Decentralized exchange edgeX has attributed a more than 40% collapse in its EDGE token to ‘deliberate’ market manipulation by an unnamed external party, a claim that onchain investigator ZachXBT has dismissed.

Data from CoinMarketCap shows edgeX (EDGE) plunged from roughly $1.20 to an intra-day low of $0.3663 on Tuesday, a drop of around 70%. The token is currently trading at $0.6474, down by around 45% over the past day.

In a post on X, the edgeX team acknowledged the sudden collapse in its native token, telling its community it had “observed a sudden and irregular price movement” and was actively investigating.

In response, ZachXBT claimed edgeX’s supply had been controlled by a small number of insiders operating with a low float, making the token inherently vulnerable to these types of events. He also demanded that the project publicly disclose the counterparties and market-maker agreements that contributed to the crash.

Only 350 million EDGE tokens are currently in circulation out of a maximum supply of 1 billion, meaning more than two-thirds of the total supply has yet to hit the market. A low circulating float can make a token more vulnerable to sharp price moves, especially if liquidity is concentrated or large holders sell into thin order books.

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EdgeX says project not hacked

In a follow-up statement, edgeX said the platform had not been compromised in any way. “What we have identified so far suggests deliberate attempts by certain external party to manipulate the market price of EDGE,” the project wrote, calling it a market integrity issue.

However, ZachXBT was unconvinced. “We investigated ourselves and did not find ourselves guilty even though we control nearly the entire supply,” he sarcastically wrote.

Source: CoinMarketCap

EdgeX is the 16th largest DEX in terms of trade volume over the past day, according to data from DefiLlama. The project has a total value locked (TVL) of $137 million.

Related: Recovery hopes fade as Kelp DAO hacker launders nearly all $220M in stolen funds

DEX trading volume declines

DEX trading volume across all chains has also pulled back sharply from its peak levels.

The broader pullback in DEX activity can make thinly traded tokens more vulnerable to sharp moves, though EDGE’s crash also involved project-specific questions over supply, market makers and insider control.

After hitting a spike close to $45 billion in early 2025, aggregate decentralized exchange volume has trended lower and largely stabilized in the $5 billion to $20 billion daily range through the first half of 2026, with a secondary peak around $30 billion in October 2025 before fading again, according to data from DefiLlama.

DEX trade volume. Source: DefiLlama

The cooling activity reflects a broader retreat in onchain trading appetite following the frenzy of early 2025, leaving DEX markets thinner and more vulnerable to outsized price impacts.

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The crash unfolded amid rising DeFi security concerns following recent exploits across bridges and liquidity pools.

The EDGE token collapsed to an all-time low of around $0.40 on June 1, less than two weeks after it hit an all-time high of $1.54.

The crash wiped off about 51% of the token’s value in a single day, triggering more than $6.2 million in liquidations across major exchanges and drawing immediate accusations of insider manipulation from on-chain researcher ZachXBT.

edgeX Points the Finger Outward

edgeX, the decentralized perpetual futures DEX that issues the EDGE token, posted on X several hours after the crash began, acknowledging what it called “a sudden and irregular price movement.” The team also said they were working to understand what happened. Two hours later, the project followed with a firmer statement, saying the following:

“The edgeX protocol were not compromised in any way. This is not a hack, exploit, or security breach. What we have identified so far suggests deliberate attempts by certain external party to manipulate the market price of EDGE.”

The company added that it was working with relevant exchanges and platforms to identify the cause and pursue accountability. It also promised to provide a more detailed update once the said investigations were over.

However, their explanation was not well received everywhere, with ZachXBT, an on-chain investigator known for calling out bad actors in crypto, pushing back directly and stating that the EDGE supply appeared to be controlled by a small group with low circulating float. He also challenged the edgeX team to disclose the platform’s counterparties and market maker agreements if they really cared about transparency, mocking the project’s self-investigation with a pointed paraphrase:

“We investigated ourselves and did not find ourselves guilty even though we control nearly the entire supply.”

