Olivia Capozzalo & Christopher Storaker
September 30, 2025

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

Swift confirmed that it’s piloting a blockchain ledger with banks, but the project is still firmly inside a walled garden

In other news:

Andre Cronje’s latest DeFi project, Flying Tulip, raises $200M
Hypurr NFTs’ floor price holds out above 1K HYPE
Solana-based Solstice launches stablecoin and yield program
ETHGas building critical infra for Ethereum blockspace [SPONSORED]

Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.

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Bitcoin has MicroStrategy. Ethereum has no whale — until now. Michael Saylor turned his company into Bitcoin’s giga-whale, stacking billions through corporate debt and creating a new Wall Street narrative. But Ethereum, despite powering DeFi, stablecoins, NFTs, and restaking, has lacked an equivalent story of large-scale accumulation.

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Learn how Rezerve is turning MicroStrategy into a DeFi protocol.

📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$113,206	0.94 %
Ethereum	$4,166.46	1.53 %
XRP	$2.85	-0.03 %
BNB	$1,011.4	0.94 %
Solana	$207.13	0.29 %

Today’s Big Story

Swift’s Blockchain Retrofit

Swift, the backbone of global payments, just confirmed reports that it is piloting a blockchain ledger with Consensys and several banks. The ledger will use smart contracts to validate interbank transfers and support tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and even CBDCs — but always under regulated issuers’ control. It arrives alongside the global shift to ISO 20022, which replaces free-text fields with rich, structured data for cleaner reconciliation and real-time compliance.

“The types of tokens that will be exchanged on the ledger is the territory of commercial and central banks”

Swift

The promise: fewer manual interventions, faster crediting, some corridors dropping from multi-day to same-day settlement. Treasurers get transparency, banks cut remediation costs, regulators get better oversight.

What’s New Here:

Hybrid / permissioned tilt is more evident nowThe fact that Swift is piloting via a zkEVM L2 (Consensys’ Linea), cooperation with Consensys, and phrasing around “regulated tokenized assets” strongly suggests the architecture is not fully open/permissive. It’s more of a bank-centred bridge ledger than a public, decentralization-first rail.
Messaging + settlement convergence is being testedBecause some reports claim the pilot aims to unify messaging and settlement into one atomic on-chain transaction, this undercuts the old “messaging layer stays separate” assumption. That’s a meaningful evolution in Swift’s ambition.
Interoperability is baked in as a design constraintSwift emphasizes that the ledger must pair with existing and emerging networks. That reinforces the idea that they don’t expect it to dominate every use case—we’ll see hybrid rails.
Token issuance remains institution-controlledWhile Swift supports tokenized flows, it avoids saying it will issue stablecoins itself. Token types will be determined by banks, commercial and central institutions. This helps preserve a compliant, modular architecture.

In any event, let’s be clear: this is a walled garden retrofit. Swift retains its role as coordinator, access is permissioned, and banks remain in the middle. Richer data and smart contracts streamline the plumbing, but the correspondent banking model; fees, hops, jurisdictional silos may well stay intact.

Meanwhile, open rails are sprinting ahead. Stablecoins processed $18T in 2024 (Citi), more than doubling year-on-year. Protocols like x402, now backed by Coinbase, Cloudflare, and Google, embed payments directly into HTTP, enabling agent-to-agent programmable money at internet scale.

Swift’s ledger may ease friction for compliance-heavy corridors, but it won’t reverse the tide. Stablecoins already deliver 24/7 finality on open rails, where anyone can build and innovate without bank permission. By putting a walled garden on Linea, Swift acknowledges blockchain’s inevitability, while proving it still doesn’t trust the openness that makes it transformative.

Stay real,

Chris, Product and RWAs at The Defiant

This story is an excerpt from the latest edition of our weekly newsletter about stablecoins and RWAs, Real World. Subscribe to read the rest of this analysis, and make sure you don’t miss the next one.

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🎬WATCH

$100 Million DeFi DAT Chooses ETH | Ryan Zurrer

On the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Vinny sat down with crypto pioneer Ryan Zurrer to explore the strategy behind Game Square, the Jerry Jones-backed media powerhouse that bet $100 million on Ethereum instead of Bitcoin.

Ryan, who co-wrote the MakerDAO whitepaper and now leads Dialectic, shares why Ethereum dominates 5 out of 6 real-world crypto use cases, from stablecoins to DeFi, and how it’s emerging as the financial substrate of the future. The conversation dives deep into the evolution of DeFi, the lessons learned from past crypto cycles, and the importance of decentralization and fair launches in building sustainable ecosystems.

Top News in the Past 24 Hours

Andre Cronje’s Flying Tulip Raises $200 Million Ahead of ICOFlying Tulip, the latest venture from prolific decentralized finance (DeFi) developer Andre Cronje, has raised $200 million in a private seed round, valuing the project at a fully diluted valuation of $1 billion.Why it matters: Cronje is a legendary and controversial figure in DeFi. He founded one of the earliest DeFi protocol’s, Yearn Finance, and participated in the development of multiple other high-profile projects.
Hyperliquid’s Hypurr NFTs Settle at $55K Floor Amid Ecosystem Expansion Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid’s official NFT collection Hypurr is changing hands with a floor price of around 1,100 HYPE, or about $50,000 today, just two days after its launch on the ecosystem’s Layer 1 network, HyperEVM. Why it matters: Even before their official launch, Hypurr NFTs drew strong interest, trading on OTC markets for as much as $100,000 per NFT.
Solstice Finance Launches USX Stablecoin and YieldVault Solana-based decentralized finance protocol Solstice Finance has officially launched its USX stablecoin and YieldVault. The YieldVault program allows USX holders to access delta-neutral, institutional-grade returns by locking their tokens in the protocol.Why it matters: The launch underscores a growing trend of projects building on Solana for on-chain yield, composability, and fast, low-cost transactions.