Major Developments in DeFi, NFT & Gaming DeFi momentum builds: The decentralized finance sector saw moderate growth during August’s last week, buoyed by climbing crypto prices. Total value locked in DeFi protocols rose about 3.3% to roughly $149.2 billion ts2.tech. Liquid staking leader Lido Finance led the pack with over $38.1B in assets staked ts2.tech,…
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Bitcoin traded around $115,000–$117,000 over Aug. 24–25, 2025, roughly four times its level a year earlier and well above its 2021 all-time high of $69,000. Ethereum neared $4,800 and briefly hit about $4,870 on Aug. 24, 2025, approaching its record and signaling strong institutional demand. Aave deployed its v3 on the Aptos blockchain on Aug.…
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Bitcoin briefly spiked to $120,000, retraced about 2%, and triggered liquidations of over 176,000 positions totaling more than $500 million in losses. On July 18, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act, creating the first federal framework for stablecoins and requiring issuers to obtain federal or qualifying state licenses with reserve and monthly disclosure…
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Bitcoin breached $120,000 in July 2025 and traded around $123,000 by month’s end. The total crypto market capitalization surpassed $4 trillion for the first time in July 2025. MicroStrategy purchased 4,225 BTC for about $472.5 million in mid-July 2025, bringing its holdings to 601,550 BTC. Grayscale’s Digital Large Cap Fund was approved to convert into…
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Executive Summary Platform Updates Ethereum Following the May 2025 Pectra upgrade, Ethereum’s PoS chain showed robust health. Staking surged to new heights: over 35 million ETH (28.3% of supply) was locked as of mid-June cointelegraph.com, driven in part by renewed confidence after the upgrade. Analysts noted ~500K ETH was staked in the first half of…
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Circle Internet Financial’s NYSE IPO on June 5 priced at $31 per share, opened at $69, surged about 800% to over $270 within two weeks, pushing Circle’s market cap above $60 billion and the deal was oversubscribed roughly 25×. Coinbase and Kraken secured MiCA licenses to operate across all 27 EU member states (Luxembourg for…
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Blockchain is a distributed, append-only ledger where each transaction is grouped into a block cryptographically linked to the previous one, making the system tamper-resistant. Smart contracts on platforms like Ethereum are self-executing code that enforces agreements when conditions are met, operating with no downtime, censorship, or fraud. Walmart and IBM demonstrated a blockchain-based food-traceability system…
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In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, and in January 2009 Bitcoin’s genesis block was mined. The 2016 DAO hack on Ethereum triggered a hard fork. Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum in 2013, and the Ethereum Frontier network went live in July 2015, introducing smart contracts. By 2019, Walmart deployed a food traceability system using…
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Bitcoin hit a record high of about $112,500 on May 22, 2025, traded around $106,000–$110,000 in June, and held roughly 60% of total crypto market capitalization by mid-June. Total crypto market capitalization surpassed $3 trillion for the first time since late 2021, peaking near $3.4 trillion in June 2025. Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade went live on…
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