Vitalik Backs a Prediction Market and TRUE Jumps 900%
Binance takes a $100 million Circle stake, and Kalshi blames one paid market maker for its repeating trade size
gm, Defiers!
These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:
- Vitalik Buterin backed Trueo's move to Ethereum mainnet and TRUE jumped 900%
- Binance took a $100 million Circle stake and renewed the USDC deal Circle pays for
- Kalshi blamed one paid market maker for the repeating trade size in its ether perp
- a16z and the DeFi Education Fund asked the SEC to put DEXs outside exchange registration
- Bitcoin Cash ran 27% on CME's futures listing as bitcoin gave up the day
Vitalik Buterin posted about Trueo 78 minutes after the protocol said it would move its primary deployment from Base to Ethereum mainnet, calling it dedicated to decentralization and "ethical and not corposlop." TRUE traded at $0.1786, up 900% over 24 hours, on $11.9 million of volume against a $16.6 million market value. The price moved on the post. The deployment has not: Trueo holds $847,526 in total value locked, all of it still on Base, and has set no migration date.
What mainnet would be getting is small. Ethereum has another upstart prediction market called Seer, which runs on Gnosis Chain and Ethereum and which DefiLlama has tracked since October 2024. Seer holds $314,773 across the two chains, $31,013 of it on Ethereum. Trueo would arrive at roughly 27 times the size of the deployment already there, and still under $1 million.
Augur shows what that ceiling has looked like. It launched in 2018 as the first onchain prediction market, runs on Ethereum alone, and holds $2.16 million, the largest of any prediction market on mainnet, against $342 million at Polymarket International on Polygon. Kalshi keeps no onchain footprint at all. Eight years of mainnet and Ethereum's biggest prediction market is worth less than 1% of Polymarket's. Liquidity was the constraint, and an endorsement doesn't move it.
Read more below!
Vitalik Buterin Backs Trueo's Ethereum Move As TRUE Jumps 900%
Vitalik Buterin endorsed a prediction market by name, posting 78 minutes after Trueo published its plan to move its primary deployment from Base to Ethereum mainnet. He called the project dedicated to decentralization and "ethical and not corposlop," and has disclosed no position in TRUE. Its $847,526 of total value locked ranks 14th among the 123 protocols in DefiLlama's prediction-market category, which holds $393.91 million in total. No migration date has been set: the deployments page lists Base mainnet contracts only, and the one date in the announcement is Jan. 31, 2027, after which Base users are asked to put new markets on Ethereum. Kalshi and Polymarket took 93% of prediction market volume in August.
Binance Takes $100 Million Circle Stake And Renews The USDC Deal Circle Pays For
Binance bought $100 million of Circle stock and signed a five-year agreement to promote USDC across emerging markets. Circle issued 1,237,011 Class A shares at $80.84 in a private placement that closed Sept. 17, exactly a five percent discount to that day's $85.09 close, for about 0.5% of shares outstanding. Binance cannot sell, pledge or hedge for two years or until it terminates the commercial arrangements, and it keeps its voting rights throughout. The money moves the other way on the commercial side: Circle subsidiaries will pay Binance a monthly incentive fee set as a percentage of USDC held through Circle's Modular Smart Contract Wallet service, with the percentage undisclosed. The arrangement supersedes the November 2024 deal, which carried a $60.3 million upfront fee and a 3 billion USDC treasury commitment, and the August 2025 wallet agreement. Emerging markets supplied 84% of first-week volume when Binance opened stock trading in June. Distribution costs related to Binance rose $152.1 million in 2025, alongside a $438.4 million increase in payments to Coinbase.
Kalshi Denies Faking Its Crypto Volume
Kalshi attributed the repeating trade size in its ether perpetual futures to a single market maker it pays to keep orders resting on the book. The Defiant measured that clip at 47.2% of trades and 62.75% of notional across 120,000 consecutive trades on Sept. 20 and 21. The exchange says hundreds of distinct takers sat on the other side and were consistently faster than the maker, which it offers as evidence of real economic activity: wash trading would lift volume with neither side taking a loss. Kalshi illustrated its liquidity payments with invented firm names — $100,000 a month for two-sided resting orders of at least $5,000, no more than 0.1% apart, on the book 95% of every hour — a size close to the $5,425 clip in the data. Self-Clearing Members currently pay nothing to trade perpetuals under a rebate program in force since July 9, and Kalshi says the Sept. 2 filing setting 0.3-basis-point fees has not taken effect. The exchange disclosed $40 million of its own capital in the perpetuals Guaranty Fund and more than 350,000 lifetime perpetual traders.
a16z And DeFi Education Fund Ask SEC To Put DEXs Outside Exchange Registration
Andreessen Horowitz and the DeFi Education Fund asked the SEC for a rebuttable presumption that a DEX and the app fronting it are not engaged in exchange activity, in a joint letter to Commissioner Hester Peirce dated Sept. 14 and published by the agency's crypto task force. A qualifying protocol would have to be non-custodial, automated with no party able to alter its rules, permissionless, and credibly neutral. A qualifying app would have to source pricing from pre-disclosed objective parameters, exercise no discretion over matching or execution, and limit developer work to interface maintenance and objective asset filters. The pair want staff guidance first, then rulemaking to codify it. a16z filed a second letter the same day asking the SEC to let centralized crypto trading platforms register under a regime modeled on Regulation ATS, with public Form ATS-N disclosure only above a 5% average-daily-volume threshold. DEX spot volume ran $11.07 billion over 24 hours, Uniswap leading at $3.19 billion.
Bitcoin Cash Runs 27% on CME Futures Listing as Bitcoin Gives Up the Day
Bitcoin Cash gained 14% in the hour beginning 8 a.m. ET, when CME Group said it will launch Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures on Oct. 19, on 24,531 BCH of Coinbase volume against a 943 BCH average over the prior eight hours. It kept going, reaching $347.03 in the 3 p.m. ET hour, 30% above the UTC-day open and six hours after the release, with no second dated catalyst behind the extension. Bitcoin SV rose 20% though CME did not name it. Bitcoin last changed hands at $86,232, down 0.7% on the day and up 14% on the week, and never reached Monday's $87,397 high. Breadth split 64 up and 61 down, after Monday closed with 106 of the 125 largest non-stablecoin tokens higher. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $999.0 million on Monday, against $6.1 million across all five sessions of last week. Front-month WTI settled at $89.84, a fifth consecutive session lower, and the S&P 500 finished six hundredths of a point below Monday.
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