Miami Beach, FL — Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, said the crypto exchange is “about 80% ready” to go public, underscoring the firm’s IPO ambitions as the company rolls out a new partnership with MoneyGram aimed at solving crypto’s “last mile” problem.

Speaking alongside Anthony Soohoo, chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, at Consensus Miami, Sethi framed the deal as a way to bridge the gap between digital assets and physical cash, a critical gap in global adoption. MoneyGram brings scale: roughly 500,000 retail locations worldwide.

CoinDesk reported in March that Kraken had paused its IPO plans after confidentially filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in November, with sources saying it may revisit a listing when market conditions improve.

“This is the first step of working together to solve the last mile,” Soohoo said, noting that “in many situations, customers still want access to cash.”

That’s especially true in regions where financial infrastructure lags. “People need cash at an onboarding location,” Sethi said, pointing to markets in Latin America and beyond. “Partnering with MoneyGram helps solve that.”

Moderator Ben Weiss noted that users increasingly treat exchanges like banks. Sethi said that the shift reflects a deeper transformation. “A lot of what banks used to do is now being done by crypto firms.”

Both executives pointed to stablecoins as a key unlock. Soohoo said they can “remove waste” and lower costs across the system, while Sethi was more blunt: “Intermediaries are the losers here, but they should be.”

On Kraken’s IPO, Sethi said the company has filed but is waiting for the right moment. “We’re ready,” he said, citing a broader industry reset driven by automation and tighter cost discipline.

MoneyGram, taken private in 2023, is in no rush. “We’re focused on rebuilding the company,” Soohoo said, emphasizing long-term value over quarterly pressure.

The shared goal: cheaper, faster financial access, especially for those left outside the traditional system.

Read more: Kraken’s parent company Payward to acquire derivatives exchange Bitnomial for $550 million in cash and stock

Dubai-based Global Millennial Capital closes a $100M IPO Opportunities Fund to back overlooked AI and DeFi mid-cap tech names one to three years before exit.

According to the PR Newswire announcement, Global Millennial Capital has completed a final close of $100 million for its IPO Opportunities Fund, which will focus on pre-IPO and pre-exit allocations in global technology companies.

Targeting overlooked mid-cap tech ahead of IPO

The investor base includes Gulf family offices from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar, together with international wealth management platforms that GMCL says are seeking structured access to growth-stage tech deals that would otherwise be limited to large institutional allocators.

The fund’s mandate centers on mid-sized technology companies valued between $5 billion and $20 billion, with an emphasis on firms operating in artificial intelligence, DeFi technology, and adjacent sectors such as fintech and Web3, provided they exhibit scalable business models, predictable revenue, and mature governance.

GMCL argues that these “new-age technology leaders in underpenetrated mid-cap segments” are in the early stages of value realization but are often ignored by megafunds that focus on mega-caps and by early-stage VCs that rotate out before companies reach late-stage rounds.

Late-stage discipline with a DeFi and AI tilt

The IPO Opportunities Fund will concentrate on what GMCL describes as “key inflection points” in a company’s lifecycle — typically the one to three years before an IPO or strategic sale — deploying capital through private placements, structured equity, and other late-stage vehicles.

The firm says its strategy combines active risk management with a data-driven sourcing process that uses artificial intelligence to screen global deal flow for business quality, governance robustness, and alignment with secular themes such as AI adoption and decentralized finance infrastructure.

A recent crypto.news feature highlighted GMCL’s prior $20 million early-stage fund, which backed transformational ventures in the U.S. and MENA, as a precursor to this larger push into late-stage, DeFi- and AI-focused mid-cap opportunities.

Another crypto.news overview emphasized that GMCL’s thesis is to “empower future digital economies,” a framing now extended from seed and Series A into the pre-IPO window where liquidity events and public-market repricing are imminent.

A separate crypto.news analysis noted that by layering this $100 million IPO Opportunities Fund on top of its AI-driven sourcing engine, GMCL is positioning itself as a bridge between Gulf capital and global mid-cap tech, including DeFi platforms and AI infrastructure firms preparing to list on public markets.

