Short answer (as of October 26, 2026): DeFi, short for decentralized finance, is money run by public programs: smart contracts that take deposits, lend, swap and settle trades by rules anyone can read, with no bank or broker approving each step. The history of DeFi starts with Ethereum’s launch in 2015 and The DAO, its first big experiment, in 2016. Its lasting parts came with Maker’s Dai (2017) and Uniswap (2018); it boomed in the DeFi Summer of 2020, peaked in November 2021 and survived Terra and the 2022 lender failures. By 2026 it ran from Hyperliquid’s on-chain order book to the tokenized funds and stocks Wall Street is bringing onto permissioned versions of DeFi’s rails.
Key facts
- The record is from 2021. DeFi deposits peaked at $177.49 billion on November 9, 2021, on DefiLlama‘s default count, and came nearest again on October 7, 2025, at $171.0 billion.
- Today it is about half that. DefiLlama counted about $88.0 billion on October 26, 2026, up from a 2026 low of $68.2 billion on July 1. The total moves with token prices, so a lower figure is not by itself a sign of withdrawals.
- In 2019 it was mostly Maker. On January 4, 2019, DefiLlama’s first day of Maker data, DeFi held about $289.6 million, roughly 95 percent of it in Maker.
- Uniswap shows the growth. It opened in November 2018 with about $30,000 deposited by a single liquidity provider, Hayden Adams wrote, and had handled about $3.99 trillion of trades by October 25, 2026 (DefiLlama).
- The largest liquidation day came in 2025. On October 10, 2025, CoinGlass counted more than $19 billion of borrowed-money positions closed by force within a day, the most it has tracked, over $10 billion of them on Hyperliquid (Fortune).
- The SEC now makes room for AMMs. Its September 17, 2026 Innovation Exemption lets qualifying venues trade tokenized listed stocks through permissioned automated market makers for up to five years (SEC).
On this page: What DeFi is · How it started · Black Thursday · DeFi Summer · Curve Wars · 2022 · Hyperliquid · Wall Street · Is DeFi dead? · Timeline · Crash ledger · Guides · FAQ
What is DeFi? The four building blocks
DeFi is financial services written as smart contracts, programs on a public blockchain that hold money and move it only as their code allows, for anyone with a wallet. Four inventions do most of the work:
- A dollar backed by locked collateral. To draw Maker’s Dai, a borrower locks crypto worth more than the loan; if it loses too much value, the contracts sell it.
- An exchange that is one equation. Uniswap replaced the order book with two-token pools whose balances, multiplied, must stay constant. The pool prices itself, and anyone can deposit tokens for a cut of the fees. This is an automated market maker, or AMM.
- A lender with no loan officer. Compound and Aave pool deposits, lend them against collateral at formula-set rates, and let anyone liquidate a loan once its collateral runs short.
- An order book on its own chain. Hyperliquid, open since 2023, runs bids, asks, matching and liquidations on a blockchain built for them, mostly for perpetual futures, leveraged contracts that never expire.
Because the pieces are open, builders stack them, and a failure in one can spread.
When did DeFi start?
It depends on what you count. Bitcoin (2009) moved money without a bank, but lending and trading by contract needed general-purpose programs, which arrived with Ethereum, live on July 30, 2015. DeFi’s first big experiment was The DAO in 2016. The DAO, a venture fund run by smart contracts, raised about 12 million ether (then about $150 million) that spring, and on June 17 an attacker used a code flaw to divert about a third of the fund’s ether, some 3.6 million ETH, by the SEC’s 2017 report. The attacker was never identified; no charges are known. A hard fork on July 20, 2016 reversed the diversion; holdouts kept the old chain going as Ethereum Classic. The parts that lasted came next: Maker’s Dai on December 18, 2017, and Uniswap on November 2, 2018, as the Devcon 4 conference in Prague closed. DeFi’s total first passed $1 billion on February 14, 2020, by DefiLlama’s count.
What was Black Thursday?