On the price side, the damage was significant, with CoinGecko data showing that EDGE dropped from about $1.26 to near $0.40, which was a new all-time low, before it stabilized around $0.62 at the time of writing.

Additional data from CoinGlass showed the price fall caused liquidations of about $6.2 million in 24 hours, with long positions accounting for $4.84 million. That activity was mostly concentrated on Binance, Bybit, and OKX, which together handled the majority of the forced closures that affected at least 3,840 traders, with price volatility hitting 74.77% on the day.

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A Rough Season for Crypto Security

There is a valid reason why many people, upon seeing EDGE’s behavior in the market, immediately thought its parent platform had been hacked and why edgeX came out to categorically deny that there had been such an incident.

This year, the crypto space has been rattled by a string of exploits, including a recent attack on DxSale, where more than 1,400 liquidity pools tied to its old contracts on the BNB Chain were drained of about $7.3 million worth of tokens. A hacker also stole about $11 million from the Verus bridge, while TrustedVolumes, a liquidity provider, lost just under $6 million.

The hacker behind the $293 million Kelp DAO exploit has laundered nearly all of the unfrozen stolen funds, or about $220 million, in just six weeks, according to Arkham data and onchain analysts.

The Kelp DAO hacker-tagged wallet appears to have laundered nearly all the stolen funds, with just $1.7 million remaining traceable in the wallet, according to blockchain data provider Arkham. The malicious actor drained 116,500 Kelp DAO restaked ETH (rsETH) on April 18, pushing the total amount stolen from crypto hacks to $630 million for April.

The funds were laundered in two layers: bridging to Bitcoin using crypto mixer Wasabi and then returning to Ethereum before withdrawing and depositing via mixing protocol Tornado Cash, according to onchain analyst Specter.

The laundering activity may significantly reduce the chances of recovering the remaining unfrozen funds.

An additional $71 million was frozen by Arbitrum’s Security Council on April 21. A governance proposal and a US court order previously approved the transfer of the frozen funds to an Aave-controlled multi-signature wallet for the rsETh recovery effort. The next hearing on the ownership claims tied to the frozen funds is set for Friday in New York, court documents show.

Kelp DAO Hacker-tagged wallet, total balance. Source: Arkham

The development comes a week after Kelp DAO said it restored its restaked Ether token as part of a five-week recovery effort, after the final tranche of 20,373.7 rsETH tokens was sent to the LayerZero smart contract responsible for locking, minting, burning and releasing rsETH during cross-chain transfers, Cointelegraph reported Tuesday.

Related: Verus bridge exploiter returns $8.5M after bounty offer

Crypto hacks decrease by 90% in May, but DeFi security concerns persist

Cryptocurrency hacks logged a significant decrease during May, but it wasn’t enough to soothe the growing concerns tied to the security of the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry.

Losses from cryptocurrency exploits fell to $68.3 million in May, marking a near 90% decline from the amount lost in April, according to crypto security platform CertiK. About $2.6 million was attributed to phishing attacks, while a total of $9.4 million was successfully recovered or returned.

Crypto exploit losses in May reached $68.3 million. Source: CertiK 

Still, the $293 million Kelp DAO exploit triggered wider concerns about the safety of the industry, prompting DeFi protocols to reevaluate the security of their oracle providers.

Within three weeks after the exploit, Bitcoin DeFi platform Solv Protocol and liquidity protocol Tydro both migrated to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), seeking a more secure oracle provider.

Kelp DAO also migrated its rsETH token to Chainlink CCIP, moving away from its previous LayerZero-powered bridge after attributing the incident to weaknesses in its cross-chain setup. 

However, LayerZero said on April 20 that the exploit resulted from a single point of failure in Kelp DAO’s implementation, which relied on a single LayerZero DVN as the only verified path despite prior warnings against that configuration. 