GoMining’s GoBTC protocol promises instant authorization and on-chain Bitcoin settlement with a 0.2% merchant fee, positioning miner-run rails as a low-cost challenger to Visa and Mastercard.

According to Forbes, GoMining will formally debut its GoBTC payment protocol at this year’s Consensus event, marketing it as a “Bitcoin-native alternative to Visa and Mastercard” that the firm can operate because it controls a meaningful share of hash rate.

The protocol is designed so that merchants receive “instant authorization” at checkout while settlement finalizes directly on the Bitcoin mainnet within a few hours, leveraging the underlying blockchain’s confirmation process instead of card-network clearing and batch settlement.

GoMining’s pitch is that miners are uniquely positioned to operate payment protocols that sit directly on the mainnet, because they already earn block rewards and can structure additional revenue around transaction fees and value‑added services.

The Forbes piece stresses that GoBTC is not just a wallet or gateway but “a protocol only GoMining can run,” implying that its design may rely on proprietary coordination with the company’s own blocks or a preferred set of mining pools to guarantee certain settlement and fee characteristics.

If executed at scale, a 0.2% on-chain payment protocol could pressure existing crypto payment gateways that charge around 0.5% to 1% per transaction, as well as traditional card processors whose economics depend on multi‑percent fee stacks.

A recent crypto.news analysis noted that card fees remain a major pain point for merchants, with the average processing charge eating into thin retail margins, a backdrop that GoMining is clearly targeting with its sub‑1% offer.

Another crypto.news overview broke down the 1.5%–3.5% fee range into interchange, assessment, and markup components, arguing that any on-chain alternative that can deliver similar reliability at a fraction of that cost “poses a credible threat to the status quo” — a challenge GoBTC is now explicitly mounting.

A separate crypto.news briefing highlighted how Visa and Mastercard’s $30 billion swipe-fee settlement underscored regulatory and merchant pressure on card fees, adding further momentum to experiments like GoBTC that try to route payments over Bitcoin instead of legacy rails.

Demand for U.S. equities is rising globally, pushing investors to look beyond domestic markets, Robinhood senior VP and general manager in charge of crypto, Johann Kerbrat said during a Fireside chat at Consensus 2026 in Miami.

“We are seeing a lot of demand for U.S. stocks from overseas investors, particularly tied to AI-related companies,” Kerbrat said, adding that access remains limited in many regions compared with the United States.

Kerbrat said investors should shift from country-specific strategies toward global allocation now that international 24/7 trading platforms are available to them. “It is time for a lot of investors to really think about not just how to invest in one specific country, but also how to have a global portfolio,” he said.

The Kraken executive pointed to tokenization and around-the-clock trading as key enablers. “We think it is going to be 24/7. We think it is going to be instant settlement,” he said, describing features that could differentiate tokenized assets from traditional brokerage products.

The discussion, moderated by Crypto in America host Eleanor Terrett, also addressed regulatory constraints in the United States. Kerbrat said “regulation in the U.S. has been less than friendly in the past,” though he noted recent engagement with policymakers has improved.

Robinhood has launched tokenized stock products in Europe using a derivative model that tracks underlying assets, with plans to expand access to additional asset classes including private equity. Kerbrat said the goal is broader participation in markets that have historically been limited to accredited investors.

“I think it is really important to give them the choice to be able to invest in it before it goes public,” he said, referring to private companies.

Kerbrat said adoption will depend on offering new functionality rather than replicating existing brokerage services, with lending, collateralization and continuous trading cited as areas of development.

Kraken, which trails platforms like OKX, Bybit and Coinbase (COIN) in spot trading volumes but remains a major player in the crypto derivatives market. is a U.S.-based crypto exchange where users can buy, sell, and trade digital assets like bitcoin and ether using fiat or crypto. It has expanded into services such as derivatives, staking, and custody, positioning itself as a more full-service trading platform beyond a basic retail app.

DeFi lending is growing faster than any Aave price prediction expected, but AAVE still sits 86% below its all time high of $666.

The protocol launched V4 on Ethereum, locked $25 billion in contracts, and still trades around $92.48. That gap between adoption and returns tells a story about where the real upside lives.

