BUIDL is BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, a share class of US Treasury exposure that lives on public blockchains instead of in a brokerage account. It launched in March 2024 as the asset management giant's first tokenized fund, grew into the flagship of an entire asset class, and sits at about $2.25 billion as of 2 October 2026, per rwa.xyz data. The sharper story is what grew around it. Tokenized Treasuries as a category now hold $14.75 billion, and BUIDL is no longer even the largest f

Gemini Earn froze in November 2022 along with the rest of crypto lending, and then its story went somewhere no other frozen platform's did. In May 2024 its users got their crypto back in kind, the actual coins rather than their crash-era dollar value, a distribution of over $2 billion per Reuters that Gemini's own announcement put at $2.18 billion and a 232% recovery against what the assets were worth at the freeze. In 2026 the aftermath finished unwinding, the SEC dismissed its lawsuit over the

Crypto arbitrage is buying an asset where it is cheap and selling it where it is expensive, pocketing the gap between two prices for the same thing. Crypto's fragmented structure, hundreds of venues quoting the same coins around the clock, produces those gaps constantly, which is why arbitrage is simultaneously the most real yield source in this market and the most oversold promise in its marketing. The gaps exist. The question an honest explainer has to answer is who actually captures them, and

What's new on the platform New strategies: SOL DeFi and XRP DeFi Two DeFi strategies opened in September. Both pay rewards daily, allow withdrawals at any time, and carry the Cross-Venue risk label. Expected APY at launch was 6.5% for each; current terms, including the minimum deposit, are on the strategy page. BTC LP and ETH LP moved to new strategy groups From 11 September, BTC Liquidity Providing is run as BTC DeFi, and ETH Liquidity Providing is run as ETH Maker Core. Each strategy now

FDUSD is First Digital USD, a dollar stablecoin issued from Hong Kong that at its peak climbed into the top handful of stablecoins by market cap. Launched in mid 2023, it rode Binance's zero-fee trading promotions to a multi-billion dollar valuation, survived a public solvency accusation and a depeg scare in April 2025, and has since shrunk to about $320 million as of 26 September 2026, per CoinGecko, ranking outside the top 100. The full arc, growth driven by another company's promotions, a str

Tokenized stocks are blockchain tokens designed to follow the price of real equities, Apple, Tesla, the S&P 500, and trade around the clock on crypto rails. The category crossed $3.1 billion in on-chain value by 26 September 2026, growing 13% in a month with nearly four million holders, per rwa.xyz data, and it has become the loudest front of the Wall-Street-onchain story, with Robinhood building an entire chain around the idea. The pitch is easy to love, stocks that trade like crypto, for anyo

Bitcoin cannot be staked in the way Ethereum or Solana can, because it runs on proof of work. Miners secure it by burning electricity, not by locking coins, and the protocol pays no staking rewards because it has no stakers. That has not stopped half the crypto industry from selling something called Bitcoin staking, and in fairness, one genuinely novel protocol now makes the phrase partly true. Sorting the real thing from the rebranding is the whole game. So here is the honest map as of Septemb

Wrapped Bitcoin is Bitcoin repackaged as an Ethereum token. One WBTC is backed by one BTC sitting in a custodian's vault, which lets Bitcoin's value move through DeFi, lending markets, liquidity pools, collateral positions, where native BTC cannot go. For six years it was the leading custodial Bitcoin wrapper by supply and DeFi integration, and then a 2024 custody controversy turned its category into a contested race. As of 26 September 2026 WBTC represents about 116,000 BTC worth roughly $9.8 b

PYUSD is PayPal's US dollar stablecoin, issued by Paxos, a New York regulated trust company required to hold full reserves behind the token, live since August 2023, and holding a market cap around $2.8 billion as of late September 2026, per CoinGecko. What makes it worth understanding in 2026 is not the token itself, which uses the familiar reserve-backed model, but the fact that PayPal pays 4% rewards for holding it inside PayPal and Venmo, in a year when US law supposedly banned stablecoin yie