March 12, 2020, when the pandemic sell-off broke Maker’s liquidation auctions. Ether lost 43 percent that day, from $194 to $111, and with Ethereum jammed, bids of zero Dai won more than $8 million of seized ether, Glassnode found. That left about $4.5 million of Dai unbacked. Maker filled the hole by selling newly minted MKR, 20,980 of it for 5.3 million Dai in 106 auctions from March 19 to 28, with Paradigm the biggest buyer, The Block reported. Maker survived; its token holders were diluted, and the zero-bid vaults’ owners lost all their collateral.
What was DeFi Summer?
The 2020 boom in tokens paid to users. It started on June 15, 2020, when Compound began giving its COMP token to its users, about 2,880 a day (The Block), and deposits began chasing the newest rewards, which became known as yield farming. Yearn’s YFI, created on July 17, 2020, was another governance token earned in pools (Etherscan). SushiSwap, a Uniswap copy with a token, paid Uniswap’s liquidity providers to defect and moved over $800 million out of Uniswap on September 9 (Decrypt). A week later Uniswap let each of 251,534 past user addresses claim 400 UNI (Uniswap Labs). DefiLlama has DeFi rising from about $1.12 billion on June 15 to over $10 billion on September 26 and about $15.5 billion by December 29; DeFi Pulse, the tracker The Block cited at the time, showed $10 billion that same week (The Block).
What were the Curve Wars?
The 2020 to 2022 contest for control of Curve, an exchange for swapping stablecoins and other like-priced tokens. Locking CRV for up to four years gives veCRV, whose gauge votes split new CRV rewards among pools (Curve docs). A project needing a deep pool for its token had to acquire and lock CRV itself or reward those who held it. Convex, launched in May 2021, pooled holders’ CRV and became the biggest bloc of votes, and markets such as Votium paid for votes in public. Curve’s deposits peaked at $24.30 billion and Convex’s at $21.17 billion, both on January 5, 2022 (DefiLlama; the two overlap).
What happened to DeFi in 2022?
DeFi’s deposits fell by about three quarters in 2022, from $163.2 billion on January 1 to $38.3 billion on December 31 by DefiLlama’s count, as prices fell, Terra collapsed and several crypto lenders failed; the main protocols kept running. Terra’s UST, a dollar token held up by a swap with LUNA rather than by reserves, broke from May 7, 2022 and was finished within a week; DeFi’s deposits dropped about 43 percent in that week, by DefiLlama. Then the crypto lenders fell: Celsius froze withdrawals on June 12 (The Block), Three Arrows Capital was ordered into liquidation by a court in the British Virgin Islands that month, Voyager suspended trading, deposits and withdrawals on July 1 (Bloomberg, for both), and FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11 with about 130 affiliates (CNBC). HYPE’s Chapter Eleven compares those companies with the protocols they borrowed from:
Lay the five failures side by side, Celsius, Three Arrows, Voyager, FTX and BlockFi, and they share a shape. Each was a company holding other people’s money. This book’s argument is that their losses came mostly from LUNA, from uncollateralized loans they made to one another and, at FTX, from what a jury found was fraud, and not mainly from decentralized finance.
The protocols they had borrowed from kept running. None of the four core systems, Aave, Maker, Compound and Uniswap, halted or went bankrupt in 2022. Their deposits shrank: Aave’s total value locked fell from $12.65 billion on May 6 to $3.70 billion at the end of the year, and Maker’s from $13.0 billion to $6.07 billion, by DefiLlama’s count. Most of that was price, not loss.
The short version fits in six words: the code worked; the humans didn’t. The same months do not let it stand alone.
[…]
So the argument holds, with its asterisk. The lenders that held collateral liquidated it and survived; the companies that held promises froze and failed. But some of the code had failed too, some had been gamed, and in one place token holders had voted to override it.
Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter Eleven, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
The lines cut from that passage ([…]) cover the exceptions: Terra’s own contracts; a Solend vote to take over one whale’s account, reversed the next day; the Mango Markets trades; and a November short sale of CRV that left Aave a small bad debt. In August 2022 the Treasury also sanctioned Tornado Cash; see the FAQ and Are privacy coins legal?