Pepeto has pulled in more than $9.78 million during its presale with a Binance listing on the horizon that could deliver what the AAVE forecast will take years to match.

Aave deployed V4 on Ethereum mainnet on March 30, introducing a hub and spoke system that splits risk into separate liquidity pools according to CoinMarketCap. The upgrade divides assets into Core, Plus, and Prime hubs for tighter risk control.

The protocol also froze markets within hours of the $292 million KelpDAO bridge exploit in April, shielding $25 billion in locked value from wider damage according to CoinDesk. Both moves lifted the Aave price prediction outlook, but AAVE at $92.48 still needs a 620% climb to touch its 2021 peak.

Top DeFi and Presale Tokens to Watch: Pepeto and AAVE

Pepeto

When an Aave price prediction shifts after a big protocol upgrade, attention usually pulls capital toward tokens that can ride the same growth cycle. But as DeFi lending grows, finding the entry that delivers the biggest return gets harder every month.

That is one reason wallets have been loading into Pepeto.

The cofounder who built the first Pepe token leads the Pepeto team, and a developer with Binance experience works on the build side. These are people who shipped a token that reached billions in market cap with zero products. Pepeto has products. PepetoSwap gives holders fee free swaps, so the spread that eats into small positions disappears. The cross chain bridge carries holdings across chains without fees, so money reaches the best opportunity on another network without gas costs.

SolidProof ran a full audit on the code before the presale opened, and more than $9.78 million of capital followed that verification. The price sits at $0.0000001868 per token, and staking pays 175% APY while holders wait for the listing. But that yield is just the bonus on top of what the listing itself produces.

As AAVE headlines bring fresh focus to DeFi, buyers start looking for presale entries that carry the kind of upside established tokens no longer offer. Pepeto is built to capture that rotation, and analysts project 100x or more from this entry because a live trading platform behind a meme coin at presale price has not appeared before. The expected Binance listing is the single event that turns presale wallets into winning positions, and the Aave price prediction ceiling does not apply at this stage.

AAVE

AAVE trades at $92.48 as of May 2026, down 86% from its all time high of $666 from 2021. V4 brought stronger technology, but the price has not followed. Support holds near $90, and resistance sits at $110 according to CoinMarketCap.

Coinpedia projects a high of $650 for 2026 if DeFi activity surges, while Cryptopolitan caps the best case at $200 by mid year. The realistic AAVE forecast range sits between $90 and $130 for May given current levels and falling open interest.

Even at $650, AAVE would need a 600% move from today. That is strong, but it falls short of what presale entries deliver before a first listing. The math tells the story.

Conclusion

Today’s DeFi space is moving in two directions at once. Protocols like Aave roll out V4 upgrades and pull in billions, while early movers rotate into the presale that no Aave price prediction can match. Pepeto crossed $9.78 million because the holders inside understand exactly what the Binance listing produces, and the Pepeto official website is where that entry still exists right now.

The listing can land without warning, and the moment it does, the presale price disappears permanently. The last five cycles all produced one presale that minted millionaires, and five times over, millions of people who read about it early chose to wait and then spent years calculating what a $500 entry would have returned.

That is not a small missed trade. That is watching $500 turn into $50,000 or more from the outside, knowing the only thing missing was clicking the buy button while it was still available.

Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale

FAQs

How does Aave V4 affect the Aave price prediction for 2026?

Aave V4 adds stronger risk controls and higher locked value that lifts the AAVE outlook, but AAVE at $92.48 still needs a 620% climb to reach its $666 peak. Coinpedia projects a $650 high while Cryptopolitan caps the best case at $200 by mid year.

Is Pepeto a better entry than AAVE before the Binance listing?

Pepeto raised $9.78 million at $0.0000001868 with a SolidProof audit, fee free swap tools, and a Binance listing expected that gives presale holders upside no established DeFi token can match. The presale price disappears the moment listing arrives, making the current window the only chance to enter at this level.

Disclaimer: This is a Press Release provided by a third party who is responsible for the content. Please conduct your own research before taking any action based on the content.

