March proved to be a defining month for crypto's relationship with traditional finance and regulatory institutions. From the CFTC and SEC issuing coordinated interim guidance, to the US Treasury softening its stance on crypto mixers, to the famous stock exchanges integrating tokenized equities platforms, the boundaries between decentralised and centralised finance continued their accelerating convergence. Against this backdrop, Hyperliquid cemented itself as a major player in global macro trading, with oil perpetuals hitting over a billion dollars in daily volume amid the Iran conflict, drawing extensive coverage from traditional news outlets like Bloomberg, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.
Following the progress from previous months, both the CFTC and SEC have taken active steps this month to provide regulatory clarity ahead of any formal legislation. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig publicly confirmed that the agency is close to releasing formal guidance on crypto perpetual futures, signalling that these long-offshore instruments could soon operate legally within US markets. Selig was also clear that similar clarity would be forthcoming for prediction markets. Crucially, these are interim guidances rather than permanent rulemakings and, as a result, they carry a level of institutional fragility around them, although they are widely being regarded as fortifying for the wider landscape. While standalone agency guidance is more easily challenged than codified legislation, the significance should not be understated; Selig has been acting as the sole confirmed commissioner on the normally five-member CFTC, meaning that on his own authority, he has been able to move with a speed that would typically require bipartisan consensus among the full board.
In tandem, the CFTC and SEC have continued advancing their joint initiative, "Project Crypto", designed to harmonise the two agencies' approaches to digital asset oversight in the absence of broader Congressional action. Jointly, a 68-page document was released establishing the first formal taxonomy for crypto assets under the US federal law. The framework organises all digital assets into five categories: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital utilities, stablecoins, and digital securities. The vast majority of major assets fall outside of the SEC jurisdiction, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and so on. These same assets were classified as digital commodities, placing them under CFTC oversight rather than securities law. As noted before, the release is interpretive rather than statutory, meaning it remains vulnerable to challenge or reversal by a future commission. Embedding through the CLARITY Act would give these classifications permanent legal backing, which is why the legislative stalemate continues to matter.
On a separate but related note, the US Treasury issued a notable policy shift this month in a 32-page report to Congress under the GENIUS Act framework. The department formally acknowledged that crypto mixers can serve legitimate privacy purposes on public blockchains, including the protection of personal wealth, business payment details, and charitable donations from public view. This represents a meaningful shift in tone from an agency that sanctioned Tornado Cash as recently as 2022. While the report stopped short of reversing the enforcement posture and still flagged mixers as a vector for illicit finance, it explicitly recognised privacy as a legitimate use case. The real test will be whether these public acknowledgements translate into policy that grants the industry durable protections, which we have not seen so far with the most recent to memory example, the Roman Storm trials.
This month delivered several landmark moments in traditional finance's integration with crypto infrastructure. Kraken became the first crypto-native firm to receive a Federal Reserve master account, granted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Through its Wyoming-chartered banking arm, Kraken can now settle US dollar payments directly on Fedwire without relying on intermediary banks, placing it on the same core payment rails as traditional banks and credit unions. The reaction from banking lobby groups was swift and critical, arguing that these so-called "skinny" accounts bypassed the regulatory framework banks operate under. This friction is instructive: the same tension that is playing out in the halls of Congress over the CLARITY Act is now manifesting in the basic mechanics of financial infrastructure.
In a closely timed development, Nasdaq announced a formal partnership with Kraken's parent company Payward, to build for tokenised stock trading, powered by the xStocks framework. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange's parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), made a strategic investment in crypto exchange OKX at a $25 billion valuation, with OKX set to offer tokenised stocks and derivatives listed on the NYSE as early as this year. BlackRock added its own landmark this month with the launch of ETHB, the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF. Investors receive approximately 82% of gross staking rewards, distributed monthly at a rate currently running at roughly 3.1% annually. The product reached more than $250 million in AUM within a few days.