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Memecoin launch platform DxSale was drained of $7.3 million in funds in a cyberattack that affected around 1,400 liquidity providers (LPs) on the BNB Chain. 

The attacker’s address “0xC457” transferred $1.87 million worth of BNB (BNB) tokens into two main wallets and subsequently deposited them into multiple Binance deposit addresses, according to blockchain data platform PeckShield in a Friday X post.

Back in 2021, DxSale was used to lock in liquidity for tokens launched on the BNB Chain. Blockchain analyst Tahax estimated that the locker still holds liquidity from projects launched years ago and explained that the exploiter wallet was freshly created and funded through crypto exchange Bybit.

The exploit adds to the renewed concerns around decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks, which have stolen $52 million so far in May, down from $634 million in April, which marked an over one-year high last seen in February 2025, according to data aggregator DefiLlama.

Mounting cyberattacks have led to widespread concerns about whether the wider DeFi sector is unsafe, partly due to the growing use of AI by malicious actors. “I now consider *all* of DeFi unsafe,” Manuel Aráoz, founder of the blockchain security platform OpenZeppelin, said on Tuesday, citing AI’s growing ability to identify smart contract vulnerabilities.

Source: PeckShield

DxSale stolen funds are already untraceable: onchain analyst

The attacker has already moved some funds through infrastructure that may make tracing more difficult, according to Tahax.

The analyst said that the DxSale deployer quietly transferred ownership of the locker contract to a new wallet 269 days ago, alleging that a “backdoor was left in” without an official migration announcement.

Source: Tahax

The analyst pointed to onchain evidence of another 80 transactions that executed subsequent ownership hops for obfuscation, before contract ownership landed at wallet ‘0xC45,’ which started the mass BNB withdrawals.

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The backdoor in the deployer contract, paired with a backdated lock, enabled the hacker to exploit withdrawal loops and extract the BNB tokens, wrote Web3 security platform Coinsult, in a Friday X post, adding:

“A privileged setFee plus a backdated lock turned ‘locked’ deposits into a withdrawable balance.”

Cointelegraph has approached DxSale for comment on the exploit and the final number of affected liquidity providers.

The exploit adds to more than $17 billion in crypto exploit losses tracked by DefiLlama, including about $7.8 billion from DeFi protocols.

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A security analyst suggested that DxSale’s old locker contract may have contained an unverified backdoor vulnerability.

More than 1,400 liquidity pools tied to old DxSale contracts on BNB Chain were drained in a $7.3 million exploit flagged by blockchain security firms on May 29.

The attack adds to a growing list of DeFi breaches this month, as security experts warn that aging smart contracts and weak access controls are leaving protocols exposed.

What Happened

According to on-chain security account PeckShieldAlert, a user named “Tahax” first identified the exploit. Per their report, attackers targeted at least 1,400 old DxSale liquidity pool contracts on BNB Chain, draining about $7.3 million worth of crypto from them, which they then routed through AnySwap in an attempt to obscure their trail.

PeckShield added that an address identified as “0xC457…FA69” had transferred 2,958 BNB from the hack, worth $1.87 million, into two main wallets, which then moved the funds through several deposit addresses on Binance.

DxSale is a launchpad platform that lets crypto projects create tokens and liquidity pools without building their own infrastructure. It was pretty big about five years ago, with many of the projects launching tokens on BNB Chain locking their LPs with the protocol.

According to Tahax, the locker was still holding LPs from projects that had not been touched for years, with founders and holders believing it was safe. However, nearly nine months ago, the DxSale deployer transferred ownership of the locker to a new wallet with no public announcement or migration notice. The on-chain degen claims that the locker contract was unverified and it probably contained a backdoor, which the attacker took advantage of.

Two days ago, 0xC457…FA69, a brand new wallet funded from Bybit and possibly routed through AnySwap, reportedly took ownership of the locker and, within hours started draining the LPs.