How did Hyperliquid change DeFi?
It put a full exchange, order book and all, on a public chain of its own, and it did so without venture capital: the team chose not to raise any, and Jeff Yan fronted the cost himself, Fortune reported. At the HYPE genesis on November 29, 2024, 31 percent of the supply, 310 million tokens, went to users, with nothing reserved for private investors, exchanges or market makers (The Block); how it spread is in the Hyperliquid airdrop by the numbers (publishing December 1). On October 10, 2025, over $10 billion of the day’s more than $19 billion of liquidations ran through Hyperliquid (Fortune); the full account is in the October 10, 2025 crypto crash (publishing December 11). Its decentralization is partial: 27 validators were active on October 26, 2026 by the chain’s own API; the validator set voted to delist the JELLY market in March 2025 (The Block); and outside teams may list markets only after staking 500,000 HYPE that validators can vote to slash (HIP-3). Each point is scored in Is Hyperliquid decentralized? (publishing December 29)
Its legal status: as of October 26, 2026, no enforcement action, criminal charge or civil suit against Hyperliquid had been reported. Singapore’s central bank added its website and app to its Investor Alert List in June 2026, a notice rather than a ban (Cointelegraph); a House committee asked it for information in September 2026 (The Block); and the Hyper Foundation’s terms bar US residents.
Disclosure: Ryan holds HYPE, along with SOL, JUP and other digital assets HYPE covers. Nothing here is financial advice.
How did Wall Street adopt DeFi?
By using its rails behind its own gates. BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, launched on Ethereum on March 20, 2024 (BlackRock). On February 11, 2026, Uniswap Labs said BUIDL could trade through UniswapX, where approved market makers quote prices, and that BlackRock had also invested in the Uniswap ecosystem (Decrypt). Uniswap’s Permissioned Pools, introduced on July 23, 2026, check an issuer’s allowlist on every swap (Uniswap Labs). The SEC’s September exemption then let qualifying venues run permissioned AMM pools for tokenized stocks, and OKXICE, an equal joint venture of OKX and the NYSE’s owner, Intercontinental Exchange, said it would trade 63 of them in permissioned Uniswap v4 pools (The Defiant); by its October 23 notice, 22 of the companies, among them Microsoft, Alphabet and Cerebras, had objected (OKXICE). What each kind of token gives its holder is set out in Tokenized stocks explained (publishing November 17).
The vocabulary moved too. Larry Fink’s 2025 letter to BlackRock’s investors praised decentralized finance as “an extraordinary innovation.” His 2026 letter compared tokenization with the internet of 1996 and said it could update the financial system’s plumbing, without once saying “decentralized” or “DeFi.”
Is DeFi dead in 2026?
No, but it shrank sharply this year. DefiLlama’s total fell from $171.0 billion on October 7, 2025, within about 4 percent of the $177.49 billion record of November 9, 2021, to $68.2 billion on July 1, 2026, its lowest since February 2024, and stood at about $88.0 billion on October 26, 2026. Ether fell by about two thirds from October 7, 2025 to July 1, 2026, from about $4,690 to about $1,570 by DefiLlama’s price feed, and the total moves with token prices. The machinery kept running: Uniswap’s lifetime trading crossed $3 trillion on August 10, 2025, and Aave held about $17.5 billion on October 26, 2026 (both DefiLlama). The systems of 2017 to 2020 still run; who uses them has changed. HYPE argues, as an interpretation rather than a measurement, that the name “DeFi” is fading while banks, funds and exchanges take up its machinery.
