Stablecoins are increasingly showing up at the heart of tokenized finance, not just as short-term trading tools. In a report released by Binance Research, stablecoin-settled perpetual contracts tied to traditional financial assets generated more than $1.1 trillion in trading volume in the first half of 2026—highlighting how on-chain dollar instruments are being used to mirror parts of TradFi through crypto.

Binance Research also points to a broader shift in behavior among exchange users: stablecoins are becoming long-term portfolio holdings rather than assets held only for brief trading windows. That dual role—derivatives settlement and everyday value storage—helps explain why stablecoin activity is rising alongside the market’s size.

Key takeaways

• Binance Research reports stablecoin-settled TradFi-linked perpetual contracts topped $1.1 trillion in first-half 2026 volume.
• Those TradFi perpetuals accounted for roughly 11% of all crypto perpetual trading volume in the first five months of 2026, per Binance Research.
• Binance data cited in the report shows stablecoins are moving from “temporary” trading assets toward longer-term holdings (with stablecoin-heavy portfolios becoming far more common).
• Stablecoin usage for cross-border transfers is accelerating in Latin America, where transfer-user share on Binance rose to 38% in 2026 from 17% in 2025.
• Overall stablecoin market capitalization is around $311 billion, with payment-related activity supported by recent record transaction volumes tracked by Visa’s Allium dashboard.

Derivatives settlement moves closer to TradFi

One of the clearest signals from Binance Research is that stablecoins are increasingly being used as settlement rails for perpetual contracts linked to traditional financial assets. These “TradFi perpetuals” are designed to give traders exposure to assets familiar from conventional markets, while using crypto infrastructure and stablecoin settlement.

According to Binance Research, this segment expanded to roughly 11% of total crypto perpetual trading volume across the first five months of 2026. The first-half 2026 figure—over $1.1 trillion in stablecoin-settled TradFi perpetual trading—suggests the category is no longer a niche experiment and has become a meaningful slice of derivatives activity.

The practical implication for traders and market makers is that stablecoins are becoming less optional in derivatives routing. Instead of merely being a quote asset or temporary buffer, they are increasingly embedded in how positions are effectively settled and maintained.

Stablecoins shift from trading fuel to portfolio core

Binance Research argues the stablecoin story is not only about derivatives. It says stablecoins are increasingly used as longer-term stores of value, with measurable changes in how exchange users allocate their holdings.

The report states that 30% of Binance exchange users now hold more than half of their portfolios in stablecoins, up from 4% in 2020. This is a large behavioral change, suggesting that many participants are treating stablecoins as a default “base” for account value—whether for risk management, quick deployment into trades, or keeping capital positioned on-chain without exposure to higher volatility assets.

For investors and traders, the takeaway is that stablecoins may be playing an increasingly structural role in liquidity and capital allocation. If more participants keep a stablecoin-heavy allocation, it can affect how quickly liquidity appears across markets and how sensitive exchange order books are to broader market swings.

Payments momentum and record transaction volumes

Beyond exchange behavior and derivatives, the report frames stablecoins as part of a wider payment and settlement ecosystem. DefiLlama data cited in the article shows global stablecoin market capitalization is roughly $311 billion, up from about $254 billion a year earlier.

Visa’s Allium-powered stablecoin dashboard adds another layer to the activity picture. According to Visa’s dashboard figures referenced in the article, adjusted stablecoin volume reached a record $1.79 trillion in June—exceeding the previous high set in February. The combination of a higher market cap and stronger transaction activity points to demand that is not limited to speculative trading.

For readers, this matters because stablecoin growth that is supported by transaction throughput is generally more resilient than growth driven solely by short-lived leverage cycles. When payment rails and settlement demand rise, stablecoins can become more tightly linked to real usage patterns.

Latin America becomes a focal point for transfer adoption

Binance Research also highlights a geographic shift in stablecoin usage for cross-border payments, with Latin America standing out. The report says the region’s share of Binance stablecoin transfer users more than doubled to 38% in 2026 from 17% in 2025, attributing the change to growing demand for faster and lower-cost international transfers.

The report’s findings align with broader marketplace signals. A report highlighted in the article from Bitso—an exchange based in Mexico City—found that US dollar-pegged stablecoins represented 40% of crypto asset purchases on its platform in 2025. That share surpassed Bitcoin’s 18% for the first time, suggesting stablecoins are increasingly the gateway asset for purchases and on-chain value conversion in the region.

Industry participants have also framed stablecoin payments as an opportunity set beyond the traditional US-to-Mexico remittance corridor. The article notes that in May, Claudia Wang, a former Bybit executive, estimated remittance corridors outside the US-to-Mexico market represent a $112 billion opportunity for stablecoin issuers.

Traditional players appear to be moving in parallel. In May, Western Union launched its USDPT stablecoin on the Solana network for cross-border payments. Later, MoneyGram launched its MGUSD stablecoin on the Stellar network for remittances using its consumer app, expanding the set of on-chain rails available to customers.

Taken together, these developments reinforce the idea that stablecoins are increasingly treated as payments infrastructure, not just speculative tokens. As adoption concentrates in regions with strong remittance demand, competitive pressure may shift toward reliability, coverage, fee efficiency, and user onboarding—areas where crypto-native rails can compete directly with legacy systems.

