the ~$695M deposited across 10 new V4 markets. Partner brings users → hub built around them → Aave V4 infrastructure ① @ether_fi's Cash hub is the closest thing to a franchise. EtherFi runs its own V4 instance on Optimism, handling liquidity, risk and operations. The DAO gets 20% of protocol revenue with no ongoing operating costs. Already $311.5M in deposits, nearly 45% of all new V4 deposits in Q3. ② @global_dollar and @coinbase are taking a different route. Their hubs are built around specific assets and users, while Aave governance still sets the parameters. Different products, same Aave lending infrastructure. ③ @SentoraHQ wants to take this further. It has proposed curating its own V4 markets and splitting protocol revenue 50/50 with the DAO, again with no ongoing operating costs for Aave. Still subject to governance approval. ➥ Partners used to come to @aave asking to list their assets. Now some are building entire lending markets around their own products. They bring the users and distribution. Aave provides the infrastructure and earns a share as those markets grow. Aave doesn't need to build every lending business itself. V4 gives others a reason to build theirs on Aave.