🟠 Fed's Jackson Hole Focuses on Payments for First Time in 40 Years
Bitcoin is holding above $80,000 as the Federal Reserve's annual Jackson Hole symposium opens with an agenda centered on payments and financial infrastructure — a topic directly tied to crypto for the first time in the event's four-decade history.
The shift marks a notable departure from the symposium's traditional macroeconomic focus, placing digital payments and financial rails at the center of central bank discussion.
With Fed policymakers formally addressing the infrastructure that underpins crypto markets, the event is being watched closely for signals on how regulators view the evolving payments landscape.
🪙 Uniswap surges 32% weekly as DeFi tokens lead altcoin recovery
Uniswap's UNI token posted a 32% gain over the past week, standing out as one of the stronger performers among major altcoins. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has stabilized around $78,000.
DeFi-related tokens drove notable daily moves across the market. Arbitrum's ARB gained 24% and Curve's CRV rose 15% in a single day, with both tokens re-entering the top 100 by market capitalization following the moves.
The cluster of gains in DeFi-linked assets suggests renewed short-term interest in the sector, though broader market direction remains tied to Bitcoin's next move from the $78K range.
🌐 London Stock Exchange Partners With Kraken to Tokenize UK Stocks
The London Stock Exchange has partnered with Payward — the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken — to bring shares of the 100 largest London-listed companies onto the blockchain.
The collaboration will use Payward's xStocks tokenized equities framework. The tokenized stocks could eventually trade through the LSE's planned 24-hour trading venue, significantly expanding access and liquidity windows beyond traditional market hours.
The move marks one of the most prominent traditional finance institutions to formally engage with on-chain equity tokenization, signaling growing institutional appetite for bridging public markets and blockchain infrastructure.
BlackRock's BUIDL fund has climbed back to approximately $2.8 billion in assets, reclaiming its position as the largest tokenized U.S. Treasury product on-chain.
The fund briefly lost the top spot to Circle's USYC earlier this year — the title changed hands twice within six months before BUIDL edged back ahead.
The back-and-forth underscores growing competition in the tokenized real-world asset space, where institutional-grade Treasury products are attracting increasing on-chain capital.
DeFi lending protocol More Markets was exploited on August 31, with an attacker draining approximately $9.3 million from its mFlowWFLOW lending reserve on Flow EVM.
Blockchain security firm Blockaid flagged the incident, reporting that the attacker combined Ankr's liquid staking token with E-mode — a capital-efficiency feature from Aave V3 — to overborrow against the protocol. Around 15.5 million Wrapped Flow (WFLOW) tokens were taken from the reserve.
Users with funds in More Markets on Flow EVM should assess their exposure. No confirmed recovery plan or post-mortem has been reported at this time.
A severe congestion in Ethereum's validator activation queue has stretched to 35.75 days, costing depositors an estimated $350,000 in lost staking rewards every day.
The bottleneck stems from the network's 256 ETH-per-epoch activation limit, which caps how quickly new validators can enter the staking system. As deposit demand outpaces the gate's throughput, queued ETH sits idle — earning nothing while waiting for activation.
The growing backlog highlights a structural tension in Ethereum's staking design as validator demand continues to rise.