Looking ahead, investors and builders should watch whether stablecoin usage keeps deepening beyond trading venues—especially in high-throughput payment corridors like Latin America—and whether derivatives growth continues at a similar pace as market structure evolves. The key open question is how quickly stablecoin-settled TradFi perpetuals and real-world transfer flows can reinforce each other in sustained volume.

Crypto markets could benefit from increased liquidity if the US central bank steps in to support the $75 trillion equity market in a bear market, as it is “too big and too important to fail,” according to analysts.

The US equity market has grown by 68% over the past five years and has added roughly $6 trillion in market value so far this year. However, analysts and experts, such as goldbug Peter Schiff, have warned that years of rapid growth could be setting up the market for a major correction.

Such a correction could see the Fed “break decades of precedent” and buy equity ETFs to support the stock market, Balchunas said on Tuesday, while other analysts said the resulting move to increase liquidity could set up an environment for cryptocurrencies to benefit.

“Once the Fed steps in, rate cuts, balance-sheet expansion, even targeted ETF purchases, crypto has historically entered a medium-to-long-term uptrend, similar to what we saw in 2021, as risk appetite returns and capital rotates back into high-beta assets,” Bitget Wallet chief operating officer Alvin Kan told Cointelegraph.

Stocks deeply embedded in American households

Balchunas said that 58% of Americans own stocks, so “the political pressure to keep stocks out of a prolonged bear market is going to be very powerful.”

In 2020, the Fed bought corporate bond ETFs during COVID-19 to act as a “buyer of last resort” to restore liquidity to frozen credit markets. The unprecedented move saw it acquire $8.7 billion worth of ETFs, which helped to limit economic damage from the pandemic.

“I think there’s a good chance the Fed will buy equity ETFs in the next major downturn to support [the] market, and it will be common practice going forward,” said Balchunas.

Related: Crypto turns ‘contrarian bet’ as AI stocks draw investor attention: Bitwise

Central banks in China and Japan currently use indirect equity ETF purchases via authorized intermediaries with public funds to boost liquidity, and America could follow, he added.

“This is just one byproduct of the ‘Nothing Stops This Train’ monetary supply explosion and debt extravaganza sweeping the world, but especially in the US, which at this point feels irreversible.”

US stock market cap growth over the past five years, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index. Source: Yahoo Finance

Crypto remains tied to dollar liquidity

HashKey Group senior researcher Tim Sun said that a prolonged, severe bear market “would do far more than just erode investor wealth — it would directly shock consumer spending, compromise pension stability, stall corporate credit expansion, and dent tax revenues.”

While cryptocurrencies will not receive direct backing from the central bank, “their macro pricing remains fundamentally tied to US dollar liquidity, real interest rates, and equity market risk sentiment,” Sun added. 

“Once market participants are convinced that a policy floor effectively underpins risk assets, the risk premium demanded for highly volatile assets will compress. As a result, Bitcoin and mainstream crypto assets are poised to benefit significantly from improving liquidity expectations and a broader revival in risk appetite.”

Bitcoin has underperformed US stock markets this year. Source: Google Finance

Strong incentive to backstop major drawdowns

“This structural backstop supports a more resilient macro backdrop, and that’s ultimately bullish for crypto’s role as a growth and diversification asset in a world of expanding global liquidity,” Kan said. 

Meanwhile, Jeff Mei, the operating chief of BTSE, told Cointelegraph that in the event of a downturn, “it’s difficult to see the Fed printing more money to stimulate it, given that inflation is still high. However, there are other tools they can deploy to take action.”

Features: The biggest blockchain upgrades still to come in 2026

Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR), founded by Blockstream CEO Adam Back, is seeking to renegotiate its proposed merger with Cantor Equity Partners I, a SPAC backed by Cantor Fitzgerald. In an announcement released Wednesday, BSTR and Cantor Equity Partners I said they have scrapped the original deal terms and will move into new negotiations, citing the need for provisions that “better reflected market conditions.”

The change arrives as investors watch SPAC-backed crypto-adjacent companies for signs of whether tokenization and Bitcoin-treasury themes can still clear public-market hurdles. A shareholder meeting scheduled for Friday to vote on the merger and related public offering has been postponed indefinitely, with the companies saying they will share further details later.

Key takeaways

• BSTR and Cantor Equity Partners I have terminated the original 2025 merger terms and will negotiate a revised agreement.
• The planned shareholder vote on the SPAC merger and public offering has been postponed indefinitely.
• BSTR’s initial structure included a contribution of more than 30,000 BTC plus $1.5 billion in PIPE financing.
• The U.S. SEC recognized the registration statement for the original deal in June, but the offering timeline has now stalled.
• The broader SPAC backdrop is under pressure after a Cantor-associated tokenization deal by Securitize began trading last week.

Merger terms scrapped, vote delayed indefinitely

According to the Wednesday update, BSTR and Cantor Equity Partners I decided to drop the original terms of their proposed business combination and negotiate a new set of provisions. The companies did not provide specifics on what would change, but they said the goal is to align the agreement more closely with current market conditions.

Because the shareholder meeting originally scheduled for Friday has been postponed indefinitely, the deal’s next steps are now uncertain. Both sides indicated they would provide additional information “in due course,” leaving investors to wait for details on the revised structure, timing, and any updated financing or equity economics.

