Today's top news highlights:
Vitalik: Ethereum's four-year roadmap focuses on scaling and quantum security.
Upbit will list the PIEVERSE token on the Korean Won, BTC, and USDT markets.
Polymarket is in talks to raise $400 million in funding, valuing the company at $15 billion.
Regulation & Macro
Iranian parliamentary leader: Iran has decided to continue negotiations with the United States.
Ibrahim Aziz, chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s parliament, said that Iran has decided to continue negotiations with the United States, but this does not mean negotiating at all costs, nor does it mean accepting any actions taken by the other side.
Hong Kong's Under Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Chan Ho-lim, stated that the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) is working with the industry to study secondary market trading rules for tokenized products, with the goal of announcing policy details in the first half of 2026. Hong Kong already has more than 10 SFC-approved tokenized money market funds, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) issued its first two stablecoin issuer licenses this month.
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has announced a new regulatory framework to pilot the secondary market trading of tokenized SFC-approved investment products in Hong Kong. The first batch of products is expected to primarily consist of tokenized money market funds. The SFC will review the operation and consider expanding the product range.
Iranian Foreign Ministry: Transfer of enriched uranium has never been mentioned
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bagaei said that the topic of transferring Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile to the United States or any other country has never been mentioned in any phase of negotiations, both now and in the past, and that this option is simply not on the agenda of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran designates new shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, prohibiting passage without permission.
The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has designated a new shipping route, named the "Laraq Corridor," running from south of Hormuz Island to south of Larak Island, which is off-limits without permission. Earlier reports indicated that the US military attacked an Iranian container ship in the Gulf of Oman, prompting Iranian armed forces to launch drone strikes against several US warships.
Project Updates
KelpDAO suffered an attack, resulting in approximately $290 million in losses. Initial indications suggest the attack may have originated from TraderTraitor, a subsidiary of North Korea's Lazarus Group. Due to its single DVN setup, the incident was limited to the rsETH configuration and did not affect other cross-chain assets. The attacker compromised the RPC infrastructure used by LayerZero Labs' DVN, replacing the binaries and launching a DDoS attack. All affected RPC nodes have been replaced, and DVN is now operational again. LayerZero emphasizes that the protocol itself has no vulnerabilities and recommends migrating applications to a multi-DVN setup.
Upbit will list the PIEVERSE token on the Korean Won, BTC, and USDT markets.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit will list the PIEVERSE token on the Korean Won, BTC, and USDT markets.
One of the RAVE manipulation addresses, 0xe07…B690b, deposited 20 million RAVE tokens, worth $10.67 million, into Bitget. Today, a total of 42.996 million RAVE tokens, worth over $34.97 million, have been transferred to centralized exchanges.
Alibaba Cloud ATH announced that HappyHorse-1.0 will gradually open its API testing through the Alibaba Cloud Bailian platform starting April 27th, with enterprise customers being the first batch of invited testers. Alibaba Cloud ATH revealed that HappyHorse-1.0 will be officially released for commercial use in May.
USDT0 transfers have resumed, the infrastructure is functioning normally as designed, system integrity is unaffected, and there is no risk exposure. All transactions in progress prior to the suspension have now been safely settled. The USDT0 OFT cross-chain bridge infrastructure was temporarily suspended as a precautionary measure during the rsETH incident investigation.
Vercel CEO: Security incident stemmed from a breach of Context.ai, an AI platform used by employees.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch stated that the security incident stemmed from an employee's use of the AI platform client Context.ai, which was compromised. The attacker gained access to the Vercel environment through the employee's compromised Google Workspace account. All client environment variables were encrypted, but the attacker exploited variables marked as 'non-sensitive'. The number of affected customers is limited.
The multisignature address 0x53d7, associated with the initial RAVE allocation, sent approximately 23 million RAVE tokens ($23 million) to two Bitget deposit addresses, after which the price of RAVE dropped 40% from $1 to $0.60. Previously, ZachXBT accused RAVE tokens of 'pump and dump' and claimed the source was suspected to be three centralized exchanges (CEXs).
Coinbase CEO: The company is testing AI agents modeled after two former employees.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong stated that Coinbase is testing AI agents that appear in work Slack and emails like human teammates. The first two agents are modeled after former Coinbase employees Fred Ehrsam and Balaji Srinivasan. He anticipates that the number of agents will soon surpass the number of human employees.