DeFi timeline: the history of DeFi, 2015 to 2026
Deposit figures are DefiLlama’s market values on the day unless a row names another source.
| Date | Event | Built or lost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 30, 2015 | Ethereum’s Frontier network goes live | A chain that runs general programs | ethereum.org |
| Spring 2016 | Token sale for The DAO | About 12 million ETH, then about $150 million | SEC |
| June 17, 2016 | Attacker exploits The DAO’s code | A third of its ether diverted | SEC |
| July 20, 2016 | Hard fork reverses the attack | Ethereum Classic splits off | SEC; ethereum.org |
| July 25, 2017 | SEC’s DAO report | Found DAO tokens were securities; brought no enforcement action (not an adjudication) | SEC |
| December 18, 2017 | Single-Collateral Dai deployed | A crypto-backed dollar with no bank | Etherscan |
| November 2, 2018 | Uniswap opens at Devcon 4 | An AMM seeded with roughly $30,000 | Adams |
| January 4, 2019 | Earliest Maker data | $289.6 million in DeFi, about 95 percent Maker | DefiLlama |
| February 2020 | The lender bZx is hit twice using flash loans, loans taken and repaid within one transaction | About $350,000 and $600,000 of attacker profit | Qin and others |
| March 12, 2020 | Black Thursday | About $4.5 million of unbacked Dai | The Block |
| June 15, 2020 | Compound starts paying out COMP | DeFi Summer and yield farming begin | The Block |
| July 17, 2020 | Yearn’s YFI token created | A governance token earned in pools | Etherscan |
| September 9, 2020 | SushiSwap’s migration | Over $800 million pulled from Uniswap | Decrypt |
| September 16, 2020 | Uniswap launches UNI | 400 UNI each to 251,534 past user addresses | Uniswap Labs |
| May 5, 2021 | Uniswap v3 goes live | Liquidity concentrated in chosen price ranges | Uniswap Labs |
| November 9, 2021 | All-time high | $177.49 billion | DefiLlama |
| May 2022 | UST and LUNA collapse | Terra’s chain from about $20.2 billion to under $1 billion | DefiLlama; NBER |
| June and July 2022 | Celsius and Voyager freeze withdrawals; Three Arrows is ordered liquidated | Customer funds frozen, then tied up in bankruptcy | The Block; Bloomberg |
| August 8, 2022 | Treasury sanctions Tornado Cash | Sanctions on code no one can switch off | Treasury |
| November 11, 2022 | FTX files for bankruptcy | About 130 affiliates in Chapter 11 | CNBC |
| 2023 | Hyperliquid launches | An order book run on its own chain | Fortune |
| March 2023 | Flash-loan attack on the Euler lending protocol | About $197 million taken; Euler said all recoverable funds were returned by April 3 | The Block |
| July 2023 | Vyper compiler bug hits several Curve pools | About $69.3 million taken from six projects | CertiK |
| March 20, 2024 | BlackRock’s BUIDL launches | A tokenized Treasury fund on Ethereum | BlackRock |
| November 26, 2024 | Fifth Circuit’s Tornado Cash ruling | Immutable contracts are not blockable “property” | Arnold & Porter |
| November 29, 2024 | HYPE genesis | 310 million HYPE for users, none for private investors | The Block |
| February 25, 2025 | SEC closes its Uniswap Labs inquiry | No case after the 2024 Wells notice | Decrypt |
| March 21, 2025 | Treasury delists Tornado Cash | The 2022 sanctions end | Treasury |
| October 10, 2025 | Largest liquidation day CoinGlass has tracked | Over $19 billion of positions closed | CoinGlass, via Fortune |
| December 2025 | UNI holders pass UNIfication | A vote to switch on Uniswap’s protocol fee | The Block |
| February 11, 2026 | BUIDL on UniswapX | A BlackRock fund on Uniswap rails | Decrypt |
| July 23, 2026 | Permissioned Pools | Allowlists checked inside the pool | Uniswap Labs |
| September 17, 2026 | SEC Innovation Exemption | Permissioned AMMs for tokenized stocks | SEC |
DeFi’s crash ledger
Rebuilt from HYPE’s Appendix II and rechecked, with what kept running after each failure. Losses are as the named source reported them at the time, and a forced liquidation is not the same as losing that sum.