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DxSale itself was yet to make a statement regarding the exploit.

DeFi Security Concerns Keep Growing

The DxSale hack hasn’t happened in isolation, with the crypto sector losing at least $650 million in April from similar incidents. May has also had its fair share of attacks, including one last week, where a person stole more than $11 million from the Verus bridge after exploiting a flaw in how it verified payment amounts. According to security researchers, the attacker submitted a tiny transaction that passed verification checks while still unlocking large withdrawals from the bridge’s reserves.

Earlier in the month, liquidity provider TrustedVolumes was also hit for about $5.9 million after a hacker abused weaknesses in its custom settlement system, with analysts pointing out that the exploit worked because the protocol checked authorization against one address while pulling funds from another.

THORChain was also a victim, with on-chain sleuth ZachXBT saying it may have lost more than $10 million, which sent its RUNE token plummeting 15% within minutes.

This steady stream of exploits has elicited a reaction, with OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz declaring “all of DeFi unsafe,” arguing that AI-assisted attackers are finding vulnerabilities faster than security teams can patch them.

Despite the regulation milestone, AAVE token prices remained under pressure alongside the rest of the crypto market.

Aave Labs announced on May 28 that its two subsidiaries located in the United Kingdom, Push Labs Ltd. and Push Virtual Assets Ltd., have been granted registration by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to operate as crypto asset exchange providers in the UK.

The approval also gives the firms permission to issue electronic money under the UK’s Electronic Money Regulations 2011.

Aave Pushes Deeper Into Regulated Crypto Services

In a post published on X, Aave said the approvals would allow “regulated cryptoasset activities and payments infrastructure” in the UK, including stablecoin on- and off-ramping services.

The companies were assigned firm reference numbers 1031720 and 1031721, while Push’s electronic money authorization carries reference number 900984.

According to Aave founder Stani Kulechov, the setup will allow users to move fiat currency directly into the Aave ecosystem through what he described as a “vertically integrated zero-fee on-ramp.”

He also linked the FCA registration to Aave’s broader regulatory plans in Europe, referencing the company’s MiCA license through the Central Bank of Ireland for operations across the European Economic Area.

The announcement has come at a particularly busy time for the protocol. Earlier this week, it published a governance “Temp Check” proposal to deploy Aave V4 on Avalanche, including a dedicated liquidity hub for tokenized real-world assets.

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Former Ava Labs executive Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo wrote on X that Avalanche had a “huge opportunity” to build on-chain capital markets around the new version of the protocol.

It has also come when the wider DeFi sector is facing renewed scrutiny after several major exploits this year. Things have gotten so bad that yesterday, OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz warned users on X that he now considers “all DeFi unsafe.”

He argued that AI-powered coding tools have tilted the balance too heavily in favor of attackers and named Aave as one of the platforms he no longer thinks is safe.

Aave was indeed heavily affected by an exploit in April on KelpDAO. However, recent community discussion has focused on its response, with analyst Jose Fabrega praising Aave DAO for using roughly $58 million from its treasury to help cover losses tied to rsETH depositors after the incident.

An April 25 report on the recovery effort showed Kulechov personally pledged 5,000 ETH toward the “DeFi United” initiative formed to stabilize markets after the exploit created a deficit of more than 100,000 ETH across connected protocols.

AAVE Price Slips

Despite news of the UK approval, data from CoinGecko showed that at the time of writing, Aave’s native AAVE token had dipped about 5% in 24 hours to trade at around $81.

That figure also represented a nearly 10% drop during the last seven days, as well as a 17% fall over the past month. Still, Aave remains one of the largest DeFi lending protocols, with more than $13.6 billion in total value locked (TVL).

For years, crypto has thrived on speculative capital flows and the explosive popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens and applications.

That still holds true for rising sectors such as perpetual decentralized exchanges and prediction markets. But as Wall Street pushes deeper into tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), not all of the industry’s existing systems cater to the kinds of financial products institutions want to bring onchain.