The Qivalis consortium, which brings together 12 major European banks including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, and BBVA, confirmed that its euro-pegged stablecoin remains on track for a commercial launch in the second half of 2026. The token will be backed 1:1 to the euro, with at least 40% of reserves held in bank deposits and the remainder in high-quality short-term eurozone sovereign bonds.
Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets had their most visible month to date, driven primarily by the Iran conflict and the resulting shock to global oil markets. When oil prices started surging above $100 a barrel, traders flooded into Hyperliquid's crude perpetual contract over the weekend while CME markets remained closed. Daily oil trading volume on the platform peaked at nearly $1.7 billion, a staggering increase from the approximately $21 million in daily volume the contract was seeing prior to the escalation. Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune all ran features on Hyperliquid's role as a 24/7 price discovery venue for macro assets, marking a milestone for on-chain finance. JPMorgan published its own analysis highlighting how decentralised exchanges are taking share from mid-tier centralised platforms precisely because of their continuous availability.
HIP-3 markets now regularly account for between 30% and 40% of Hyperliquid's total daily trading volume, partially driven by compressed crypto-native asset volumes. Just 7 of the top 30 markets on Hyperliquid are currently crypto pairs; the majority are commodity and equity contracts launched through HIP-3 deployers. Silver was the earlier standout, and oil has since taken the lead. This trajectory underscores the market's appetite for permissionless, 24/7 access to real-world asset exposure and suggests that HIP-3 is no longer a niche extension of Hyperliquid but a central driver of its growth moving forward. Separately, Hyperliquid this month enabled portfolio margin for master accounts, allowing more sophisticated traders to execute complex, cross-collateralised strategies fully on-chain. This is a meaningful step toward institutional-grade trading infrastructure on a decentralised platform.
In broader DeFi developments, Aave V4 launched on Ethereum mainnet, introducing its hub-and-spoke architecture in a significant structural evolution for the protocol. Shortly after, Whop also brought its treasury to Aave, with Plasma incentives supporting the integration. Whop is a marketplace where creators sell digital products, community access, courses, and software, servicing over 20 million users - these users will now be able to access permissionless yield generation on their Whop holdings provided by Aave. On the prediction markets side, ICE finalised its investment in Polymarket, totalling $1.6 billion, and Kalshi raised over $1 billion in a Coatue-led round at a $22 billion valuation.
Anza also announced Constellation this month, a proposed upgrade to Solana’s block production mechanism. Constellation replaces the current single-leader block proposal with multiple concurrent proposers operating in 50ms cycles, using erasure coding and attestation thresholds to enforce censorship-resistant transaction inclusion. The proposal introduces deterministic ordering rules based on priority per compute and aims to mitigate MEV issues.
Valinor, a private credit protocol founded by ex-Blackstone operators Lily Yarboroug and Connor Dougherty, announced a $25 million seed round. Valinor provides institutional capital solutions at the intersection of credit and blockchain across asset-backed finance, corporate lending, and structured products. The round was led by Castle Island Ventures with participation from Maven11, Apollo, Susquehanna Crypto, Neoclassic Capital, and other investors across credit, fintech, and crypto. Valinor also received continued support from its initial backers, Paul Prager and Nazar Khan of TeraWulf. This seed capital will enable Valinor to scale through operational development, strategic hires, and capital deployment across a growing pipeline of deal opportunities.
Unfortunately, not all developments this month were positive. Resolv's USR minting contract was exploited due to a flaw involving a privileged minting role controlled by a standard externally owned account rather than a multisig, with no oracle checks or maximum mint limits in place. An attacker minted approximately 80 million unbacked tokens from roughly $200.000 in USDC, using the proceeds to purchase over 11,000 ETH worth approximately $23.7 million. USR briefly crashed to $0.025 on Curve before recovering to approximately $0.85. The damage may extend to the protocol's junior tranche, with debate continuing over the involvement of various tranches. USR and its staked derivative wstUSR had been accepted as collateral on platforms including Morpho and Gauntlet, creating exposure for opportunistic traders who borrowed USDC against the token at its hardcoded $1 valuation. The exploit is a sobering reminder of the infrastructure risks still present in DeFi, particularly where access controls are insufficiently hardened.