What the original BSTR-Cantor framework included

The initial proposal contemplated a larger public-market launch for BSTR built around a Bitcoin treasury strategy. In the original deal, BSTR was set to contribute more than 30,000 Bitcoin (BTC) and $1.5 billion in PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) financing.

The SEC’s role was a key marker for progress: the regulator recognized the registration statement connected to the merger agreement in June. That recognition is often viewed by deal participants as an important step toward executing a SPAC-linked offering, which contributed to expectations that a public listing would follow soon after.

Now, with the shareholder vote delayed and the parties resetting negotiations, the original timeline appears to have been overtaken by the same “market conditions” rationale cited in the announcement.

SPAC flexibility and the shifting viability of “Bitcoin treasury” themes

While the BSTR update explains the immediate reason for renegotiation, the wider context is the scrutiny that Cantor SPAC structures have faced from industry observers.

Earlier coverage cited by Institutional Investor described Cantor as having “a lot of wiggle room” in SPAC transactions, moving beyond a narrow focus on Bitcoin treasury vehicles such as BSTR and Twenty One Capital. The report referenced Twenty One Capital’s completion of a $3.6 billion merger deal with Cantor in 2025, suggesting that the Cantor-backed ecosystem had been experimenting with broader or more flexible deal themes.

According to the same Institutional Investor piece, SPACInsider founder and CEO Kristi Marvin said that it was unclear whether a Bitcoin treasury-focused SPAC approach would remain attractive in the near term—adding that the outlook might look different once the next few months play out.

That tension helps frame what BSTR is now navigating: if market appetite for specific SPAC-linked crypto strategies has cooled or become more selective, even SEC-acknowledged registration steps may not be enough to guarantee deal execution on schedule.

Securitize’s Cantor-linked debut highlights the stakes for the category

The uncertainty around BSTR’s merger comes after Securitize, a tokenization company, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange following a Cantor-related SPAC transaction.

Cointelegraph previously reported that Securitize received SEC approval for its SPAC deal with Cantor Equity Partners II in June and began trading on the NYSE about a week after shareholders signed off. Cointelegraph also noted that the shares started trading under the ticker SECZ.

In the days immediately following the listing, the price action underscored how quickly sentiment can shift. The article says the shares traded at $7.42 apiece on Wednesday, roughly 40% below their July 2 closing price of $12.30.

Taken together, Securitize’s early market performance may not directly determine BSTR’s outcome, but it illustrates the challenge of raising capital and maintaining investor confidence in public-market vehicles tied to digital asset infrastructure themes.

What investors should watch next

For BSTR and Cantor Equity Partners I, the next milestone will be the details of the revised merger terms—especially how the companies plan to rework financing and equity economics after scrapping the original agreement. Until a new shareholder process and timeline are established, investors will likely focus on whether the parties can rebuild deal certainty without losing market momentum.

Key Highlights

• SpaceXAI and Cursor are set to unveil their first collaborative AI model, potentially as early as Wednesday, according to The Information
• The release was postponed earlier in the week to enhance performance and efficiency
• The new model aims to rival OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8
• This development precedes SpaceX’s proposed $60 billion all-stock purchase of Anysphere, Cursor’s parent company
• SpaceX (SPCX) became part of the Nasdaq-100 on Tuesday, marking a swift rise following its June 12 public offering, with shares trading near $151

SpaceXAI and Cursor are on the verge of unveiling their first collaborative artificial intelligence model, with the rollout potentially happening as early as Wednesday, based on reporting from The Information that referenced an internal company memo.

The two organizations initially targeted an earlier release this week but decided to delay the launch to refine the model’s performance and operational efficiency.

SPCX shares were hovering around $151 during early Wednesday market activity, reflecting an approximately 1.4% increase.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SPCX

The upcoming model has been engineered for rapid information processing. Based on available reports, it’s anticipated to perform competitively in select benchmarks against Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

Officials from SpaceXAI and Cursor have not publicly confirmed the release timeline or disclosed comprehensive details about the model’s features. Reuters indicated it was unable to independently corroborate the information. Cursor representatives declined to provide commentary, while SpaceXAI did not respond to inquiries.

Release Timing Precedes Acquisition Completion

The model’s introduction is happening before SpaceX finalizes its acquisition of Anysphere, the organization that created Cursor. SpaceX revealed the all-stock transaction in June, placing Anysphere’s valuation at $60 billion.

The deal is projected to conclude during Q3 2026. For SpaceXAI, the acquisition strengthens its position in AI-powered coding solutions. For Cursor, it addresses a persistent challenge: insufficient computational resources.

AI-assisted coding represents one of the industry’s most rapidly expanding sectors, offering substantial revenue opportunities that have drawn intense competition from well-capitalized competitors.

This collaborative model marks the first significant product emerging from their partnership, arriving even before the transaction’s official completion.

It’s important to emphasize that this information stems from an unverified internal memo. Neither organization has issued official confirmation.

SPCX Achieves Nasdaq-100 Status

SpaceX reached another significant benchmark on Tuesday with SPCX’s addition to the Nasdaq-100 index, occurring less than 30 days after its June 12 market debut.