Bitcoin BTC$81,648.42 pushed higher Tuesday, climbing to $81,500 to its strongest level since January as the latest leg of the rally spread beyond major tokens into tokenization-focused plays.

The largest cryptocurrency rose another 2% over the past 24 hours and is now up more than 35% from its early February lows. Ether (ETH), XRP (XRP) and Solana (SOL) also advanced, though they lagged bitcoin’s pace.

Feeding that momentum is strong demand for spot bitcoin ETFs, according to Paul Howard, senior director at Wincent. More than $500 million has flowed into spot BTC funds led by BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s products on the Monday session, reflecting continued interest from large investors, he said.

The positive sentiment is likely to stay constructive unless geopolitical conditions deteriorate materially, he said.

Tokenization theme gains traction

The move coincided with renewed momentum in tokenization — the effort to bring traditional financial assets onchain.

In equities, Bullish (BLSH) surged 12% after announcing the $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti, a move that positions the company deeper into capital markets infrastructure. Bullish is CoinDesk’s owner.

The deal marks a shift beyond trading, said Owen Lau, analyst at Clear Street.

“Strategically we see this acquisition as a big push to transform Bullish from a crypto exchange to a capital market infrastructure provider capturing the tokenization trend,” said Lau. He added that the move could drive more recurring revenue and stronger margins over time, with the key question being timing rather than viability.

Galaxy Digital (GLXY), which just unveiled with State Street a tokenized cash-management fund for large investors, climbed 3.6%. Other digital asset infrastructure-linked stocks also moved higher.

Among tokens, tokenized real-world asset protocol Centrifuge’s native crypto (CFG) jumped 15% after Coinbase (COIN) tapped the protocol as a partner to help bring ETFs, credit and structured products onto blockchain rails, signaling growing institutional interest in the space. Coinbase also took an equity stake in Centrifuge.

What makes tokenization compelling to investors that it’s one of the fastest-growing sector at the intersection of blockchain tech and traditional finance. The market of tokenized assets, including stablecoins, is projected to reach $18.9 trillion by 2033, according to Ripple and BCG.

Not all crypto stocks participated in the rally. Circle (CRCL) and Coinbase (COIN) slipped 3-4%%, respectively, paring some of their Monday gains, suggesting some rotation within the sector.

Meanwhile, the broader equity market also pushed higher: the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 climbed 1.2% to a fresh record and the S&P 500 advanced 0.8% during the session.

Aave court motion filed today in New York asks a federal judge to unfreeze $71 million in ETH.

Aave LLC filed an emergency motion today in the Southern District of New York to vacate a restraining notice blocking 30,765 ETH, worth roughly $71 million, from returning to exploit victims.

The filing argues the assets belong to users of the Aave Protocol harmed in the April 18 Kelp DAO bridge exploit, not to North Korea or its alleged Lazarus Group hackers.

The restraining notice was served on May 1 by Gerstein Harrow LLP, representing three sets of judgment creditors holding $877 million in unpaid terrorism awards against North Korea. Their argument: because the attackers are linked to Pyongyang’s Lazarus Group, the recovered ETH qualifies as DPRK property subject to seizure.

Aave calls that theory “flatly wrong.” Aave founder Stani Kulechov said: “The global DeFi community came together to recover assets stolen from users, and we are not going to let those assets be wrongfully redirected.”

Why the legal theory matters for DeFi

Aave’s filing draws a clear legal line: “A thief does not gain lawful ownership of stolen property simply by taking it.” The motion argues that on-chain movement between addresses does not determine ownership, and that treating recovered funds as belonging to the thief would punish innocent users while rewriting basic property law.

As crypto.news reported, Arbitrum DAO had already secured more than 99% governance support for a plan to route the frozen ETH into the DeFi United recovery fund, which has raised over $314 million across multiple DAOs to restore rsETH’s backing. That plan now depends on the court’s decision.

The stakes extend beyond this case. If courts allow unrelated creditors to intercept DeFi recovery funds based on alleged state-actor attribution, future rescue efforts could be deterred entirely.

