TLDR:

• Pendle’s TN Lee represented DeFi alongside Wall Street giants at Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister meeting in New York.
  
• Vietnam is building sandbox models for both permissioned and permissionless tokenized assets to attract global capital.
  
• Tokenized bonds, ETFs, and private credit were central to discussions about Vietnam’s emerging financial infrastructure.
  
• Pendle’s inclusion signals DeFi protocols now hold a credible seat at the highest institutional financial policy tables.

Pendle joined some of Wall Street’s most powerful institutions to shape Vietnam’s financial future. TN Lee represented the protocol in New York alongside Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Anchorage Digital.

The delegation met with Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister to discuss the country’s ambitions for an International Financial Center. The meeting positioned Pendle as a credible voice for decentralized finance at the highest institutional levels.

Wall Street and DeFi Unite Around Vietnam’s Tokenization Potential

Pendle’s inclusion in the New York delegation alongside Wall Street’s biggest names was far from accidental. Vietnam’s leadership deliberately assembled a group spanning both traditional finance and emerging digital asset sectors.

The goal was to build a comprehensive case for Vietnam as a next-generation financial hub. That mix of institutions signals a broad and serious commitment to the country’s financial development.

TN Lee spoke directly to Vietnam’s potential as a market for tokenized bonds, ETFs, and private credit. As noted by @pendle_fi, Lee also made a strong case for the depth of talent Vietnam has to offer.

These points landed before an audience of institutional heavyweights rarely found in the same room as DeFi protocols. The moment reflected how significantly the tokenization conversation has shifted within mainstream finance.

Vietnam’s government is actively constructing the regulatory infrastructure to match its ambitions. Sandbox models covering both permissioned and permissionless assets are currently on the table.

That dual approach reflects a measured yet forward-thinking posture toward digital financial markets. Wall Street institutions present in the room clearly responded to this structured regulatory direction.

The meeting also reinforced that Vietnam is not simply watching the tokenization trend from a distance. Its leadership is making deliberate and targeted moves to attract global financial partners.

Bringing together Deutsche Bank, BlackRock, and Pendle under one policy conversation shows the breadth of that strategy. Each institution brings a different layer to what Vietnam is trying to build.

Pendle Positions Itself as DeFi’s Voice in Institutional Finance Discussions

Pendle’s seat at the table alongside Wall Street giants marked a turning point for DeFi’s role in formal financial policy. Traditional institutions have long dominated these high-level government discussions, without representation from blockchain.

That dynamic shifted visibly in New York when TN Lee addressed Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister directly. It established Pendle not just as a participant but as an advocate for the entire DeFi sector.

According to @pendle_fi, the protocol views Vietnam’s brightest days in decentralized finance as still ahead. That long-term perspective aligns with how Wall Street institutions typically approach emerging market opportunities.

Pendle is not entering Vietnam for short-term positioning but for sustained strategic involvement. This approach mirrors the patient capital mindset that major financial institutions bring to frontier markets.

Vietnam’s talent base emerged as a recurring point throughout the delegation’s discussions in New York. Skilled professionals across blockchain, finance, and technology are already driving adoption within the country.

That human capital argument carries significant weight with institutions assessing long-term market viability. Wall Street partners look beyond regulation to the people who will ultimately build and operate these systems.

Moving forward, the sandbox frameworks Vietnam develops will determine how quickly tokenized products reach the market. Pendle is already embedded in that process as an early and active participant.

Its presence alongside Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, and Anchorage Digital has set a clear precedent. DeFi protocols can and will play a role in shaping the financial infrastructure of tomorrow’s emerging markets.

TLDR:

• Linea’s shift to RISC-V reduces instruction complexity from EVM’s full opcode set to roughly 40 instructions.
  
• Every Ethereum hard fork previously forced complete rewrites of Linea’s ZK constraint modules under the old system.
  
• RISC-V enables Type-1 Ethereum compatibility automatically through standard compiler tooling, replacing manual constraint work.
  
• Linea retains zkC, Vortex, and Arcane in the new stack, preserving years of cryptographic research and production experience.

Linea, the Ethereum Layer 2 network developed by ConsenSys, is transitioning from direct EVM arithmetization to a RISC-V-based proving architecture.

The team spent three years building one of the most rigorous ZK proving systems in production. That work produced a 1,000-page specification that became an ecosystem reference.

However, the approach created maintenance challenges that slowed progress. The move to RISC-V marks a strategic reset focused on performance, modularity, and Ethereum alignment.

A Simpler Instruction Set Changes Everything

The EVM operates with a complex, dynamic state model that is difficult to translate into mathematical constraints. RISC-V, by contrast, offers approximately 40 instructions and 32 registers.

That simplicity makes traces narrower and allows the prover to start working on proof chunks immediately. The performance gains are structural, not incremental.

Every Ethereum hard fork previously required complete rewrites of Linea’s constraint modules. That maintenance burden consumed significant research capacity.

The team was managing complexity instead of advancing cryptographic performance. Switching to RISC-V removes that cycle entirely.

Type-1 Ethereum compatibility was another major obstacle under the old architecture. Achieving it required implementing Keccak, RLP, and the Merkle Patricia Trie manually inside constraints.

With RISC-V, a standard EVM client compiles directly to a RISC-V binary, and the compiler handles compatibility automatically.

Linea’s cryptographic researcher Alexandre Belling presented the transition at the eth_proofs conference. As Linea posted on X, the team is moving toward “true modularity,” where every layer can be independently benchmarked, audited, or replaced. That was not achievable with the tightly coupled system previously in use.

The Ethereum Foundation has also committed to RISC-V as part of its proving layer roadmap. Linea cited this as a deciding factor. Continuing on the previous path would have meant diverging from Ethereum’s long-term technical direction.

What Carries Forward Into the New Stack

Linea is not discarding years of work. The team’s constraint-native language, zkC, will be used to write the RISC-V virtual machine. Vortex and Arcane, which handle proving and aggregation, are architecture-independent and transfer directly.

Formal verification is being built into the new system from the start. Constraints are being designed for export to tools like Lean. That approach makes the stack auditable by a much wider audience than before.

Linea also retains full-stack ownership across its infrastructure. That includes the Besu execution client, the Maru consensus layer, the ZK prover, and the gateway. No critical third-party dependencies exist in the architecture.

As Linea noted in a follow-up post on X, direct EVM arithmetization was “difficult to audit without deep cryptographic expertise.”

RISC-V is widely taught, well documented, and supported by a growing developer ecosystem. The shift makes the proving stack accessible beyond Linea’s internal team.

The transition positions Linea as an early mover in a space where the broader Ethereum ecosystem is now converging.

Years of production proving experience now apply to a simpler, faster architecture. The team has indicated more technical details will follow in the coming weeks.

Developers from Gnosis and Zisk, with backing from the Ethereum Foundation, have proposed a new framework aimed at unifying Ethereum’s fragmented layer-2 ecosystem by enabling rollups to interact seamlessly with each other and the mainnet in a single transaction.

According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the proposed “Ethereum Economic Zone” (EEZ) would allow smart contracts on different rollups to execute synchronously across networks without relying on bridges.

The initiative targets a key trade-off in Ethereum’s scaling strategy, where dozens of layer-2 networks have improved throughput but split liquidity, infrastructure and user activity across separate environments.

If implemented, the framework would let applications share infrastructure across rollups while settling back to Ethereum, reducing duplication and the need for cross-chain transfers.

The project is being developed together with Ethereum researchers and industry participants, with early contributors including infrastructure providers and DeFi protocols exploring a shared standard for interoperable rollups.