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

As committed in the post-mortem of 4 September and in the update of 18 September, this is the scheduled 2 October update. It covers two things: where the review with Binance stands — against the questions we said were open — and the status of every item listed in "What we changed — and what is still in progress", against the dates we committed to. 1. The review with Binance Where it has got to * 18 August — before the liquidation, we asked Binance how collateral rates apply under Portfolio

RLUSD is Ripple's US dollar stablecoin, issued through a New York regulated trust, backed by cash and Treasuries, and live on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. Launched in December 2024, it crossed a $2.4 billion market cap by September 2026, per CoinGecko, making it one of the faster-growing regulated stablecoins since the GENIUS Act, the 2025 US stablecoin law, with Ripple positioning it as trading collateral inside its own institutional brokerage business. This guide covers what RLUSD actual

Celsius Network froze its roughly 1.7 million registered users out of their accounts on 12 June 2022, per its own bankruptcy filings, filed for bankruptcy a month later, and its founder is now serving 12 years in federal prison for fraud. Of the platforms that died in crypto's 2022 lending collapse, Celsius is the one where the courts eventually said the quiet part out loud. This was not just a risk model that failed. It was a business whose own marketing was found to be false by a bankruptcy ex

BlockFi froze withdrawals on 10 November 2022, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy eighteen days later, and no longer exists as a business. That is the short answer. The longer answer is stranger and more instructive, because BlockFi eventually announced distributions covering 100% of allowed customer claims, the court-recognised amounts valued in dollars on the filing date, a recovery almost nobody predicted, and many former customers still have not collected it. And the 100% carries a catch that e