The rapid inclusion was facilitated by updated Nasdaq regulations that permit recently public companies to qualify for prominent indexes faster than previous standards allowed.

SPCX has experienced considerable price volatility since its initial public offering. Shares currently trade around $151, with Wall Street analysts monitored by TipRanks establishing an average 3-month price objective of $218.08.

Among 28 analysts following the stock, 22 assign it a Buy rating, 5 recommend Hold, and 1 suggests Sell — forming a Strong Buy consensus.

Inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 ensures SPCX will be incorporated into numerous index-tracking investment vehicles, expanding its exposure to institutional capital.

SpaceX’s accelerated progression from IPO to Nasdaq-100 membership positions it among the fastest companies to achieve this milestone under the exchange’s modernized listing criteria.

Tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) is advancing faster than many investors expected, but a major constraint remains: DeFi access and infrastructure. A recent research note by Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, argues that on-chain finance could rapidly absorb tokenized products—provided DeFi ecosystems can actually integrate them.

Kendrick estimates that only about 3% of stablecoins and 10% of tokenized real-world assets are currently used in DeFi. He projects that these shares could rise to 30% by 2030. That would represent a dramatic shift in how tokenized assets flow through decentralized markets, according to the note—though the pace will likely hinge on regulatory clarity and, just as importantly, practical trading and custody plumbing.

Key takeaways

• Standard Chartered expects DeFi’s use of tokenized assets to expand sharply, with Kendrick projecting 30% usage by 2030.
• Tokenized Treasuries remain the largest RWA on-chain category by distributed value, around $15 billion, supported by yield-bearing demand.
• Tokenized private credit is growing but still far smaller than Treasuries, at roughly $6.2 billion across major issuer platforms.
• Tokenized stocks are still a small share overall, yet growth is accelerating alongside broader market-structure pilots.
• Tokenized commodities have shown resilience during market closures, with on-chain perpetuals seeing sharply higher weekend volumes in early 2026.

Why DeFi adoption could be the real bottleneck

Tokenization is not the same as decentralized utility. Kendrick’s research frames the current gap: stablecoins and RWAs do exist on-chain, but only a limited portion is deployed inside DeFi strategies. The difference matters because DeFi liquidity, lending, hedging, and derivative markets typically require robust token standards, reliable custody, and operational integrations with trading venues.

The research note’s optimistic outlook for DeFi usage rests on a broader expansion in tokenized markets. According to data compiled by RWA.xyz, tokenized real-world assets reached $32.22 billion in distributed on-chain value by the end of June, nearly three times the $11.8 billion reported a year earlier. When stablecoins are included—understood here as tokenized representations of fiat—the wider tokenized market stands above $328.8 billion, per the same dataset.

RWA.xyz also reports that RWA asset holders grew to 937,928, up 13% in a single month—an indicator that the ownership layer is widening even if DeFi penetration is not yet where it could be.

Treasuries lead on-chain: yield, familiarity, and expanding access

Within RWAs, US Treasury instruments are currently the standout. Tokenized Treasuries are the largest category by on-chain value at about $15 billion. The appeal is straightforward: investors get familiar assets, low perceived risk, and yield—capabilities that stablecoins do not provide on their own.

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, launched in March 2024, reached over $2.9 billion in total asset value by June 2025, and it was at $2.23 billion at the time of reporting. The article notes that some funds declined as capital was reallocated, reflecting competition among platforms and shifting allocations rather than a universal withdrawal.

Importantly for DeFi, tokenized funds are beginning to connect to decentralized trading venues. In February 2026, Uniswap Labs and Securitize announced that BUIDL shares were available for trade on UniswapX. The integration is described as restricted—meaning access is not fully open-ended—but it still signals a step toward bringing regulated, institutional-grade tokenized assets into DeFi-style execution.

Elsewhere, Franklin Templeton’s OnChain US Government Money Fund is represented by the BENJI token, which the article says has reached $2.44 billion. It runs across multiple networks, including Avalanche and Arbitrum as well as others listed in the report.

Beyond these flagship products, the piece highlights several additional Treasury offerings including Circle’s USYC (about $3.1 billion), Ondo’s tokenized suite (around $3.7 billion), and WisdomTree’s WTGXX (about $764 million). Together, these illustrate that Treasuries are not just the largest category by distributed value—they’re also where momentum is most visible across platforms.

Private credit and tokenized credit: liquidity where lockups used to dominate

Private credit—loans issued, negotiated, and held by non-bank institutions—has emerged as another growth lane within RWAs. The rationale overlaps with Treasuries but with a different incentive: private credit can offer higher yields than government debt, while tokenization can also address a long-standing pain point. Traditional private credit is often characterized by extended capital lockups; tokenization can make positions more transferable, usable as collateral, and redeemable.

According to RWA.xyz data cited in the article, the largest tokenized private credit platforms are Maple Finance and Stokr, each holding about a 22% market share. The total value of tokenized private credit is reported at approximately $6.2 billion—small relative to Treasuries, but meaningful for a sector that historically lacked liquid secondary markets.

Stocks and ETFs: pilots begin, but scale is still early

Tokenized stocks remain a fraction of the broader RWA ecosystem. RWA.xyz data referenced in the article places tokenized stocks at about $2.19 billion, with growth of nearly 50% in the previous 30 days at the time of writing.

