Weekly Market Outlook | October 5 - October 11, 2026

Executive Summary

  • Twenty-two rounds raised $330.6M, led by $90M Series B rounds for Nous Research and Spiko and a $37.5M round for bitcoin life insurer Meanwhile. OKX raised again at $25B from Circle, Ripple and Standard Chartered, and Anchorage bought payment platform Routable.
  • Lido unveiled a Morpho-based lending protocol, Circle Mint added Aave to bitcoin-backed borrowing, Arbitrum made USDG its ecosystem dollar, Samsung Wallet will put USDC on 82 million phones, and OKX and ICE filed to trade 63 NYSE stocks around the clock. Aero's merger and Fables set October token events.
  • Moody's rated Sky B3 on a capital cushion under 1% of assets, S&P launched a scorecard for the $10B lending-vault market, and GSR committed $100M of its own money to new Aave vaults. Onchain credit is getting the ratings and sponsor commitments institutions require.
  • Hyperliquid received its first $14.6M of USDC reserve yield for HYPE buybacks, about $177M a year, with Coinbase and Circle each staking 500,000 HYPE behind the deal. Bloomberg added its prices, Brevan Howard moved to a prime broker connected to it, and Coinbase merged Deribit to compete.

Venture Capital & M&A Pulse

Twenty-two disclosed rounds raised $330.6M, led by $90M Series B rounds for Nous Research and Spiko; OKX raised again at a $25B valuation

Top Raises

  • Nous Research ($90M Series B) – Decentralised AI training and inference network on Solana; led by Robot Ventures with Nvidia, M12, Samsung and Union Square Ventures.
  • Spiko ($90M Series B) – Tokenised money-market funds for European businesses; led by NEA with Index Ventures, Bpifrance and Wintermute Ventures.
  • Meanwhile ($37.5M) – Bitcoin-denominated life insurer backed by Sam Altman; led by Bain Capital Crypto with Haun Ventures, Pantera and Apollo.
  • Catalyst Labs ($30M Seed) – AI-driven prediction-market trading; led by Sequoia Capital with Jump Trading, Peak XV and Coinbase.
  • Navra ($19M Series A) – Onchain finance infrastructure; led by Ribbit Capital with Jump Crypto, DST Global and Lightspeed Faction.
  • Noah ($16M Seed) – Stablecoin payment and wallet infrastructure; Endeit Capital, FJ Labs, LocalGlobe and Felix Capital.
  • Vest Markets ($13M Seed) – Zero-knowledge perpetuals exchange on Arbitrum; led by Portal Ventures.
  • Anvil ($5M) – Onchain credit infrastructure; led by Founders Fund with Pantera Capital and Bullish.

M&A Highlights

  • OKX (Strategic, $25B valuation) – Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures and hedge fund QRT extended the March round led by ICE; amount undisclosed. The ICE tie-up has since become a filing for 24/7 tokenised NYSE stock trading.
  • Anchorage Digital x Routable (Undisclosed) – The federally chartered crypto bank buys a corporate bill-payment and payout platform covering 220 countries, to embed stablecoin and tokenised-deposit settlement in it.
  • Orca x Loopscale (Merger) – Solana's largest DEX and the Loopscale lending protocol combine under a new Formation brand.

Emerging Themes

  • The two largest rounds were for infrastructure that sells to institutions and AI, not to crypto traders: tokenised money funds in Europe and a decentralised AI network.
  • Exchanges keep raising from their own partners: OKX took money from Circle, Ripple and Standard Chartered, all of which already supply it with stablecoins, custody or collateral.
  • Regulated banks are buying payment software rather than building it, with Anchorage's Routable purchase following MoonPay's North Capital deal.

DeFi Launch Radar

Protocol & Chain Releases

New Feature Rollout

Ecosystem Expansions

Token Launches & Airdrops

Token Launches

Airdrops

  • Reya – Season 2 - At least 3% of supply for the V2 order-book launch, gated by waitlist; no end date or conversion rate yet.
  • RWAperp – Early Access - 24/7 perps on equities and commodities on X Layer; points are a retrospective promise with no published formula.

Last Week Highlights

Rating Agencies Arrive in DeFi

Moody's Gives Sky Its First Rating

Moody's assigned Sky Protocol, the issuer of the USDS and DAI stablecoins, a B3 counterparty risk rating with a stable outlook on October 6. A counterparty risk rating measures how likely the protocol is to meet its obligations; B3 sits deep in speculative grade, which Moody's defines as high credit risk. Sky says it is the first stablecoin protocol rated by both big agencies, after S&P reaffirmed its B- the same week. The rating is an opinion on the protocol, not a guarantee on the tokens, but it gives institutions a document they can file.

