Binance, along with other exchanges, shut down in many EU countries July 1st as MiCA regulations go into effect. The DefiLlama team put together a MiCA compliance dashboard to help EU users find the right exchange from all the compliant options:

The dashboard includes trading products, trading fees, KYC requirements and liquidity. If you’re looking for an exchange that holds a certain token, that can be found in DefiLlama’s newly added token directory.

Kraken proposed acquiring a significant stake in Aave via a purchase of 15% in Aave Group common stock + 250,000 AAVE tokens. The deal would value Aave at $385m, a significant discount of AAVE’s current market cap.

Aave’s founder Stani clarified on X that Aave would not sell AAVE tokens at a 70% discount. Noted in this post was the upcoming release of Aavenomics 3.0, which would potentially include an automated token buyback mechanism.

While none of Aave’s smart contract logic was compromised during the KelpDAO hack in April, its TVL declined nearly 50% in six days.

In January, Aave TVL was fluctuating between $30-35b. Today, it sits at $12b. Fees have fallen but are currently holding steady with the protocol bringing in ~$1m per day.

Aave still leads lending protocols with nearly $10b in active loans and holds a third of the entire lending market TVL.

Despite the TVL outflow, institutional interest in DeFi is growing as Kraken’s Payward Inc is looking to take a more active role through a series of potential deals and acquisitions.

Payward isn’t the only company looking to take the helm. Moonpay made their fifth DeFi acquisition of the year last week, acquiring Entendre to enhance agentic bookkeeping for digital assets.

On April 1, 2026, Franklin Templeton announced its planned acquisition of 250 Digital, a liquid cryptocurrency investment firm. The deal closed last week, formally launching Franklin Crypto as Franklin Templeton's dedicated active digital asset management division.

Part of the acquisition consideration paid using was BENJI tokens (shares of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund), making it it one of the first major financial services M&A transactions settled using tokenized fund shares rather than cash or stock.

This deal crosses a threshold: tokenized money market funds have been positioned as yield-bearing cash equivalents sitting in DeFi portfolios and institutional accounts.

Using BENJI as M&A consideration adds a tremendous use case for tokenized funds:

1. Corporate treasury instrument: Paying an acquisition counterparty in BENJI tokens means the recipient holds a yield-bearing, blockchain-native instrument rather than a wire transfer. The counterparty earns T-bill yield immediately, while the acquirer avoids liquidating other positions.

2. A regulatory moat is now a product moat: BENJI is a U.S.-registered mutual fund, not an unregulated crypto token. Using it in a regulated M&A transaction is legally unambiguous in a way that using, say, a DeFi LP token would not be. Franklin Templeton's decade-long investment in compliant blockchain infrastructure just created a first-mover advantage.

BENJI currently holds $902.7m in onchain AUM across 8 chains. Franklin Templeton also runs iBENJI (the institutional variant) at $114.4M, bringing the firm's combined tokenized fund footprint to $1.02b.

On the other side of M&A, we’ve seen a large uptick in protocol sunsets. We’ve tracked 19 announcements of protocol shutdowns in the month of June.

Radiant Capital announced its closure this month, still dealing with exploit effects originating from the Lazarus group hack in late 2024.

Goldfinch, a decentralized credit protocol backed by a16z, shut its doors after sustaining $100m in active loans going into 2024. The shutdown proposal came after bad debt accrued and several borrowers defaulted, leaving lenders stranded with withdrawal requests.

Felix perps, Ventuals and Dreamcash are winding down operations as tradeXYZ accumulated most of the HIP-3 open interest and liquidity.

Over the last 7 days, tradeXYZ facilitated $18.6b out of HIP-3’s $19b in perp volume and earned 90% of HIP-3’s June revenue.

Schedule a call with our (human) analyst team at DefiLlama Research for more market insights and to explore our market intelligence tools.

How Variational is approaching a brokerage-style model that connects traders to liquidity through RFQs, internal market making, and isolated onchain settlement

A purpose-built LLM, allowing users to instantly analyze DefiLlama’s comprehensive, up-to-the-minute crypto data with plain language queries.

Many stablecoin single-asset yields spiked this week and many of them are earning a significantly higher rate than previous weeks. The USDC pool on Fluid experienced a large TVL increase from $8m to $129m.

Liquidity provision yields are elevated as well, with rewards available across a series of pools. Increased trading activity and concentrated liquidity around these asset prices are yielding higher than usual.

For lending pools, DAI utilization on Aave is at 94%. Increased yield, but with a higher risk of liquidity constraints. RLUSD has a large reward component on top of the base APY.

Tag @llama on X to quickly verify onchain data, see trends and tell your friends they’re wrong.

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