The next potential step-change is market-structure modernization. In May, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced plans to pilot tokenized securities trading. DTCC clears and settles almost all US stock trades and custodies over $114 trillion in securities, according to the report. The pilots are described as beginning in the current month, with a full commercial launch considered possible by October. The pilot assets include Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs, and US Treasuries, with participation listed across a wide range of financial firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Circle, Ondo Finance, and Ripple Prime.

In the tokenized equities space specifically, the article says Ondo Finance holds roughly 60% of the tokenized equity market through its Global Markets platform. It also points to partnerships Ondo has made to expand tokenization coverage, including a March 2026 partnership with Franklin Templeton to tokenize five ETFs and an April deal with Broadridge Financial Solutions aimed at enabling token holders to submit voting preferences for underlying shares.

Commodities, real resilience: trading around clock gaps

Tokenized commodities have delivered one of the clearest “use it or lose it” demonstrations of why on-chain markets can matter in real time. While tokenized gold and other commodities have existed for years, 2026 introduced a more stressful test.

The article describes a period of heightened US–Iran tensions when traditional markets faced closures, while tokenized oil and gold markets remained available. After US and Israel attacks on Iran earlier in the year, trading desks reportedly turned to on-chain perpetual futures platforms as a pricing venue during off-hours when conventional markets were not operating.

Weekend volumes on on-chain commodity perpetuals are described as increasing ninefold since the beginning of 2026, and commodity perpetuals now represent more than 67% of builder-deployed contracts on DEXs, according to the piece. While volumes have pulled back from March—when tokenized commodities reached $5.8 billion—the article says current figures are about $4.7 billion, with gold still comprising the majority.

On-chain and traditional markets have also started to move together more reliably. The article notes that the correlation between tokenized gold volumes and traditional gold markets crossed a 0.70 threshold in Q1 2026, suggesting that the on-chain commodity market is maturing rather than trading in isolation.

Real estate: still small, but approvals in regulated markets are changing the outlook

Real estate tokenization has historically been more promise than large-scale reality. As a slice of the RWA pie, the article places real estate at about $202.7 million in assets currently, while arguing that expansion could accelerate as tokenized property enters major regulated markets.

Dubai’s Land Department began the second phase of its real estate tokenization project in February 2026, opening tokenized property units for resale. In the same quarter, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission approved real estate tokenization products from Derlin Holdings, the article states.

For investors, the potential benefit is fractional exposure. The token represents a share of a building, which can translate into proportional rents and, crucially, the ability to trade positions without waiting for a property sale—though the long-term impact will depend on liquidity and secondary-market depth.

Growth is real—but RWAs are still dwarfed by traditional markets

Despite rapid progress, tokenized RWAs remain early-stage by most benchmarks. Tokenized Treasury products, though the largest category at nearly $15 billion, are still far smaller than the traditional US Treasury market, estimated at around $30 trillion by SIFMA research referenced in the article. Tokenized stocks are also described as a rounding error compared with the DTCC’s $114 trillion in securities under custody.

Liquidity is another limiting factor. The article points to thin secondary trading and long holding periods across many RWA segments—conditions that can frustrate DeFi strategies that rely on consistent market access and tight spreads.

Regulation may determine how quickly these frictions ease. In March, the SEC reportedly approved a Nasdaq proposal allowing certain stocks to be traded and settled via tokens, according to Reuters coverage cited in the article. Observers described in the same reporting expect broader approval ahead, with SEC Chair Paul Atkins potentially supporting RWAs through an “innovation exemption.” Either way, the article frames the remaining question as timing: not whether tokenization will expand, but how fast infrastructure and oversight can keep up.

For investors and builders, the next watch items are clear: whether integrations like DeFi-friendly token trading of regulated funds scale beyond restricted access, and whether regulatory pilots for tokenized securities translate into sustainable liquidity. If DeFi penetration rises as Kendrick expects, it will likely be because tokenization finally meets the operational needs of on-chain markets—not just because RWAs exist.

Berachain is preparing a hard fork that will replace its dual-token incentive model with one centered on its main BERA token.

Set for Wednesday at 4 pm UTC, the hard fork will end Bera Governance Token (BGT) emissions and shift the network’s incentive system to Wrapped BERA (WBERA), the Berachain Foundation announced in a Tuesday X post.

Following the upgrade, the network will distribute fixed amounts of WBERA instead of BGT as block rewards. The change replaces Berachain’s previous dual-token model, which split the network’s functions between the transferable BERA token and the non-transferable governance token BGT.

Berachain said annual percentage rates (APR) could triple after the upgrade, though it warned yields may fluctuate during the first few days.

Berachain Foundation strives for a “simpler” token economy 

The Berachain Foundation said the upgrade replaces its BGT-based reward system with one centered on sWBERA, the staked version of WBERA, which it described as simpler and more sustainable.

Before the upgrade, users seeking higher yields had to navigate multiple reward mechanisms and liquid staking tokens tied to BGT.

The transition will occur in two stages. WBERA emissions began Tuesday, while Wednesday’s hard fork will halt BGT emissions.

Reward vaults and liquid staking incentives tied to BGT will be phased out in the days following the hard fork.

