Tether completed the first full independent audit of its annual financial statements, with KPMG US issuing a clean opinion on the stablecoin issuer’s 2025 accounts.

The audit covered Tether’s balance sheet, income statement and cash flows for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, including the assets backing its issued tokens and the liabilities they represent. Tether said the audited statements showed reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion.

Unlike Tether’s quarterly reserve attestations, which it has published for years, the full audit subjected the company’s broader financial statements and underlying evidence to independent examination, including transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations and counterparties.

Source: Paolo Ardoino

As part of the audit, KPMG physically inspected and counted Tether’s gold holdings, verifying each bar rather than relying solely on custodian records.

Tether said KPMG issued an unqualified opinion on the statements, finding they fairly presented the company’s financial position, results and cash flows in all material respects under US accounting standards.

Related: Tether signs tokenization deal with Nairobi Securities Exchange

Tether’s growing financial footprint

Tether launched its USDt (USDT) stablecoin in 2014 and has since grown into one of the crypto industry’s largest companies, generating more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025. In the second quarter of this year, the company reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit, driven largely by income from its US Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements.

USDT remains the company’s core business and dominates the stablecoin market. Its roughly $183 billion market capitalization accounts for about 61% of the $301 billion market, more than twice the roughly $72 billion held by its nearest rival, Circle’s USDC (USDC), according to DefiLlama.

Stablecoin market cap. Source: DefiLlama

Tether has used its profits to expand beyond stablecoins, investing $20 million each in Argentine neobank Ualá and Brazilian crypto platform Mercado Bitcoin this year, while leading a $50 million funding round for AI sleep technology company Eight Sleep.

The company has expanded its tokenized gold business as well, with physical reserves backing Tether Gold (XAUt) rising 9.5% in the second quarter. At the time of writing, XAUt is the largest tokenized commodity product, with around $2.7 billion in value, according to data from RWA.xyz.

Despite the company’s growth, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has shown little interest in taking it public. In June 2025, amid speculation over a potential Tether IPO, Ardoino wrote on X: “No need to go public.”

Source: Paolo Ardoino

Magazine: Inside the fake crypto startup that fooled North Korean IT workers

Matthew Boyle

Scott Jennings 

Robinhood’s newly launched blockchain, Robinhood Chain, is scaling its onchain activity with help from Uniswap, according to Standard Chartered—an integration that may reduce one of the biggest early hurdles for any fresh network: assembling sufficient liquidity quickly enough to support real demand.

In a research note cited by the bank’s analysts, Robinhood Chain is reported to have grown to nearly $1 billion in total value locked (TVL). Standard Chartered also says that virtually all of the chain’s liquidity requirements are being met via Uniswap’s existing decentralized exchange infrastructure (Uniswap V2, V3, and V4), potentially allowing Robinhood to focus on expansion rather than building liquidity plumbing from scratch.

Key takeaways

• Standard Chartered reports Robinhood Chain is close to $1 billion in total value locked, calling it the fastest TVL growth among blockchains by that metric.
• According to the note, Robinhood Chain’s liquidity needs are “virtually all” met through Uniswap V2, V3 and V4.
• Protocol fees attributed to Robinhood activity are now the largest driver of UNI token burns, Standard Chartered says.
• The UNI burn rate has reportedly accelerated after a Robinhood-linked fee switch activated on July 27, reaching an annualized pace of about $90 million.
• Robinhood’s broader push into tokenization and prediction markets is being closely watched on Wall Street, even as reported crypto trading volumes have softened.

Why Uniswap liquidity matters for a new chain

New networks typically struggle early with liquidity: without deep trading venues, users have less confidence that they can enter and exit positions efficiently. Standard Chartered’s assessment suggests Robinhood Chain is attempting to sidestep that problem by routing much of its liquidity demand to Uniswap rather than relying on nascent pools.

The bank’s note, attributed to analyst Geoffrey Kendrick, frames the approach as strategically important for Robinhood as it scales. By leaning on battle-tested decentralized finance infrastructure, Robinhood Chain can potentially improve execution quality for users while accelerating growth.

Earlier coverage highlighted that Robinhood Chain launched on July 1 with a focus on bringing real-world assets onchain, and adoption moved quickly after launch. Cointelegraph previously reported the chain reached 194,000 daily active users during its first week, reflecting strong initial engagement that would require reliable access to trading venues and liquidity.

