• Fed Signal: Powell’s Harvard comments sent CME FedWatch rate-hike odds tumbling from 25% to 5% for 2026, with the 2-year yield sliding eight basis points to 3.83%.
• Oil Level: WTI crude rose 5.3% Monday to close near $105 per barrel – the first close above $100 since 2022, sustained by the ongoing US-Iran conflict.
• Crypto Impact: Bitcoin shed early gains and settled around $66,500, roughly flat on the 24-hour, as risk appetite compressed across equities and digital assets.
• Rate Path: The March 18 FOMC held the federal funds rate at 3.5%–3.75% for a second consecutive meeting, with the SEP projecting one quarter-point cut in 2026.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has built its reputation on one core promise: trustless security powered by cryptography. From smart contracts to cross-chain bridges, the entire ecosystem assumes that today’s encryption standards are unbreakable.

That assumption may not age well.

A silent disruption is approaching—not from regulators, not from hackers, but from quantum computing. And if DeFi doesn’t evolve fast enough, the very foundations of its security model could crack.

The Quantum Threat to DeFi

At the heart of DeFi lies public-key cryptography—specifically systems like the Elliptic Curve Cryptography used in wallets and transactions. Today, it’s virtually impossible for classical computers to reverse-engineer private keys from public ones.

Quantum computers change that equation.

Algorithms like Shor’s Algorithm could theoretically break ECC and RSA encryption in a fraction of the time. This means:

• Wallet private keys could be derived from public addresses
• Signed transactions could be forged
• Entire blockchain histories could be manipulated

Suddenly, “not your keys, not your coins” becomes “your keys aren’t safe anymore.”

The Timeline Problem: It’s Not If, It’s When

Here’s where things get tricky: quantum computers capable of breaking modern cryptography aren’t fully here yet—but progress is accelerating.

Organizations like IBM Quantum and Google Quantum AI are pushing the boundaries every year. While estimates vary, many experts believe that cryptographically relevant quantum computers could emerge within the next decade or two.

And here’s the real danger:

Attackers don’t need to break DeFi today—they can harvest data now and decrypt it later.

This is known as the “harvest now, decrypt later” strategy.

Why DeFi Is Uniquely Vulnerable

Unlike traditional finance, DeFi operates in a fully transparent environment:

• Public wallet addresses
• Open transaction histories
• Immutable smart contracts

Once quantum decryption becomes viable, all previously exposed public keys become attack vectors.

Even worse, many DeFi protocols are not easily upgradeable. If a smart contract wasn’t designed with post-quantum migration in mind, it may be permanently vulnerable.

The Shift Toward Post-Quantum Cryptography

The solution isn’t to panic—it’s to prepare.

Enter Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC): a new generation of cryptographic algorithms designed to withstand quantum attacks.

These include:

• Lattice-based cryptography
• Hash-based signatures
• Multivariate polynomial schemes

Governments and institutions (like the National Institute of Standards and Technology) are already working to standardize these approaches.

But integrating PQC into DeFi isn’t plug-and-play—it requires deep protocol redesigns, wallet upgrades, and coordinated ecosystem migration.

Validator Networks + Checkpointing: A Practical Defense Layer

While full quantum resistance is still evolving, hybrid solutions are emerging—and this is where things get interesting.

Concepts like validator networks combined with checkpointing mechanisms offer a bridge between current security and future resilience.

Here’s the idea:

• Independent validator networks continuously monitor blockchain states
• They embed post-quantum hashes as checkpoints
• In case of a quantum-induced attack (e.g., chain reorg), the network can revert to a verified state

This is similar to emerging designs like the QUIP concept, where:

• Multi-party computation ensures distributed validation
• Post-quantum signatures secure state checkpoints
• Recovery mechanisms allow restoration after malicious interference

Think of it as a time-anchored safety net for DeFi systems.

The Migration Challenge

Upgrading DeFi to a post-quantum world isn’t just technical—it’s social and economic.

Key challenges include:

• User migration: Convincing users to move funds to quantum-safe wallets
• Protocol upgrades: Redeploying or migrating liquidity across new contracts
• Backward compatibility: Ensuring legacy systems don’t become instant liabilities
• Coordination: Aligning thousands of decentralized teams and communities

In a space that struggles to agree on governance proposals, this is no small feat.

So… Are We Ready?

Short answer: Not yet.

Long answer: We still have time—but not as much as we think.

DeFi today is like a fortress built with the strongest locks of its era. But quantum computing isn’t a better lockpick—it’s a completely different game.

The projects that start preparing now—by experimenting with post-quantum cryptography, hybrid security models, and checkpointing systems—will define the next era of decentralized finance.

Final Thought

DeFi solved trust by removing intermediaries.

Now it faces a deeper challenge: removing assumptions about the future of computation itself.

Because in a post-quantum world, security won’t be about what worked yesterday—it’ll be about who prepared for tomorrow first.

REQUEST AN ARTICLE

Keyrock, a Brussels-based digital asset services firm, has raised a Series C round led by SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered, at a valuation of $1.1 billion, the company said in a press release Tuesday.