Related: Solana Foundation launches framework for protocol-level governance

BERA falls 7% ahead of hard fork as network activity remains muted

The BERA token fell 7% in the 24 hours to 8:34 am UTC, extending its decline over the past year to 88%, according to CoinMarketCap.

BERA/USD, 1-year chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Berachain’s total value locked (TVL) fell by $1.79 million, or 3%, over the same period. The network ranks 37th by TVL with $56 million locked, according to DefiLlama. Over the past 24 hours, Berachain generated $41 in chain fees and $3,359 in application revenue while distributing $14,816 in token incentives.

Magazine: Has Bitcoin bottomed for this cycle? Analysts say ‘not yet’

Flash loans let anyone borrow tens of millions of dollars with no collateral, no credit check, and no identity, on one condition: the loan must be repaid within the same transaction that created it. This guide explains how that is even possible, what flash loans are legitimately used for, how attackers weaponize them, and why the strangest loan in finance is also one of its most honest.

Imagine walking into a bank and asking to borrow $50 million. You have no collateral, no credit history, and you decline to give your name. In traditional finance the conversation ends there. In decentralized finance, the loan is approved instantly, at a fee of a few basis points, by a lending pool that has never heard of you and never will. The only condition is the strange one: you must pay the entire loan back before you leave the building, and if you cannot, it will be as if you never entered at all.

That is a flash loan, and it is one of the few financial primitives that genuinely could not exist before blockchains. Flash loans have funded some of the most elegant arbitrage trades in crypto and some of its most devastating exploits, including attacks that drained protocols of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a single block. They are cited in nearly every post-mortem of a DeFi disaster, which has given them a sinister reputation, and they are also used thousands of times a day for entirely mundane purposes that make markets more efficient.

This guide explains flash loans from the ground up: the property of blockchains that makes an uncollateralized loan safe for the lender, the mechanics of a flash loan transaction step by step, the four legitimate jobs flash loans do, a worked example of how an attack actually uses one, why the loan itself is almost never the vulnerability, what they cost and where they live, and the honest debate about whether DeFi would be better off without them.

The trick that makes it possible: atomicity

Everything about flash loans follows from one property of blockchain transactions called atomicity. A transaction on a network like Ethereum is all-or-nothing: either every operation inside it completes successfully, or the entire transaction fails and the chain’s state reverts to what it was before, as if the transaction had never been attempted. There is no such thing as a half-finished transaction. The word comes from the Greek atomos, indivisible, and it is the same guarantee that prevents a token transfer from debiting your wallet without crediting the recipient’s.

Now consider what atomicity does for a lender. In ordinary finance, a lender demands collateral because of time: between the moment money leaves the lender and the moment it returns, days or years pass in which the borrower can default, disappear, or go bankrupt. Collateral is a hostage against that passage of time. But what if the loan and its repayment happened inside a single atomic transaction? Then there is no passage of time in which anything can go wrong. The lending contract checks, at the end of the transaction, whether the borrowed amount plus fee has been returned. If it has, the transaction completes and everything inside it becomes permanent. If it has not, the entire transaction reverts, including the original lending step, and the pool’s money never actually left. The lender is not trusting the borrower; it is trusting mathematics. Default is not forbidden; it is impossible, because a defaulted flash loan is a transaction that never happened.

This is why flash loans need no collateral, no credit check, and no identity. All the machinery banks use to manage repayment risk exists because repayment is uncertain, and atomicity deletes the uncertainty. The trade-off is equally absolute: a flash loan cannot outlive its transaction. You cannot borrow via flash loan to buy something and repay next week. Whatever you intend to do with the money, borrowing it, using it, and repaying it, must all fit inside one transaction, which on Ethereum means inside roughly twelve seconds of block time and, more precisely, inside a single bundle of code execution.

Anatomy of a flash loan, step by step

A flash loan transaction is a small program the borrower writes and submits, and its skeleton is always the same five steps.

Step one, the request: the borrower’s smart contract calls a lending protocol, such as Aave, and requests a loan, say 10 million USDC. Step two, the transfer: the protocol sends the full amount to the borrower’s contract, optimistically, before any repayment. Step three, the payload: the borrower’s contract does whatever it came to do with the money, and this is the only step that varies; it might buy a token on one exchange and sell it on another, repay a loan on a second protocol, or swap collateral. Step four, the repayment: the borrower’s contract returns the 10 million USDC plus the fee, on Aave about 0.05%, so $5,000 on this loan, to the lending pool. Step five, the check: the protocol verifies the repayment landed; if yes, the transaction finalizes and the borrower keeps whatever profit the payload generated; if no, everything reverts and the borrower has lost only the network gas fee for the failed attempt.

Notice what the borrower risked: gas, typically a few dollars to a few hundred depending on complexity and congestion. Notice what the lender risked: nothing, by construction. And notice the skill that actually matters: writing the payload. Flash loans are permissionless, but they are not point-and-click for most purposes; using one means deploying a contract that orchestrates every step, which is why their users are overwhelmingly bots, developers, and MEV searchers, not casual traders, and why several services now sell no-code flash-loan tooling of wildly varying quality.

What flash loans are actually for

Four legitimate jobs account for the vast majority of flash-loan volume, and each exists because DeFi is a fragmented landscape of pools and protocols whose prices and terms drift apart.

