The steward of the Cardano blockchain is seeding DeFi liquidity, backing an $80M venture fund and signing enterprise deals — a reversal of its hands-off posture that lands as onchain metrics fall and the network's founder feuds with it over governance.

Digital Asset has closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto, with HSBC, Apollo, CME, BNP Paribas, ADIA, ABN Amro, S&P Global, Tradeweb and more than 20 other institutional names joining as investors.

ZK blockchain project Hyli is shutting down after two years, with the team citing weak demand for zero-knowledge technology. The closure comes the same day Botanix wound down its Bitcoin Layer 2.

Polychain-backed Botanix Labs is winding down its Spiderchain Bitcoin Layer 2 after a year of mainnet operation, citing insufficient demand for Bitcoin-native DeFi. Users have until July 9 to withdraw assets.

Model lock-in keeps hundreds of millions of users tethered to platforms that train on their data, but ZetaChain has built an exit ramp.

Starknet launched STRK20 on Tuesday, a note-based privacy framework that lets users shield ERC-20 token balances and conduct private transfers and swaps on the Ethereum layer-2 network, with an encrypted viewing-key path for compliance.

Monolythium Foundation today introduced the public testnet for Monolythium, a rebuilt Layer 1 blockchain designed as settlement infrastructure for autonomous agents, post-quantum accounts, native markets, and operator-cluster infrastructure.

The Zcash developer said researcher Taylor Hornby used Anthropic's latest AI model to find a flaw that could have minted undetectable counterfeit ZEC inside the Orchard privacy pool. It wants a further network upgrade to prove the supply is sound, beyond the emergency fix activated June 3.

TapTools, the most-used analytics platform on Cardano, said on X it will wind down within two weeks after losing its fifth senior executive in a year. Founder Charles Hoskinson warned in a video the same day that more older Cardano-ecosystem projects will fold in the second half of 2026.

The Sui Foundation's post-mortem ties two of three outages to an edge case in the v1.72 address-balances feature, and the third to a randomness-state bug exposed by an interim fix the team shipped knowing it carried halt risk.