Ripple, which provides blockchain-based enterprise infrastructure, also participated in the fundraising as an existing backer. The funding round remains open and could total up to $100 million.

Keyrock said in the release that the new capital will be used to strengthen its balance sheet, expand its suite of services and pursue acquisitions.

Founded in 2017, the firm offers market making, asset management, over-the-counter (OTC) trading and options services across digital asset markets. It positions itself as a bridge between traditional financial institutions and crypto-native markets.

“In 2026, we’re pushing for more growth in our services, client base, and geographic reach, as we look to gain greater market share and reinforce our position as a leading player,” Keyrock CEO Kevin de Patoul said in the release.

Keyrock operates across more than 80 centralized and decentralized trading venues and has a workforce of over 200 employees globally.

The firm expanded into asset and wealth management by acquiring Turing Capital, a Luxembourg-registered alternative investment fund manager, in September last year.

That deal marked the launch of Keyrock’s Asset and Wealth Management division, a new business unit dedicated to institutional clients and private investors.

Read more: CEO of crypto investment firm Keyrock says bitcoin is undervalued, entering ‘transition year’

• Bitmine has increased its Ethereum (ETH) holdings to over 4.73 million.
• The company is adding to its ETH treasury strategy despite market struggles.
• Ethereum price holds near $2,000.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies, led by Tom Lee, has accelerated its Ethereum acquisitions, marking its largest purchase of 2026 so far.

According to a company update, Bitmine’s total Ethereum holdings have risen to more than 4.73 million ETH, while its combined crypto and cash reserves now exceed $10.7 billion.

The firm has also expanded its staking activity, even as Ethereum trades near the $2,000 level amid broader weakness in the crypto market.

The downturn has prompted notable capital outflows from ETH-focused investment products.

Largest weekly purchase lifts holdings

In a Monday update, Bitmine said it executed its biggest weekly Ethereum purchase of the year, acquiring 71,179 ETH.

The transaction lifted its total ETH treasury to 4.73 million tokens, representing about 3.92% of Ethereum’s total supply.

The latest purchase significantly exceeds the firm’s recent weekly average of 45,000–50,000 ETH, underscoring a more aggressive accumulation strategy.

This contrasts with broader market behavior, where many digital asset treasuries have either paused purchases or liquidated holdings amid declining prices.

Crypto outperforms despite macro headwinds

Ongoing macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures have weighed on risk assets.

Commenting on the trend, Bitmine chairman Thomas Lee said:

“As the Iran war enters its fifth week, ETH and crypto have outperformed the broader market, with ETH outperforming equities by 1,160 basis points. This stands in contrast to gold, which has underperformed by more than 750 basis points. Crypto is demonstrating its potential as a wartime store of value.”

Bitmine remains one of the few large corporate buyers maintaining a consistent accumulation strategy despite market headwinds.

In contrast, Michael Saylor’s Strategy—the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin—recently paused its 13-week buying streak.

Ethereum holds above $2,000 despite outflows

Ethereum has remained resilient around the $2,000 level and is up nearly 10% over the past month, although upside momentum remains limited.

The asset has held near this range despite persistent exchange outflows and cautious institutional sentiment.

Data from CoinShares showed that ETH investment products recorded $222 million in net outflows last week.

Bitcoin products also saw outflows of more than $194 million, contributing to a broader $414 million withdrawal across crypto investment vehicles.

Long-term conviction persists

Despite these outflows, Bitmine’s continued accumulation highlights strong long-term conviction among select institutional players.

The Ethereum Foundation also signaled a similar stance, staking more than $46 million worth of ETH on Monday.

Looking ahead, Ethereum prices could benefit from underlying resilience and potentially move higher in the coming weeks or months.

However, a break below the $2,000 level remains a risk if negative sentiment intensifies.

Ex-Blackstone staffers raised $25M for Valinor, a startup using smart contracts to move private credit workflows on-chain and lend first to crypto firms.

Valinor, an on-chain private credit startup co-founded by former Blackstone employees, has raised $25 million in seed funding to move the mechanics of private lending onto public blockchains. Fortune reports that the round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from the crypto arm of trading giant Susquehanna, venture firm Maven11 and the founder of bitcoin miner TeraWulf, which is currently pivoting part of its business toward artificial intelligence. The capital will go toward scaling Valinor’s loan book, broadening its customer base and hiring beyond its current six-person team.

In its current form, Valinor’s core pitch is straightforward: take the revolving credit lines and structured loans that dominate traditional private credit, and transplant the back-office process onto smart contracts. As Fortune explains, conventional lenders still lean heavily on “manual verification and spreadsheet collaboration” to manage covenants, drawdowns and repayments, a structure that is slow, opaque and operationally brittle. Valinor plans to replace those workflows with contracts that “automate routing of funds and condition-triggered execution,” essentially turning legal and operational terms into on-chain logic that runs by itself once parameters are met.