Aave stated that analysis shows rsETH on the Ethereum mainnet is fully collateralized. Out of an abundance of caution, rsETH remains frozen on Aave V3 and V4, and the event risk exposure has been controlled. WETH reserves in the affected markets also remain frozen. Aave is actively verifying information and evaluating potential solutions.
Ethena has decided to extend the temporary suspension of the LayerZero OFT bridge due to the lack of a satisfactory root cause analysis of the rsETH incident. Ethena has issued new proof of reserves, confirmed by four independent third-party verification agencies, indicating that the USDe collateral support remains above 100%.
Investment and financing news
Polymarket is in talks to raise $400 million in funding, valuing the company at $15 billion.
Prediction market platform Polymarket is in talks with investors to raise $400 million at a valuation of approximately $15 billion. This funding round will add to the $600 million round in which Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) invested last month, and Polymarket is seeking to add more strategic investors.
Opinions & Analysis
Vitalik: Ethereum's four-year roadmap focuses on scaling and quantum security.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the core function of the Ethereum protocol is as a public bulletin board and a platform for sharing digital objects. The four-year roadmap includes short-term scaling, the launch of CKIVM, preparations for post-quantum cryptography, and account abstraction. The long-term goal is to maximize secure consensus, formal verification, extreme simplicity, and quantum security, with the aim of achieving scalability by 2028.
Binance CO-CEO He Yi stated that Binance currently has 300 million users and aims to reach 3 billion users, striving to become a global financial infrastructure. The long-term goal is not limited to cryptocurrencies, but rather to build a broader Web3+ traditional financial asset integration platform, aiming to become a core part of the global financial infrastructure.
DefiLlama founder 0xngmi analyzed that KelpDAO faces three potential solutions: Solution 1, share the losses among all users, with each user facing an 18.5% impairment; Solution 2, concentrate all losses on L2 rsETH holders; Solution 3, return assets to holders using a snapshot taken before the attack. If the loss-sharing solution is adopted, the bad debt is approximately $216 million; if concentrated on L2, the bad debt is $341 million; the third solution would result in a loss of approximately $91 million but is difficult to implement.
Analysts: Aave has seen $10.1 billion in capital outflows due to the rsETH incident.
The rsETH incident may have had a more severe impact on Aave than expected. Since the incident occurred early yesterday morning, funds have been continuously flowing out of Aave, with total deposits dropping from $45.8 billion to $35.7 billion, an outflow of $10.1 billion, of which $4.5 billion is in stablecoins. This kept the 13.4% deposit interest rate for stablecoins on Aave unchanged for the entire day.
Important data
Aave's total locked value has fallen to $17.947 billion, a decrease of $8.45 billion over the past two days. The total locked value of all on-chain DeFi protocols has also decreased from $99.497 billion to $86.286 billion, a reduction of $13.21 billion.
Last week, Ethereum spot ETFs saw net inflows of $276 million. Fidelity's FETH saw the largest net inflow at $126 million, followed by BlackRock's ETHA with a net inflow of $99.2271 million. Grayscale's ETHE saw a net outflow of $16.679 million. As of press time, the total net asset value of Ethereum spot ETFs was $14.26 billion, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $11.94 billion.
Last week, Bitcoin spot ETFs saw net inflows of $996 million. BlackRock's IBIT led the way with $906 million in net inflows, followed by Ark & 21 Shares ARKB with $98.5036 million. Fidelity's FBTC experienced a net outflow of $104 million. As of press time, the total net asset value of Bitcoin spot ETFs was $101.45 billion, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $57.74 billion.
Four days ago, a long position leader who closed out his $398 million long positions at a high price, making a profit of $68.47 million, re-entered the market today after a pullback. He has currently opened long positions of 44,000 ETH through two wallets, with a position value of $100 million and an entry price of $2,289.
A whale withdrew over 98,000 wstETH and 3,000 cbBTC from Aave.
A whale that previously purchased 163,405 ETH and 4,000 cbBTC through over-the-counter trading had already withdrawn 98,032 wstETH ($272 million) and 3,000 cbBTC ($221.6 million) from Aave. Due to the KelpDAO rsETH cross-chain bridge vulnerability, the whale was unable to withdraw ETH and therefore directly exchanged 7,438 aEthWETH for 1,930 stETH and 5,272 ETH, incurring a loss of 237 ETH ($540,000).