The first is arbitrage. If ETH trades at $1,780 on one decentralized exchange and $1,790 on another, anyone who can buy on the first and sell on the second captures the spread, and the profit scales with size. Flash loans remove the capital barrier: a trader with $500 can borrow $5 million, execute both legs, repay, and keep the difference, minus fees and the slippage that large orders inevitably incur. This is the wholesome face of flash loans; arbitrageurs doing this thousands of times daily are the reason prices across DeFi venues stay closely aligned, an alignment everyone else gets for free.

The second is collateral swapping. Suppose you have a loan on a lending protocol backed by ETH and you want the collateral to be staked ETH instead, without closing the position. A flash loan lets you borrow enough to repay the loan, withdraw your ETH collateral, swap it, redeposit the new collateral, reborrow, and repay the flash loan, all atomically, converting a multi-step, risk-exposed process into one indivisible action.

The third is self-liquidation and refinancing. A borrower approaching liquidation can flash-borrow the repayment amount, close their own position, recover their collateral, sell a portion to repay the flash loan, and keep the remainder, escaping the liquidation penalty that a third-party liquidator would otherwise have taken. Similarly, debt can be moved from a protocol charging 8% to one charging 5% in a single transaction.

The fourth is liquidations themselves. The keeper bots that enforce solvency across DeFi lending, repaying underwater borrowers’ debts in exchange for their collateral at a discount, routinely fund those repayments with flash loans, which means the entire liquidation apparatus of decentralized lending runs substantially on borrowed-for-twelve-seconds money. Without flash loans, liquidations would depend on the working capital of a handful of well-funded firms; with them, anyone with a good bot can compete, which makes the system faster and more decentralized at once.

The dark side: how a flash-loan attack actually works

Flash loans became famous for the other thing they do, which is supply attack capital. The crucial point, the one every serious post-mortem makes and every headline obscures, is that the flash loan is almost never the vulnerability. It is the funding. The vulnerability is elsewhere, usually in how a protocol measures prices or counts votes, and the flash loan merely lets an attacker with pocket change exploit a flaw that would otherwise require a whale’s balance sheet.

Walk through the classic price-manipulation pattern. A lending protocol decides how much you can borrow by valuing your collateral, and suppose it values a token by checking the token’s spot price in one decentralized exchange pool. An attacker flash-borrows an enormous amount of one asset, dumps it into that pool, and momentarily distorts the price the protocol reads, making the attacker’s collateral appear far more valuable than it is. Against that inflated collateral, the attacker borrows heavily from the lending protocol, then reverses the pool trade, repays the flash loan, and walks away with the borrowed funds, all in one transaction. The protocol is left holding collateral worth a fraction of the debt against it. The flaw was the naive price oracle; the flash loan just made the flaw affordable to exploit.

The second classic pattern is governance. In 2022, an attacker used a flash loan to momentarily acquire a supermajority of Beanstalk protocol’s governance tokens, voted through a proposal sending the treasury to themselves, and repaid the loan, netting around $76 million from a protocol that allowed same-block voting. The defense, requiring tokens to be held or locked before voting power activates, is now standard, and the episode sits alongside slower-motion treasury raids in the genre of governance attacks this publication has anatomized, where the lesson is identical: if momentary token possession equals power, someone will rent the tokens for one block.

Cumulative losses to flash-loan-assisted exploits run well into the billions across DeFi’s history, with individual incidents ranging from six figures to the hundreds of millions. The defenses that matter are all oracle and logic hygiene: time-weighted average prices instead of spot readings, multiple independent price sources, borrowing caps, same-block action restrictions, and vote-locking. Protocols that do these things are not meaningfully threatened by flash loans; protocols that do not are exploitable by anyone patient enough to read their code, flash loans merely lower the capital requirement from millions to gas money.

A worked example, dollar by dollar

Abstractions hide the arithmetic, so walk through one realistic arbitrage from end to end.

Suppose a mid-cap token trades at $2.00 in a large Uniswap pool and $2.03 in a smaller pool on another venue, a 1.5% gap opened by a burst of one-sided buying. A searcher’s bot spots the spread and assembles a flash-loan transaction. Step one, it borrows 1,000,000 USDC from Aave, incurring a 0.05% fee obligation of $500. Step two, it buys the token in the cheap pool; a purchase that size moves the pool’s price, so the average fill is not $2.00 but roughly $2.006, price impact eating a slice of the edge, and the bot receives about 498,500 tokens. Step three, it sells those tokens into the expensive pool, where its own selling pushes the price down from $2.03, filling at an average around $2.022 for proceeds of roughly $1,008,000. Step four, it repays Aave 1,000,500 USDC. What remains, about $7,500, minus the gas fee, call it $150 for a complex transaction, and minus any priority fee paid to win the block position, perhaps a few thousand in a competitive auction, is profit, banked in twelve seconds with zero capital at risk beyond gas.

Now run the counterfactual that shows why atomicity matters. If, between the bot’s simulation and its execution, another searcher closed the gap first, step three returns less than the repayment requires, the final check fails, and the entire transaction reverts: no tokens bought, no loan outstanding, nothing lost but gas. The bot did not take a risk and lose; it took no risk and paid a small fee to discover that. Multiply this loop by thousands of bots and every venue pair in DeFi, and you have the invisible janitorial service that keeps a fragmented market’s prices coherent, funded entirely by the gaps it closes.