From liquidity to UNI burns: the token-economics spillover

Standard Chartered also connects the integration to measurable changes inside Uniswap’s token economics. The bank says protocol fees generated through Robinhood are now the largest source of UNI token burns.

In the note, the UNI burn rate is described as having roughly doubled since a Robinhood-linked fee switch was activated on July 27. Standard Chartered estimates that this puts UNI burns on an annualized pace of about $90 million.

With UNI priced at roughly $3.50 per token at the time referenced in the report, Standard Chartered calculates that the annualized burn translates to about 25 million UNI tokens—just over 4% of UNI’s circulating supply—being removed each year.

For UNI holders and DeFi traders, the key question isn’t only whether Robinhood Chain is growing, but whether that growth sustains fee generation over time. A rapid early rise in burns can be encouraging, but the durability of activity on a new chain typically depends on its ability to retain users, deepen liquidity, and keep relevant applications running.

Robinhood’s broader crypto strategy: tokenization and prediction markets

Robinhood Chain is part of a larger corporate strategy to expand beyond traditional stock trading. The brokerage is pursuing crypto-related products alongside tokenization and prediction markets—initiatives that have attracted investor attention.

Cointelegraph previously reported that analysts at Bernstein raised their price target for Robinhood (HOOD) stock to $160 per share, citing tokenization and prediction markets as key growth drivers. That Wall Street framing matters because it ties Robinhood’s onchain activity to a wider narrative: using blockchain as distribution infrastructure for additional financial products.

At the same time, Standard Chartered’s liquidity thesis sits alongside mixed signals from Robinhood’s reported crypto business. Cointelegraph notes that Robinhood reported record revenue and earnings in its second quarter, while crypto trading volumes and revenues declined—an environment that can make it harder to interpret which developments are fundamentally strengthening the platform versus which are simply offsetting slowdowns elsewhere.

What to watch next on Robinhood Chain and Uniswap

For market participants, the immediate watchpoints are whether Robinhood Chain can keep liquidity demand flowing through Uniswap as the novelty of launch fades, and whether UNI burns remain elevated beyond the initial “fee switch” period described by Standard Chartered. Investors should also monitor how Robinhood’s tokenization and prediction-market efforts evolve, since the long-term value proposition for the blockchain will likely depend on sustained application usage rather than liquidity routing alone.

HTX’s situation has appeared increasingly precarious as both the European Union Council and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth, & Development Office have chosen to sanction the exchange.

Since then, it’s made some big changes to how it manages users’ reserves.

Its June proof of reserves report was the first that acknowledged that it had moved huge swaths of its reserves to an undisclosed “ThirdParty.”

Read more: HTX misrepresents Huobi Global S.A. after UK sanctions

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HTX claims on its website that you can verify these balances by reaching out to the custodian; unfortunately, it doesn’t tell users who that custodian is. As a result, Protos has been unable to verify most of those balances.

Further complicating this, TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence firm, released a report in which it detailed how HTX has begun churning through its wallets at a prodigious rate.

Ari Redboard, the global head of policy for TRM, described this behavior as an attempt “to stay a step ahead of screening built on static lists.”

Read more: ‘Someone’ is taking advantage of HTX’s reserves

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HTX, for its part, previously claimed that this was totally normal cybersecurity behavior.

Since then, Protos was able to track a substantial portion of HTX’s staked ETH (stETH) through Poloniex addresses.

Now, we can add that various other HTX assets have also recently passed into Poloniex.

Read more: Justin Sun’s Poloniex and HTX withdraw huge amounts from AAVE

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First, HTX distributes a tool that used to enable people to gain greater insight into its reserves, even including which addresses the reserves were held in.

We can use these past reports to determine where certain assets were claimed to be at a certain time and can use the blockchain transactions to follow some portion of the reserves as they move.

Consider 0x18709e89bd403f470088abdacebe86cc60dda12e, which was an address that HTX used to hold many of the Ethereum-based DeFi positions it maintained, for some reason.

On May 30, immediately before we get the transition to ThirdParty, we can watch the Sun-advised wrapped BTC (WBTC) move from this HTX address to 0xeB245796376912af7Fadd4986f73743feEA61e6E.

These funds were then transferred to 0x8fCA4adE3a517133fF23ca55CdAea29C78C990b8, an address that Etherscan labels as Poloniex 7.