| When | Event | Loss, and who counted it | What kept running |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Attacker diverts about a third of The DAO’s ether | About 3.6 million ETH (SEC) | Ethereum, after the fork; on Ethereum Classic the diversion was never reversed |
| 2020 | Flash-loan raids on bZx | About $950,000 of attacker profit in two attacks (Qin and others) | The flash-loan lenders, repaid in the same transactions |
| 2020 | Black Thursday at Maker | Over $8 million of ether sold for zero (Glassnode); about $4.5 million bad debt (The Block) | Maker, after 20,980 MKR were sold |
| 2022 | Terra’s UST and LUNA | Anchor deposits from $17.05 billion to $0.61 billion (DefiLlama) | Lenders and exchanges on other chains |
| 2022 | Celsius, Three Arrows, Voyager | Customer funds frozen at Celsius and Voyager, then tied up in bankruptcy; Three Arrows ordered liquidated | Aave, Maker, Compound and Uniswap (excerpt above) |
| 2022 | Mango Markets, Solana | Over $110 million, the CFTC alleged in January 2023 | Solana’s other markets |
| 2022 | FTX and Alameda | More than 100,000 creditors and $10 billion to $50 billion of liabilities in the first filing (CNBC) | Serum’s open code, forked by Solana developers into OpenBook |
| 2023 | Flash-loan attack on the Euler lending protocol | About $197 million (The Block) | Euler, which said the attacker had returned all recoverable funds by April 3 |
| 2023 | Vyper compiler bug hits several Curve pools | About $69.3 million taken from six projects, $16.7 million returned (CertiK) | Pools compiled with unaffected versions |
| 2025 | A JELLY short lands in Hyperliquid’s HLP vault and the token’s price jumps | About $12 million of unrealized losses (Lookonchain, via The Block) | Hyperliquid, after validators delisted the market |
| 2025 | Forced selling after President Trump threatened China with new tariffs | Over $19 billion liquidated, over $10 billion on Hyperliquid (CoinGlass, via Fortune) | Hyperliquid, which Jeff Yan said had worked as intended (Fortune) |
| 2026 | Drift, a Solana perps exchange, is drained through its admin controls, in what Decrypt reported as a suspected compromise of its admin keys | Up to $285 million, PeckShield estimated (Decrypt) | Solana itself; researchers pointed to Drift’s admin keys |
| 2026 | An exploit of KelpDAO’s LayerZero bridge releases rsETH, and Aave is left with bad debt | About $292 million of rsETH (The Block); Aave’s bad debt modeled at $124 million to $230 million (The Defiant) | Aave, after freezing its rsETH markets |
Start here: DeFi guides on Grey Area Labs
- HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market: the book page, with its contents, a glossary and free excerpts.
- Tokenized stocks explained (publishing November 17): what each kind of stock token gives you, and what the SEC allowed in September 2026.
- The Hyperliquid airdrop by the numbers (publishing December 1): who got HYPE at genesis, how much, and who holds the rest.
- The October 10, 2025 crypto crash (publishing December 11): the timeline, Hyperliquid’s share and how auto-deleveraging works.
- Is Hyperliquid decentralized? (publishing December 29): validators, the JELLY vote, incidents and US status, with dates.
- Perpetual futures explained (publishing January 8): funding rates, who invented perps, and how they reached the US.
- Uniswap: the complete history (publishing January 15): the 2018 launch, the UNI airdrop, the fee switch and BlackRock.
DeFi in Ryan’s other books and guides
- LIGHT: The Solana Story and the Man Who Turned Time Into Code: Serum, the FTX collapse and Solana’s rebuilt finance.
- How Solana Survived FTX: the 2022 crash and the fork of Serum into OpenBook.
- Solana vs Ethereum in 2026: see its DeFi section.
- Dynamic TAO (dTAO) Explained: Bittensor prices each subnet’s token in an on-chain pool, an AMM applied to AI.
- Decentralized AI and Bittensor: the hub for TAO.
- DOGE: Memes and the Joke That Ate Wall Street: the memecoin side of the same markets.
- Pump.fun explained (publishing November 19): bonding curves, and what happens when a memecoin moves to an AMM pool.
- Are privacy coins legal?: the Tornado Cash sanctions, ruling and prosecutions.