Aave’s motion asks the court to lift the notice immediately or require plaintiffs to post a $300 million bond while the case is heard. No hearing date has been set.

Kelp DAO claims that LayerZero personnel approved the 1-of-1 verifier setup, a decision LayerZero has since cited as the reason a North Korea-linked attacker drained roughly $292 million from Kelp’s rsETH bridge.

The claim runs counter to LayerZero’s April 19 postmortem, which said Kelp’s rsETH application relied on LayerZero Labs as its sole verifier and that the setup “directly contradicts” LayerZero’s recommended multi-DVN model.

Kelp’s memo says LayerZero personnel reviewed its configurations for over 2.5 years and in eight integration discussions, without warning that a 1-of-1 setup posed a material security risk.

The memo, titled “Setting the Record Straight Around the LayerZero Bridge Hack,” includes screenshots of Telegram exchanges that document LayerZero’s awareness and lack of objection to Kelp’s verifier setup.

One screenshot shows a LayerZero team member saying: “No problem on using defaults either — just tagging [redacted] here since he mentioned you may have wanted to use a custom DVN setup for verifying messages, but will leave that to your team!” Kelp says the “defaults” referenced in the exchange were the 1-of-1 LayerZero Labs DVN configuration later cited by LayerZero as the application-level setup that enabled the exploit.

CoinDesk could not independently authenticate the screenshot.

LayerZero’s templates

Kelp also points to LayerZero’s bug bounty scope, OFT Quickstart and developer examples as evidence that LayerZero treated verifier-network choices as application-level configuration while showing builders a one-DVN setup.

LayerZero’s published bug bounty scope on Immunefi excludes from rewards “impacts to OApps themselves as a result of their own misconfiguration,” including verifier networks and executors.

The LayerZero OFT Quickstart and the official OFT example configuration on GitHub show LayerZero Labs as the required DVN, with no optional DVN set.

Kelp’s memo cites an April 19 post from Spearbit security researcher Sujith Somraaj, in which Somraaj said he had submitted a bug bounty report describing the same attack pattern and that LayerZero rejected it.

“My bug bounty: not a vuln, requires all DVNs,” Somraaj wrote on X. “Their deployment: removes the ‘all’ part. Hackers: collects $295M bounty instead.” Somraaj is a prior LayerZero auditor, according to his Cantina profile.

Kelp moves to Chainlink

Kelp also said it is moving rsETH off LayerZero to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. The shift moves rsETH from LayerZero’s OFT standard to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Token standard.

The exploit drained 116,500 rsETH, worth roughly $292 million, from Kelp’s LayerZero-powered bridge. Two additional forged transactions totaling more than $100 million were signed and processed by the LayerZero Labs DVN before Kelp paused its contracts, the protocol said.

LayerZero said attackers are likely linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, who accessed the list of RPCs used by the LayerZero Labs DVN, compromised two RPC nodes and swapped out the binaries running on them.

The attackers then launched a DDoS attack against uncompromised RPC nodes, forcing a failover to the poisoned ones. LayerZero said the DVN then confirmed transactions that had not occurred.

Kelp argues the 1-of-1 setup was widespread. CoinGecko, citing Dune Analytics data, said 47% of roughly 2,665 active LayerZero OApp contracts ran a 1-of-1 DVN configuration over a 90-day period ending around April 22, with more than $4.5 billion in associated market value exposed to the same class of risk.

LayerZero’s postmortem said the protocol “functioned exactly as intended.” The company said it would no longer sign messages for any application running a 1-of-1 configuration, a policy change that took effect after the hack.

Kelp alleges that its team had to flag the exploit to LayerZero rather than the other way around, raising questions about LayerZero’s monitoring.

The memo also alleges substantial overlap in addresses granted ADMIN_ROLE on both the LayerZero Labs DVN and the Nethermind DVN, listing ten on April 8, 2026 and five additional on February 6, 2025. CoinDesk has not independently verified the onchain claim.

LayerZero did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

On at least two integrated chains, Dinari and Skale, the LayerZero Labs DVN is still listed as the only available attestor, according to the documentation.