An author of the newly finalized ERC-7943 (uRWA) token standard said that the fragmented infrastructure powering much of DeFi wasn’t designed for regulated financial assets, which often require identity frameworks and interoperability standards.

“If you want to bring regulated assets onchain, you can’t really escape regulations,” Dario Lo Buglio, co-founder and head of blockchain at tokenization platform Brickken, told Cointelegraph. 

“You can still play your pirate game on DeFi without regulated assets.”

DeFi veterans have been wary of freezing functions in tokens, but the same controls appeal to institutions. Source: ethereum.org

Existing standards don’t cover every RWA use case

Another token standard, the ERC-3643 — also known as the T-REX or Token for Regulated Exchanges — is one of the dominant frameworks used for tokenized securities on Ethereum.

The standard already includes many of the compliance-oriented features institutions require, like identity-based permissions and mechanisms that allow issuers to intervene under specific circumstances.

The framework was designed primarily around securities and does not necessarily translate across the broader range of tokenized assets now entering blockchain markets, Lo Buglio said. Thus, interoperability is increasingly difficult as more institutions experiment with bringing traditional financial products onchain.

“As tokenization becomes easier, the harder problem is making those assets work across different compliance systems, custodians, exchanges, wallets and institutional platforms,” Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO, told Cointelegraph.

Levin said standards such as uRWA could help standardize how tokenized assets carry information tied to identity, permissions, compliance requirements and transfer rules across Ethereum-based systems.

“Done well, that makes regulated assets far easier to move, verify and integrate without every institution building its own isolated infrastructure,” he said.

Tokenized RWAs grew from roughly $6.4 billion at the start of 2025 to about $34 billion as of Thursday, according to RWA.xyz data. Standard Chartered estimates this value to pop to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, while the Boston Consulting Group projects $18.9 trillion by 2033.

In measurements that classify stablecoins as RWAs, the total market capitalization is approaching $340 billion. Source: RWA.xyz 

Related: Wall Street’s tokenization boom has a liquidity problem: Axis CEO

Levin added that institutions have largely prioritized assets with predictable cash flows, real yield and established legal structures.

“The market is tokenizing what benefits most from faster settlement, programmable collateral and lower operational friction,” he said.

Privacy as the next institutional requirement

Privacy remains another major obstacle for institutions experimenting with onchain finance, particularly for firms unwilling to expose portfolio activity or transaction flows on public blockchains.

“We don’t want BlackRock listing their entire portfolio onchain transparently to everyone, but they still want to transact onchain,” he said.

BlackRock’s institutional liquidity fund is worth about $2.5 billion. Source: RWA.xyz

Related: DeFi hacks shake institutional confidence as risks outpace yields

Lo Buglio argued that many existing tokenization frameworks were originally designed around public Ethereum-based systems and do not always translate cleanly to privacy-oriented chains, where transaction models and data structures often differ from traditional EVM environments.

Canton Network, which was launched with backing from firms including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Cboe Global Markets, was designed around privacy-preserving financial coordination between institutions.

Unlike public blockchains where transaction activity is broadly visible across the network, Canton allows data to remain visible only to relevant participants while still synchronizing settlement between institutions.

Its architecture has irked some developers who argue the network lacks key characteristics associated with public blockchains, including a globally shared state.

The debate reflects a growing divide between crypto-native DeFi infrastructure and the types of blockchain systems many large financial firms appear more willing to adopt for regulated assets.

AI agents may push RWAs beyond TradFi

Much of the current conversation around tokenized RWA has centered on banks and institutional systems. But some builders believe the infrastructure now being developed for RWAs could eventually branch out to machine-driven financial systems.

“As AI agents begin to move capital autonomously, they will need assets that exist on-chain in a form they can read and act on,” Taran Dhillon, head of digital assets at tokenization company Kula, told Cointelegraph.

