gm, Defiers!

TL;DR:

Zcash rallies 30%
Kelp disputes LayerZero’s post-mortem
Coinbase bets on Centrifuge
SODAX Bets DeFi's Next Users are AI Agents, Not People [SPONSORED]
Figure’s Crypto-Backed Loans Are Redefining How Investors Unlock Liquidity [SPONSORED]

Let’s dive in.

Markets rallied for a third day today, with BTC pushing to its highest level in three months. Among the top-100 crypto assets by market cap, Zcash returned to its #1 spot by daily gains, surging over 30% in the past 24 hours.

This time, the privacy coin’s rally to over $570, its highest level in nearly six months, was driven by news that Multicoin has been stacking ZEC since February. While we don’t know how much ZEC Multicoin now owns, the VC firm’s co-founder and managing partner Tushar Jain said it’s “a significant position.”

ZEC 1-year price chart. Source: CoinGecko

While Zcash reached as high as $700 in November, the coin lost momentum in the new year, especially after a governance dispute led to the entire Electric Coin Capital team leaving the former development company to form a new one.

Sentiment began improving after the new Zcash development company raised $25 million in March, reassuring investors that the drama was over and the team responsible for the protocol indeed just left ECC, but didn’t leave Zcash.

In DeFi news, the Kelp bridge exploit fallout continues, and not without some of its own drama. Kelp yesterday published a statement disputing nearly every claim in LayerZero’s exploit post-mortem. The post-mortem attributed the ~$300 million theft to Kelp's choice of a 1-of-1 DVN configuration, which, Kelp argues, is LayerZero’s default setup, used by hundreds of applications.

Read more below!

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The $300M DeFi Bailout: Heroic or Unsustainable?

Was DeFi United a bailout or just voluntary market coordination? The Defiant's Camila Russo is joined by Dean Eigenmann (Markets Inc.), binji (Ethereum Foundation), and David Phelps (Confetti) to debate whether crypto bailouts are good for crypto, what this means for decentralization, and what DeFi must fix before it can scale to the mainstream.

Watch the full debate here:

Zcash Rallies 30% on Multicoin Investment News

Zcash (ZEC) rallied over 30% to become today’s top gainer after crypto-focused venture capital firm Multicoin revealed that it’s been accumulating the privacy coin for the past three months.

Why it matters: ZEC saw a massive and extended rally in the second half of last year, driven in part by the launch of a dedicated DAT from the Winklevoss twins.

Kelp DAO Accuses LayerZero of Deflecting Blame for $300M Bridge Hack

Kelp DAO published a detailed rebuttal to LayerZero's account of the April 18 rsETH bridge exploit, confirming that it will migrate to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard and accusing LayerZero of "blaming users for an issue that was caused by their own infrastructure failure."

Why it matters: Kelp's central argument is that the configuration LayerZero is now treating as a fringe choice was, in practice, the platform's standard and default, used by hundreds of other applications.

Coinbase Taps Centrifuge as Preferred Tokenization Partner

Coinbase has designated Centrifuge as a Preferred Tokenization Infrastructure platform and made a strategic investment in the firm, the companies announced on Tuesday, deepening a partnership focused on bringing compliant institutional assets on-chain through Coinbase's Base network.

Why it matters: The tokenized RWA market has crossed $25 billion in value, but the bulk of that supply remains gated and permissioned, unable to be used in DeFi — a gap Centrifuge aims to address.