The same arithmetic explains why casual users rarely profit. The gross edge in the example was 1.5%; price impact took roughly a third of it, fees a fixed slice, and the priority auction, where competing bots bid away their expected profit to validators for first execution, takes most of the rest. Flash-loan arbitrage is a real business with real margins, and those margins have been competed down to the point where infrastructure, latency, and auction strategy decide who earns them.

Where flash loans came from

The idea is younger than it feels. The first named implementation arrived in 2018 with the Marble protocol, whose creator described it as a bank for the flash-loan age; Aave popularized the primitive at scale in early 2020, and within weeks the bZx incidents, a pair of exploits in February 2020 that used flash loans to manipulate thin markets for six-figure profits, introduced the wider world to the attack pattern and set the template for hundreds of imitations. The years since have run an arms race in miniature: attackers found protocols reading spot prices or counting same-block votes, protocols adopted time-weighted oracles and vote-locking, attack sizes peaked with nine-figure incidents, and the survivor population grew steadily harder to rob. Along the way the legitimate uses quietly institutionalized, arbitrage desks, liquidation keepers, and treasury managers folding flash loans into ordinary operations, until the primitive that headlines still call a hacking tool became, by volume, mostly plumbing.

Costs, venues, and limits

Flash loans live wherever there are large idle pools and smart contracts to guard them. Aave is the canonical venue, charging 0.05% on flash-loan principal; Uniswap V3 offers the sibling concept of flash swaps from its trading pools; Balancer, dYdX historically, and a range of smaller protocols offer variants with fees from zero to a few basis points. The size limit is simply pool liquidity: you can flash-borrow whatever the pool holds, which on major assets means nine-figure loans are routinely available to anyone. Fees flow to the pools’ liquidity providers, making flash loans a small but real income stream layered on top of the fee-and-risk economics providers already juggle.

The practical constraints are computational and adversarial rather than financial. Everything must fit within a block’s gas limit, complex multi-protocol payloads are expensive to execute and brutal to debug, and a failed transaction still burns its gas. Above all, profitable flash-loan opportunities are the most contested territory in crypto: arbitrage and liquidation payloads compete in the public mempool where sophisticated MEV searchers observe, copy, and front-run them, which is why serious operators submit through private relays and why the naive dream of easy flash-loan riches dies, for most people, on first contact with the competition.

One boundary worth drawing precisely: flash loans are native to single-chain atomicity. The guarantee dissolves across chains, because moving assets between blockchains takes minutes and trust, not one atomic breath, which is why there is no such thing as a cross-chain flash loan and why claims to the contrary should be read as marketing.

A note on nomenclature before the verdict, because two neighbors are often confused with flash loans. A flash swap is the exchange-native sibling: a trading pool sends you tokens first and lets you pay, in either asset, by the end of the transaction, which enables the same atomic patterns from a different venue. A flash mint goes further still, protocols that will create unlimited amounts of their own token for the duration of one transaction, since tokens that must be destroyed before the block closes cost the issuer nothing. All three run on the same atomicity guarantee, differ only in where the temporary liquidity comes from, and collapse into the same rule: whatever exists only inside one transaction is free to create, because it is impossible to steal.

The honest verdict

It is tempting to sort flash loans into good and evil and demand the evil half be banned, and the temptation misunderstands what they are. A flash loan is capital with the time dimension removed, and removing time removes the advantages that capital size normally confers. Whales could always manipulate thin oracles and buy governance outcomes; flash loans democratized the attack, which sounds terrible until you notice it also democratized the defense-testing. Every protocol now ships knowing that any flaw exploitable with money will be exploited by someone with almost none, a brutal but effective form of natural selection that has made surviving DeFi protocols measurably harder targets.

The equilibrium the ecosystem has reached is roughly this: flash loans as infrastructure are permanent, their legitimate uses quietly dominate their volume, their role in attacks is that of an amplifier for flaws that were always fatal, and the security burden sits, correctly, on protocol design rather than on restricting the primitive. For a user, the practical takeaways are smaller: flash loans explain how attackers with no visible wealth drain nine-figure protocols, they are part of why DEX prices track each other so tightly, and if a yield product ever advertises returns powered by flash-loan magic with no legible strategy, the magic is being performed on you.

A final perspective worth keeping: flash loans are the purest expression of what smart contracts changed about finance. Every other DeFi primitive, lending, trading, stablecoins, has a traditional ancestor it improves on; the flash loan has none, because its enabling condition, provable atomicity, does not exist in a world of couriers, clearing days, and courts. That is why traditional finance cannot copy it, why its risks are novel instead of imported, and why understanding it repays the effort even for readers who will never deploy one: it is the clearest available demonstration that programmable settlement does not just speed up old finance but permits transactions that were previously not merely impractical but conceptually impossible. Whatever else DeFi becomes, the flash loan is its signature invention, and knowing how it works is knowing what the technology is actually for.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Interacting with DeFi protocols carries significant risk, including total loss of funds. Details are current as of July 8, 2026. Always do your own research.

Frequently asked questions