Bitcoin does not have native yield. But that has not stopped institutions, treasury companies, miners, whales, ETFs, and crypto-native desks from looking for ways to generate returns on top of BTC. In this episode of Converge by The Defiant, David Lawant, Head of Research at Anchorage Digital, joins the show to unpack the rise of Bitcoin options, synthetic yield, covered call strategies, and the growing intersection between TradFi and crypto-native market structure.

Three major crypto exchanges canceled their tokenized SpaceX IPO allocation campaigns Friday after xStocks could not source underlying shares, while rival onchain protocols from Ondo, xStocks' DeFi arm and Backpack launched successfully on the same morning.

Crypto data and media company Blockworks has acquired rival research platform Messari at a discount to its prior valuation, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported Friday. The deal joins two of the most prominent names in the crypto intelligence space.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered her farewell remarks Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Capital Markets Summit, closing a tenure defined by crypto-industry advocacy and dissent from the Gensler era.

DeFi logged approximately 70 separate exploits in Q2 2026, roughly doubling the previous quarterly record, even as the $746 million dollar total remains a fraction of historical single-event peaks.

A three-judge Second Circuit panel affirmed Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, along with his 25-year prison sentence, closing his primary legal path to overturning the 2023 verdict.

SpaceX opened for trading on Nasdaq Friday under SPCX, completing what Nasdaq and Morgan Stanley confirmed as the largest IPO in history at $75 billion pre-greenshoe.

Monero surged roughly 30% to an intraday high of $438 on Thursday after blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced a $120 million USDT movement that included large purchases of the privacy coin, with Tether subsequently freezing $72 million in connected funds.

SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq at 9:30 AM ET Friday under SPCX. The same morning, Ondo's SPCXon, Kraken's xStocks SPCXx, a Backpack Securities-issued SPCX token on Solana, and Hyperliquid's pre-IPO perpetual all settle into a single live tokenized-equity stack.

The Solana Foundation formalized Solana's institutional market-structure tier with Frontier Traders, requiring $500M in trailing 30-day DEX volume for VIP access, with the debut campaign running on SpaceX tokenized equity.