- Privacy and Zero-Knowledge Cryptography: the hub for Zcash and privacy law.
The book behind this hub: HYPE
DeFi history: FAQ
What is DeFi?
DeFi, or decentralized finance, is lending, borrowing and trading through smart contracts on public blockchains instead of through banks or brokers. The contracts hold the money, follow published rules and are open to anyone with a wallet. Its main parts are stablecoins such as Dai, AMMs such as Uniswap, pooled lenders such as Aave and on-chain exchanges such as Hyperliquid.
When did DeFi start?
It depends on what you count: Bitcoin (2009) moved money without a bank, but DeFi’s programs needed Ethereum, live on July 30, 2015. Its first big experiment was The DAO, a fund run by smart contracts, which raised about 12 million ether in spring 2016 and lost about a third of it to an attacker that June. Maker’s Dai followed on December 18, 2017 and Uniswap on November 2, 2018.
What was DeFi Summer?
DeFi Summer was the 2020 boom that began on June 15, 2020, when Compound started paying its COMP token to its users. Yield farming, Yearn’s YFI, SushiSwap’s raid on Uniswap and the UNI airdrop followed. By DefiLlama’s count, deposits grew from about $1.12 billion that day to over $10 billion on September 26 and about $15.5 billion by December 29.
What happened to Terra?
Terra’s UST, a dollar token propped up by a swap with its sister token LUNA rather than by reserves, lost its peg from May 7, 2022 and collapsed within a week. Anchor, Terra’s savings protocol, fell from $17.05 billion to $0.61 billion in deposits (DefiLlama). Co-founder Do Kwon pleaded guilty to two counts, conspiracy and wire fraud, in August 2025, and in December 2025 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He faces charges in South Korea as well.
Is Tornado Cash still sanctioned?
No. The Treasury removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list on March 21, 2025, after the Fifth Circuit ruled in November 2024 that its immutable smart contracts are not property OFAC can block. Co-founder Roman Storm was convicted in August 2025 of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business; the jury deadlocked on money laundering and sanctions charges. As of late August 2026 his motion for acquittal was pending and a retrial on the two deadlocked counts was set for April 26, 2027.
What is Hyperliquid?
Hyperliquid is a blockchain built to run an exchange, mostly for perpetual futures, with its order book, matching and liquidations on-chain. Hyperliquid Labs, led by Jeff Yan, chose not to raise money from venture capitalists, Fortune reported, and its HYPE token launched on November 29, 2024 with 31 percent of the supply for users and none for private investors. On October 26, 2026 it had 27 active validators and no reported enforcement action, and its foundation’s terms bar US residents.
Is DeFi dead in 2026?
No, but it shrank. DefiLlama counted about $88.0 billion in DeFi on October 26, 2026, up from a 2026 low of $68.2 billion on July 1 but about half the $171.0 billion of October 7, 2025 and the record $177.49 billion of November 9, 2021. What changed is who uses the parts: BUIDL on UniswapX, the SEC’s 2026 exemption and OKXICE’s planned venue bring Wall Street assets onto DeFi rails, behind allowlists.
What is TVL?
TVL, or total value locked, is the dollar value at current prices of everything deposited in DeFi contracts. It is the most quoted DeFi number and an imperfect one: it rises with prices even when no new money arrives, the same money is counted twice when one protocol’s receipt token is deposited elsewhere, and trackers count differently. Check whose figure it is, and its date.
Related hubs
See also Crypto & Web3, Decentralized AI and Bittensor, Privacy and Zero-Knowledge Cryptography and NFTs and Crypto Art, and all of Ryan’s books on the books page.