Why B3: a Thin Cushion

The number that set the grade is capital. Moody's counted about $90M of tangible common equity against $10B of assets, under 1%, and called that a material weakness even while crediting Sky with low historical losses, solid profits and liquid assets. The mechanics behind the grade:

  • If losses exceed that $90M, Sky must mint and sell its governance token to cover them; if that fails, USDS and DAI are written down.
  • Holders can swap USDS and DAI into USDC one-for-one only while the peg stability module has USDC in it; neither token is redeemable for dollars directly.
  • An upgrade requires equity above 2.5% of assets on a sustained basis, with profitability and liquidity held at current levels.
  • Both agencies also flag concentrated voting power and the lack of audited financial statements, partly offset by data that anyone can verify onchain.

S&P Starts Scoring Vaults

Two days earlier S&P Global launched a Vault Risk Assessment for the lending vaults where allocators now park dollars, a market that grew from $1.5B of deposits in September 2024 to about $10B this September. The assessment gives a letter grade topped by AAA(v) across six risks: the credit quality of what the vault lends to, the mismatch between asset liquidity and withdrawal terms, the curator who runs it, the blockchain, the protocol, and the vault's own security and governance. S&P says it is not a credit rating and does not assess yield, and no vault has been scored yet.

GSR Puts Its Own Money Beside Depositors

The same week market maker GSR launched Hare, a vault business built on Aave, and committed $100M of its own capital over several years, largely as a credit facility that seeds liquidity so outside investors see GSR's money in the same vaults as theirs. The first products are a dollar vault with a fixed-rate option and a gold vault built with Paxos on PAXG and PAXGy. Hare says it will stress-test how fast investors could get their money back in a rush to redeem, and its chief executive put it plainly: calling these products riskless "would be a lie."

What It Means for Allocators

Onchain credit is acquiring the language institutions already use: a counterparty rating for the issuer, a scorecard for the vault, and a sponsor with skin in the game. In our view this is what decides which products a risk committee can approve, and it will sort the $10B of vault deposits into those that can be graded and those that cannot. The caveats are real. A B3 is a junk rating, the vault framework has no track record, and both agencies price governance and audit gaps that most protocols have not closed. The direction is still clear: the protocols that raise capital buffers and publish audited numbers will be the ones institutions can hold.

Hyperliquid Turns Idle USDC Into a Revenue Line

The First Payment Lands

On October 4 Hyperliquid received its first payment under its USDC reserve-yield programme: 14.58 million USDC for 30 days, which the chain converts automatically into HYPE purchases that are then burned. In simple terms, the interest earned on the dollars traders keep on the exchange now flows to the protocol as well as the trading fees do. Annualised, the first payment is about $177M; ecosystem estimates run higher, at $196M, and some put total protocol revenue near $1B a year. The amount moves with USDC balances and U.S. interest rates, not with trading volume.

How the Deal Is Built

The arrangement was agreed in May after Hyperliquid chose USDC as its aligned quote asset. Its terms:

  • Coinbase is the treasury deployer and shares about 90% of the cost-adjusted reserve yield on USDC held on Hyperliquid with the protocol; Circle is the technical deployer running minting, redemption and cross-chain transfers.
  • Each company staked 500,000 HYPE as performance collateral, which can be slashed if the yield fails to cover costs or either walks away without six months' notice.
  • Revenue accrues over 30-day periods and reaches the Assistance Fund eight days after each period ends.

USDC on Hyperliquid stands at $7.55B, more than on Solana, lifted by the native lending market launched in September, where $269M was borrowed on day one.

The Regulated World Plugs In

Bloomberg Terminal now streams 24/7 prices for selected Hyperliquid perpetuals next to the reference prices of the commodities, indexes and stocks they track, a monitoring tool rather than an execution one. Brevan Howard, a $35B macro fund, moved its multi-asset prime brokerage, clearing and financing to Ripple Prime, which clears more than $3 trillion a year and connected to Hyperliquid as its first onchain venue. Kraken's parent is building permissioned Hyperliquid markets for U.S. clients. Hyperliquid handled $203B of the $616B of onchain perpetuals volume tracked over 30 days and holds $8.7B of the $14.8B of open interest.

Competition and Oversight

Coinbase completed its Deribit integration into a single global exchange, folding $30B of bitcoin options open interest into one pool, and will relaunch Coinbase Pro by year-end as a direct competitor for professional perps flow. Hyperliquid Labs told the Financial Times it is based in Singapore but holds no MAS licence, and the regulator said it is not aware of Hyperliquid being regulated in any major jurisdiction. The same week a Hyperliquid Labs wallet sold 3.75M HYPE, about $330M and 1.7% of supply, to an undisclosed institution over the counter, with a third of the tokens restaked.

What We Take From It

Hyperliquid is now paid twice on the same dollars, once when they trade and once while they sit, and the second stream is tied to float and interest rates rather than volatility. In our view that makes HYPE's buyback the most mechanical in the sector, and it explains why a terminal provider, a prime broker and a macro fund are plugging in rather than waiting for a licence. The risks sit in the same structure: the yield falls if the Fed cuts, the deal depends on two counterparties who can leave with notice, and the venue's regulatory status is still unresolved.

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