DeFi kept moving through China’s National Day holiday even as Bitcoin’s sharp decline dominated the broader market conversation. Across the sector, a batch of protocol updates pointed to a quieter shift in infrastructure, product design and legal structure.
Taken together, the moves show three lines of change: trading infrastructure is expanding beyond single-category products, open DeFi is testing programmable compliance frameworks, and real-world assets along with traditional financial functions are moving on-chain more quickly.
Orca merges with Loopscale as ORCA jumps more than 70% in seven days
On Oct. 8, Solana-based decentralized exchange Orca and credit infrastructure protocol Loopscale said they would merge under a new brand, Formation. Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt will serve as CEO.
Orca has been one of Solana’s earlier liquidity infrastructure projects. Since its 2021 launch, it has processed more than $550 billion in cumulative volume. Loopscale, which launched in 2025, has facilitated more than $2 billion in on-chain lending and holds more than $150 million in deposits.
The combined entity is aimed at building on-chain capital markets infrastructure across trading, credit and asset management. The stated focus is to offer issuance, market making and financing services for assets tied to sectors such as energy, defense, robotics and AI.
Before the merger announcement, Orca had already put forward a fee-sharing proposal on Sept. 29 that would add a 10% buyback account operated by the team. On Oct. 8, the governance committee canceled the ongoing vote and moved the proposal to a new voting window running from Oct. 11 to Oct. 16.
ORCA has gained more than 70% over the past seven days following the buyback proposal and the Loopscale deal. Whether the merger produces measurable synergies, whether new business lines turn into sustainable revenue, and whether the proposal passes in the revote remain open questions.
Hyperliquid says options are next
On Oct. 7, Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said at TOKEN2049 that options will be the platform’s next product focus.
Rather than using the request-for-quote model common in many decentralized options protocols, or the vault-based DOV structure, Hyperliquid plans to place options, spot and perpetuals on the same on-chain central limit order book, or CLOB.
That matters beyond simply listing another asset class. For professional traders and market makers, a shared order book can make cross-product hedging and risk management easier while reducing liquidity fragmentation. It is a notable step in Hyperliquid’s move from a leading perpetuals DEX toward a broader derivatives exchange.
Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures open-interest market share has climbed to 11.9%, another record high. The options product is still in the planning stage, and contract design, liquidity depth and launch timing have not been disclosed.
Injective recasts itself around institutional finance and RWA tokenization
Injective published a new white paper on Oct. 7, describing its shift from an Ethereum-based anti-front-running trading protocol in its early form to a Layer 1 focused on institutional finance and real-world-asset tokenization.
The document highlights four core mechanism updates:
- a native RWA tokenization suite with permission controls designed to meet institutional regulatory requirements;
- the iAssets synthetic asset framework, which lets traders use stablecoins as collateral and track macro assets and equity indexes through oracle pricing without cross-chain wrapping or prefunding in the traditional tokenization process;
- an on-chain CLOB and native perpetuals execution module that supports roughly 600-millisecond block times, batch auctions and anti-front-running protection;
- an AI agent settlement stack that enables end-to-end automated micropayments through MCP servers, strategy-constrained signatures and the USDC-based x402 machine protocol.
The white paper also says all protocol revenue generated on Injective will continue to flow into recurring community buyback auctions for INJ, linking network settlement activity to token deflation and value capture.
The repositioning pushes Injective’s story beyond trading rails alone and toward a wider financial infrastructure role. Whether that shift gains traction will depend on the scale of RWA issuance, institutional adoption and on-chain financial activity.
Founders Fund leads a $5 million ANVL purchase
Traditional venture capital also made a direct move into on-chain credit infrastructure. On Oct. 6, Founders Fund led a $5 million purchase of ANVL, the governance token of DeFi collateral protocol Anvil. Pantera Capital, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Bullish and Protoscale Capital also participated.
Deal terms and valuation were not disclosed. The tokens came from the protocol treasury rather than a new issuance. ANVL rose more than 80% on the day, giving it a market capitalization of about $110 million.
Anvil, which is built on Ethereum, is designed to use digital assets as collateral behind financial commitments such as payments and credit. Unlike overcollateralized lending markets such as Aave that rely on interest spreads, Anvil is trying to serve as an on-chain certificate of commercial credit, using crypto collateral to back business performance obligations, buy-now-pay-later arrangements and cross-border settlement without necessarily triggering interest-bearing loans.
Anvil Research Labs also introduced an enterprise SDK to lower technical barriers for integration. Consensus, Bitcoin.com and Flexa are listed as partners.
Founders Fund partner Joey Krug said traditional commercial operations depend heavily on certainty around payment and performance, and that publicly verifiable digital-asset collateral can materially reduce the cost of credit defaults between institutions.
The purchase centered on governance tokens rather than equity, which suggests investor interest is extending from operating entities to control over on-chain financial infrastructure. Anvil’s TVL is about $13 million and has fallen nearly 90% from its peak. Whether institutional backing leads to scale growth is still the key metric to watch.
ether.fi rolls out ether.fi USD with Ethena
On Oct. 6, ether.fi, which is spinning off its LRT business, said it will launch a branded stablecoin called ether.fi USD using Ethena’s white-label infrastructure. Ethena will handle reserves, minting and redemption, and compliance.