Both Valinor co-founders come out of traditional finance, having worked in banking and in Blackstone’s private credit division before moving into crypto in 2022. That background gives them familiarity with how large allocators think about risk, documentation and recovery—skills they now want to port into a blockchain-native environment. In its first phase, the company is focusing on lending to crypto companies rather than trying to underwrite the entire corporate universe at once, using the sector it knows best as a testing ground for its on-chain underwriting and servicing rails.

Fortune notes that Valinor “has completed lending for several fintech and crypto companies through blockchain technology,” suggesting that the platform is already live with real borrowers rather than just in pilot mode. Over time, the founders say they intend to introduce more of the loan lifecycle—origination, servicing, covenant monitoring—onto the chain, with the goal of improving efficiency and transparency for both lenders and borrowers. That aligns with a broader tokenization and real-world-asset push in credit markets, where other projects have started to bring trade finance, consumer loans and SME receivables on-chain under regulated structures.

The timing of Valinor’s raise underscores how quickly private credit has become a focal point for both traditional funds and crypto-native investors. In earlier crypto.news coverage of real-world-assets, asset managers described private credit as one of the most promising use cases for blockchain rails, precisely because of its fragmented data and heavy operational burden. A separate crypto.news story on tokenization highlighted how on-chain structures can give lenders near real-time visibility into collateral and payment flows, a sharp contrast with quarterly PDF reports and email chains. Another crypto.news story on institutional DeFi noted that some of the most active experiments now pair off-chain underwriting with on-chain execution, a model Valinor appears to be embracing.

For now, the startup’s immediate challenge is execution: proving that smart contracts can handle the messy edge-cases of private credit as reliably as seasoned back offices, and convincing conservative allocators that on-chain rails reduce, rather than add, operational risk. If it can do that at scale, the $25 million seed round led by Castle Island may look less like a niche crypto bet and more like an early stake in a new operating system for private lending.

More than 40 Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives sent a letter to a federal regulator and to ethics officials to ask them to warn government officials that insider trading in derivatives is illegal and that bets they make on prediction markets firms like Polymarket and Kalshi qualify under that category.

The ranking Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee (Senator Elizabeth Warren) and Senate Agriculture Committee (Cory Booker) joined dozens of their colleagues in asking Chairman Mike Selig, chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the leaders of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to “circulate executive branch-wide guidance explaining that federal employees must refrain from insider trading in prediction markets.”

The request was spurred by the eruption of suspicious reports that recent event contracts on government or military action seemed to draw bets from people with special insight into the outcomes, leading many to believe that government officials — or people associated with them — may have made such bets. U.S. derivatives laws state the illegality of government officials making trades based on non-public information they got on the job. Since the CFTC has declared the contracts at such firms are regulated derivatives, the ban should hold true, the lawmakers contended.

“We ask that the CFTC and OGE issue guidance reminding federal employees of their existing legal obligation to refrain from using their insider governmental information to profit from prediction market trades,” said the letter, dated March 29

The instances of potential insider trading outlined in the letter included contracts on military actions in Venezuela and Iran, the length of a speech from President Donald Trump’s press secretary and the firing of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The letter was also signed by the top Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee, Representative Angie Craig, and the House Financial Services Committee, Representative Maxine Waters. The agriculture panels in both chambers are the ones that directly oversee the CFTC.

Selig’s CFTC has been working on a new set of policies to govern the prediction markets. Those businesses are closely related to the crypto industry, which is a current focus of many of the lawmakers on this letter, who are also working on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act that’s been hung up in the Senate.

Also on Monday, news emerged that federal prosecutors reportedly spoke to prediction market firms about whether certain instances could trigger insider-trading cases.

The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a rule that would make it easier for 401(k) plans to include alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies, private equity and real estate.

The proposal is in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order, released in August, which directed the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to facilitate expanded access to alternative assets in 401(k)s.

“This proposed rule will show how plans can consider products that better reflect the investment landscape as it exists today,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement.

If adopted, the rule would mark a shift in how retirement plans are built. For years, most 401(k)s have focused on stocks and bonds. The new approach would allow plan providers to add a broader mix of assets, including digital tokens and private-market funds that are not traded on public exchanges.

The move builds on earlier changes. Last May, the Labor Department rescinded prior guidance that urged fiduciaries to exercise “extreme care” before adding crypto to retirement plans. Trump’s executive order went further, calling for digital assets to be treated on par with other investment options.

Still, the proposal has drawn criticism from some lawmakers and financial advisors.

“As cracks emerge in the private credit market, private equity returns fall to 16-year lows, and crypto keeps tumbling, President Trump has decided now is the time to stick all of these risky assets into Americans’ 401(k)s,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement. She warned the rule could expose workers to losses while benefiting large financial firms.

The stakes for crypto could be large. U.S. 401(k) plans hold trillions of dollars in retirement savings, and even a small shift into digital assets could send new capital into the market. If a large plan with tens of thousands of workers were to allocate just 1% of its portfolio to bitcoin, that would translate into millions of dollars flowing into crypto funds or tokens.