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These funds were then quickly sent to 0x29065a4C1f2F20d1E263930088890d6F49Fe715a, an address that Etherscan labels as Poloniex 10.

Finally, this WBTC was sent to 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, an address that Etherscan labels as Poloniex 9.

This WBTC which came from HTX, is still stored in this Poloniex address.

The HTX to Poloniex pattern repeats

The May PoR for HTX had a problem. It claimed that it had a bunch of STEAK-USDC, but it was wrong; there was no STEAK-USDC in that address on that date.

However, there was a matching amount of Sky Savings USDS (sUSDS) in that address, suggesting that while HTX failed to accurately label its own reserves — troubling on its face — it did have another position that represented that value.

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We start with approximately $200 million worth of sUSDS moving to 0x7fed2E5e06CF7B8918bB93158C4E990794da33b8.

These funds are then sent onward to Poloniex 7.

These were then forwarded in three transactions to Poloniex 10.

Finally, these funds were forwarded to Poloniex 9.

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Similar patterns can also be observed for various Spark positions, some of which may have been since redeemed.

These related-party transactions, involving many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value, raise serious questions about the internal controls and management of both of these Sun-owned exchanges.

They furthermore raise questions about Poloniex’s role in interacting with this repeatedly sanctioned entity.

Protos reached out to HTX with questions about these transfers, but it didn’t respond before publication.

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Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

The 30-year Treasury yield cleared 5% this year and is sitting at its highest level since 2007. That means every dollar sitting in bitcoin or any non-yielding asset is a dollar not earning that 5%. Several analysts have pointed to these elevated bond yields as a direct drag on bitcoin’s upside recently.

The elevated cost of capital already hurt bitcoin during the 2025 bull cycle.

The evidence sits in the divergence between BTC’s dollar-denominated spot price and its price adjusted for the cost of long-duration capital, or the 30-year yield. Bitcoin’s spot price rose to $126,000 in 2025, well above the previous cycle’s high of nearly $70,000. But priced against the 30-year yield, it did something it had never done before: it fell well short of its 2021 high, breaking a pattern of setting a new peak, on this measure, every cycle since inception.

Additionally, that same ratio has now completed a head-and-shoulders breakdown, one of the more potent bearish patterns in technical analysis.

The pattern is defined by three peaks separated by pullbacks, with the middle peak the highest, loosely resembling the outline of a “head flanked by two shoulders.” A move below the line connecting the pullbacks between those peaks, the neckline, is what confirms the pattern. The BTC/30-year yield ratio has done exactly that.

Decentralized finance has transformed how people trade, lend, borrow, and earn without relying on traditional financial intermediaries. Yet one major limitation remains: most DeFi applications know what a wallet owns, but not who or what is behind it. That could change—and identity may become the key to unlocking DeFi’s next major market.

Today, permissionless access is one of DeFi’s greatest strengths. However, it also creates challenges for credit, reputation, compliance, and institutional adoption. Without a reliable way to establish trust, many financial products remain overcollateralized or limited to users willing to operate entirely anonymously.

On-chain identity could introduce a new layer of financial context. Instead of simply evaluating a wallet based on its current assets, protocols could consider verifiable factors such as transaction history, repayment behavior, credentials, business activity, or reputation. Importantly, this does not necessarily mean exposing personal information publicly. Zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving identity systems could allow users to prove specific facts without revealing unnecessary details.

This could create entirely new DeFi markets.

For example, undercollateralized lending could become more practical if borrowers can demonstrate a trustworthy financial history. Businesses could access decentralized credit based on verifiable performance rather than simply depositing large amounts of collateral. Insurance protocols could price risk more intelligently, while institutions could participate in on-chain markets with stronger compliance and identity frameworks.

The opportunity extends beyond lending. Tokenized real-world assets, payroll, decentralized credit scoring, private markets, and cross-border financial services could all benefit from portable digital identity.

The challenge is finding the right balance. DeFi was built around user control, openness, and censorship resistance. An identity layer that becomes invasive or centralized could undermine those principles.

The winning model may therefore be identity without unnecessary exposure: users control their credentials, protocols verify what matters, and sensitive information remains private.

If DeFi can combine permissionless infrastructure with privacy-preserving reputation and identity, the next wave may move beyond simply proving what you own toward proving why you can be trusted. That could dramatically expand the addressable market for decentralized finance.

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