According to Dhillon, many productive RWAs still remain largely disconnected from automated financial systems because they lack standardized digital infrastructure.

“The standards being built today need to work across jurisdictions and asset classes, not just within the existing corridors of established financial markets,” he said.

Lo Buglio similarly argued that ERC-7943 was designed less as a single dominant implementation and more as a framework allowing tokenized assets to move across increasingly interconnected blockchain environments.

ERC-7943 moved to the “final” stage in its Ethereum Improvement Proposal process on Wednesday, meaning developers can deploy contracts based on the standard without expecting further specification changes. The next phase will likely focus on adoption across tokenized asset platforms.

The emergence of another tokenization standard may not immediately solve the lack of standardization issue it aims to address.

Lo Buglio acknowledged that ERC-7943 was intentionally designed as a more flexible and less “opinionated” framework than some earlier standards.

Large financial institutions and blockchain developers continue to experiment with proprietary infrastructure and custom compliance systems.

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Critics quickly pushed back, arguing that most recent crypto hacks were caused by operational failures instead.

Manuel Aráoz, co-founder of smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin, went public on May 26 with a blunt recommendation that people should get out of DeFi, all of it, including the blue chips.

According to him, AI-powered coding agents have tilted the security game so far toward attackers that no protocol can currently be trusted to hold user funds.

Aráoz’s Warning

The software engineer wrote in a post on X;

“PSA: I now consider all of DeFi unsafe.”

He also said he has been privately advising friends and family to exit all DeFi positions, naming Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound as protocols he no longer considers safe.

His reasoning is based on asymmetry: defenders must find and fix every vulnerability, while attackers need only one to cause damage. Now, with AI coding agents capable of scanning smart contracts faster and more thoroughly than any human security team can, Aráoz feels the asymmetry has become unworkable.

OpenZeppelin itself recently noted that crypto companies lost more than $3.4 billion to hacks in 2025; however, it blamed most of that theft on compromised credentials, operational failures, and code shipped between audits, rather than on smart contract bugs.

This year has also seen a rollercoaster of attacks, with more than $650 million stolen in April alone. Of that amount, $292 million came from an exploit on KelpDAO, with another $285 million siphoned from Drift Protocol following what experts say were months of social engineering.

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Pushback From X Users

Against that backdrop, Aráoz’s warning landed hard, but people immediately pushed back. One of those criticizing the post was Aave Chan Initiative founder Mark Zeller, who held nothing back.

His counter was data-driven: he pointed out that fewer than 10% of DeFi issues in the past year stemmed from code-level vulnerabilities, with most failures, according to him, tracing back to poor risk parameters, collateral mismanagement, and weak operational security, not AI-assisted exploits.

Several others echoed Zeller’s view, though with slightly less heat. Phoenix Lab co-founder Sam McPherson indicated that smart contracts of blue-chip DeFi platforms were “quite safe these days” and pointed to opsec failures as the real culprit behind most of the major hacks that have happened recently.

Another X user, Polaris Finance developer Robert, made a similar distinction, saying that actual smart contract exploits are “almost non-existent these days.” He added that recent breaches have largely involved centralized components that allow human control rather than the immutable code beneath them.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also has a different view on AI and its effect on crypto security, writing earlier this month that AI-assisted formal verification could actually make crypto systems more secure over time. According to him, developers can use AI to write both the code and the mathematical proofs of its correctness.

Allman was a vocal proponent of blockchain-based technology and elevated the sector of RWAs to new heights.

Founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, Nathan Allman, has died unexpectedly at the age of 32, the company announced in a statement. No cause of death has been disclosed.

Ondo described Allman as a driving force behind the company, as the team credited his vision, leadership, and belief in using technology to build a more open and accessible financial system.

Ian De Bode Named CEO

The firm said his influence on both the company and the wider crypto industry “cannot be overstated.” Allman founded Ondo in 2021 after previously working on digital assets initiatives at Goldman Sachs. A graduate of Brown University, he helped establish Ondo as one of the leading players in the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) sector.