According to ether.fi, more than $300 million in stablecoins already sits within its ecosystem. Its Cash consumer debit card has processed close to $1 billion in settlement volume and has more than 100,000 cardholders. The protocol plans to use that existing user base and idle balances to embed the stablecoin more deeply across its products and create another source of revenue.
The move reflects a broader change in DeFi. Stablecoins are no longer only a medium for payments or trading; they are increasingly used as tools for retention, treasury-like user fund management and revenue expansion. The eventual size of ether.fi USD will still depend on whether users choose to switch into the asset and whether liquidity and use cases can be built out.
Uniswap v4 Hook becomes a test bed for compliant liquidity
For years, DeFi and compliance were framed as opposites. Uniswap v4’s Hook architecture is opening another route by placing identity checks, access controls and other compliance requirements inside a programmable layer while preserving open liquidity infrastructure.
The clearest example came from the U.S. market. On Oct. 5, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said the tokenized securities venue TSV, a project involving ICE Markets and OKX, will launch on the Uniswap v4 Hook framework deployed on OKX’s Layer 2 network X Layer. The design embeds tokenized stock trading inside AMM pools and uses Hooks for identity verification and trading permissions. The initial plan covers more than 60 U.S. stocks.
That suggests compliance requirements in traditional securities do not rule out the AMM model by default. Instead, they are being translated into programmable rules that let open DeFi systems host regulated assets.
A similar model is being explored in Japan. On Oct. 2, SMBC Nikko Securities signed a memorandum of understanding with Nethermind, Uniswap Labs, Base and Nyx Foundation to develop a compliant DeFi gateway for the Japanese market. The project also uses Uniswap v4 Hook to build liquidity pools aligned with AML/CFT standards and investor-protection rules, with a focus on stablecoin and RWA trading on-chain. It is expected to go live by mid-2027.
These efforts show that large exchanges and traditional financial institutions are moving beyond lighter front-end compliance approaches and testing code-level controls instead. Uniswap v4 is emerging as one infrastructure route between open DeFi and regulated assets, though its business value still depends on regulatory approval, issuer participation and actual trading activity.
Aave Labs proposes an Aave Foundation
As DeFi products move closer to real-world finance, protocol legal structures are changing as well. On Oct. 2, Aave Labs submitted an ARFC governance proposal called “Aave Foundation Phase 1” on the governance forum.
The proposal calls for setting up an independent non-profit entity in the Cayman Islands, named Aave Foundation, to hold Aave trademarks, domains and protocol code intellectual property on behalf of Aave DAO.
Under the proposed design, the foundation would use a memberless legal structure. The first phase would only complete incorporation and appoint independent directors, supervisors and a secretary. To preserve separation of interests, neither Aave Labs nor DAO service providers would be allowed to serve as directors or supervisors.
The proposal also says technical parameter adjustments, market access decisions, treasury spending and all other protocol sovereignty would remain with AAVE DAO. Any future transfer of trademarks or code assets would still require separate on-chain governance votes.
The setup is meant to address a long-standing DAO problem: decentralized organizations usually do not have direct legal personhood, which makes it difficult to own intellectual property or sign commercial agreements. The foundation provides a legal shell without changing Aave’s business model.
Lido changes the fee structure for EarnUSD
Lido also revised the economics of one of its yield products. On Oct. 2, the protocol said it would restructure the fee model for EarnUSD from “1% fixed management fee plus 10% performance fee” to “up to 0.5% management fee plus up to 20% performance fee.” At launch, the product will use a 0.2% management fee and a 15% performance fee.
The shift lowers the fixed fee while increasing performance-based revenue sharing. In practice, that ties protocol income more closely to product results and makes the structure look more like traditional asset management.
With yields across the sector under pressure, the lower management fee can also reduce the hurdle for users while reflecting a more fine-tuned operating approach.
Monerium, Frax and Capa launch an on-chain FX pool on Polygon
Cross-border payments and foreign exchange saw another on-chain experiment on Oct. 1, when Monerium, Frax and Capa launched an EURe/frxUSD liquidity pool on Uniswap V3 on Polygon.
EURe is an e-money token backed 1:1 by euro reserves and compliant with the European Union’s MiCA framework. frxUSD is backed by cash assets and tokenized U.S. Treasurys.
If liquidity deepens, on-chain FX pools like this could become an alternative settlement channel for European companies and cross-border users. The market is still early, and trading depth, slippage and user scale have yet to mature.
What links these nine developments
Viewed together, the nine updates show a sector that is changing shape.
One part of the shift sits in trading infrastructure, where platforms are extending from perpetuals toward a broader derivatives stack that includes options. Another sits in the connection to real finance, where stablecoins, RWAs and on-chain FX are moving into clearer use cases. A third sits in governance and compliance, where protocols are building legal wrappers, intellectual-property structures and code-level compliance tools.
Most of these developments are still at the planning, partnership or pilot stage. The harder measures to watch are the same ones they have been: trading volume, liquidity, protocol revenue and regulatory execution.