Sources
- DefiLlama: total DeFi TVL history, protocol pages (Maker and Sky, Compound, Aave, Uniswap, Curve, Convex, Anchor), Terra chain TVL and Uniswap’s DEX volume, read October 26, 2026. defillama.com
- SEC, Report of Investigation on The DAO, Release No. 81207, July 25, 2017. sec.gov
- ethereum.org, timeline of Ethereum’s forks (Frontier, July 30, 2015; the DAO fork, July 20, 2016). ethereum.org
- Etherscan: Single-Collateral Dai and YFI token contracts. Dai; YFI
- Hayden Adams, “A Short History of Uniswap,” February 11, 2019. blog.uniswap.org
- Qin, Zhou, Livshits and Gervais, arXiv 2003.03810 (2020), on the bZx flash-loan attacks of February 15 and 18, 2020, which it says earned their attackers about $350,000 and $600,000. arxiv.org
- Glassnode Insights, “What Really Happened To MakerDAO?”, March 17, 2020. glassnode.com
- The Block: MKR auctions (March 31, 2020); Compound’s COMP (June 15, 2020); DeFi Pulse’s $10 billion (September 27, 2020); Celsius (June 12, 2022); HYPE genesis (November 28, 2024); JELLY (March 26, 2025); UNIfication (December 2025); Representative Comer’s letters to Hyperliquid and others (September 29, 2026). MKR; COMP; $10 billion; Celsius; genesis; JELLY; UNIfication; Comer
- Decrypt: SushiSwap (September 2020); SEC and Uniswap (February 2025); BUIDL on UniswapX (February 11, 2026); Do Kwon’s sentence (December 11, 2025); Storm retrial (August 26, 2026); Drift (April 2026). SushiSwap; SEC; BUIDL; Kwon; Storm; Drift
- Uniswap Labs: “Introducing UNI” (September 16, 2020); Uniswap v3 launch (May 5, 2021); Permissioned Pools (July 23, 2026). UNI; v3; Permissioned Pools
- Curve documentation, “What is veCRV?” docs.curve.finance
- Liu, Makarov and Schoar, NBER Working Paper 31160 (2023), on the run on Terra. nber.org
- Bloomberg (Yueqi Yang and Hannah Miller, July 1, 2022) on Voyager’s suspension of trading, deposits and withdrawals and the British Virgin Islands court’s liquidation order for Three Arrows, and CNBC on FTX (November 11, 2022). Voyager; FTX
- US Treasury press releases on Tornado Cash, August 8, 2022 and March 21, 2025. 2022; 2025
- Arnold & Porter on Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury, No. 23-50669 (5th Cir. November 26, 2024). arnoldporter.com
- United States v. Roman Storm, S1 23 Cr. 430 (KPF), S.D.N.Y., government letter of March 9, 2026 (Dkt. 281). courtlistener.com
- Hyperliquid: HIP-3 documentation and the public info API (validator summaries), read October 26, 2026. hyperliquid.gitbook.io
- Hyper Foundation, Terms of Service, last revised October 10, 2024 (residents of the United States are excluded), read October 26, 2026. hyperfoundation.org
- Fortune (Ben Weiss and Leo Schwartz, January 12, 2026), citing CoinGlass on October 10, 2025, and on Hyperliquid’s funding and its 2023 launch. finance.yahoo.com
- BlackRock: BUIDL launch release (March 20, 2024) and Larry Fink’s 2025 and 2026 chairman’s letters. BUIDL; 2025; 2026
- SEC, Release 2026-90, September 17, 2026, on its Innovation Exemption for trading tokenized NMS stock (Tokenized Securities Venues; permissioned AMM pools; expiry five years after publication). sec.gov
- Skadden on the SEC’s Innovation Exemption, September 22, 2026 (secondary). skadden.com
- OKXICE, Public Notice of OKXICE TSV, October 23, 2026 (ownership; Uniswap v4 pools on XLayer; issuer objections). okx.com
- Cointelegraph, “Hyperliquid added to Singapore’s Investor Alert List,” June 26, 2026. cointelegraph.com
- The Defiant on the 63 stocks OKXICE planned to list and on Aave’s KelpDAO bad-debt models. OKXICE; Aave
- Crash ledger: the CFTC’s release on its Mango Markets case (January 9, 2023); The Block on Euler’s returned funds (April 4, 2023) and KelpDAO (April 2026); CertiK on the Vyper incident (2023). CFTC; Euler; KelpDAO; Vyper
Published November 10, 2026.