During his time leading the company, Ondo introduced several major products, including USDY, a yield-bearing stablecoin, OUSG, a tokenized US Treasury fund, and tokenized equities through Ondo Global Markets.

Following his death, Ondo announced that longtime President Ian De Bode will take over as CEO. According to the company, De Bode has overseen Ondo’s strategy, products, and daily operations for more than two years and has the full support of the leadership team.

“We will continue building what Nate started. That is the most meaningful way we know to honor him.”

Tributes quickly poured in from across the crypto industry following Allman’s death. Former Binance CEO, CZ, called him a “pioneer in RWA,” while former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Chris Giancarlo described him as “extraordinarily gifted.” Meanwhile, Crucible founder Meltem Demirors remembered Allman as “kind, thoughtful, caring.”

Solana’s application revenue stayed remarkably stable at over $342 million despite weaker market conditions.

SOL fell 33% in the first quarter of 2026 to close at around $83, but Messari’s Q1 State of Solana report tells a story that’s harder to dismiss than the price chart would suggest.

While dollar-denominated numbers dropped across the board, the network set new records for daily transaction volume, grew its real-world asset market cap to over $2 billion, and barely budged on validator revenue.

Record Activity, Shrinking Prices

The headline figure from the report was the new all-time high for average daily non-vote transactions: 112.6 million, up 50% from the previous quarter and 15% above the previous record set in Q2 2025.

It means that more transactions happened on Solana every day in Q1 than at any point in the network’s history, which clearly sits at odds with the price decline. Meanwhile, Chain GDP, which is Messari’s term for total application revenue, stayed almost flat at $342.2 million, fractionally above Q4 2025’s $341.8 million.

Per the report, Pump.fun is still the largest single revenue source at $124.7 million, an improvement of 17% quarter-over-quarter. In second place was Axiom, a trading app, which recorded a 36% jump, raking in $42.4 million.

However, the most dramatic mover was a launchpad that lets users share trading fees with social media accounts, called Bags. Its revenue went up 1,347% to $11.5 million after meme coins tied to open-source AI projects generated intense trading activity in January.

That momentum didn’t hold, with Bags’ revenue dropping 85% month-over-month into February, making the episode another example of how quickly new activity cycles through Solana’s application layer.

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On the other hand, DeFi TVL fell 22% quarter-over-quarter to $6.16 billion, a drop that tracks almost directly with SOL’s price dip rather than with any meaningful outflow of users. Solana’s share of total DeFi TVL moved barely at all, going from 6.9% to 6.7%, while Kamino reclaimed the top protocol spot with $1.72 billion, edging Jupiter at $1.69 billion.

Drift’s performance was affected by a $285 million exploit attributed to a sophisticated social engineering operation linked to North Korean state-affiliated threat actors.

Looking at Real Economic Value, which is basically the fees and MEV tips paid to validators, the report shows it fell just 1% to $89.5 million. That figure placed Solana second among all networks, only behind Hyperliquid’s $156 million.

RWAs Take the Lead

If one story defined Q1 beyond the bear market backdrop, it was real-world assets. On Solana, the market saw its value grow 43% quarter-over-quarter to $2.01 billion.

BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized money market fund doubled to $525.4 million after Anchorage Digital added custody support, with the latter holding around 81% of the total supply on-network by quarter’s end.

Meanwhile, Ondo Finance launched 200-plus tokenized US stocks and ETFs on Solana, including a same-day tokenization of BitGo stock on the date of the company’s NYSE IPO.

Finally, while the stablecoin market cap on the platform remained at just under $15 billion, the composition changed. USDC fell 21% to $7.83 billion but remains the largest at 53% of the total, while USDT rose 34% to $2.89 billion.

At the same time, World Liberty Financial’s USD1 climbed 473% to $883.5 million, largely on the back of Binance reallocating customer holdings to Solana.