By Jae, PANews
China’s National Day holiday did little to slow crypto markets. While attention stayed on Bitcoin’s sharp drop, PANews said a quieter shift was unfolding across DeFi: infrastructure upgrades, product expansion and a steady push toward tools that can connect with regulated finance. Across nine developments, three themes stood out — trading stacks are expanding beyond single-asset categories, open DeFi is starting to absorb compliance requirements through programmable design, and real-world assets along with more traditional financial functions are moving on-chain.
Orca and Loopscale combine under the Formation name
On Oct. 8, Solana-based DEX Orca and credit infrastructure protocol Loopscale said they would merge and operate under the Formation brand, with Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt serving as CEO.
Orca, one of the earlier liquidity venues in the Solana ecosystem, has handled more than $550 billion in cumulative volume since launching in 2021. Loopscale, a peer-to-peer credit market, has facilitated more than $2 billion in on-chain loans since going live in 2025 and holds more than $150 million in deposits.
PANews said the combination is aimed at building on-chain capital markets infrastructure that bundles trading, credit and asset management. The stated target is to offer issuance, market making and financing services for assets tied to emerging sectors including energy, defense, robotics and AI.
Before the merger news, Orca had already put forward a fee-sharing proposal on Sept. 29. The proposal would add a 10% buyback account operated by the team. On Oct. 8, the governance committee canceled the ongoing vote and rescheduled it for Oct. 11 to Oct. 16.
ORCA has gained more than 70% over the past seven days, according to PANews, helped by the buyback proposal and the Loopscale deal. The report added that it remains unclear whether synergies will materialize, whether the new business can generate durable revenue, and whether the proposal will pass governance.
Hyperliquid sets its sights on on-chain options
On Oct. 7, Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said at TOKEN2049 that options would be the platform’s next product focus. Rather than rely on request-for-quote systems or DOV-style vault structures used by many decentralized options protocols, Hyperliquid plans to place options, spot and perpetual futures on the same on-chain central limit order book, or CLOB.
The significance goes beyond listing another asset class. A shared book would give professional traders and market makers a common liquidity venue for cross-product hedging and risk management instead of splitting liquidity across separate systems.
PANews described the move as a key step in Hyperliquid’s push from a leading perp DEX toward a broader derivatives exchange. The report said Hyperliquid’s perpetual open interest market share has climbed to 11.9%, a new high. Product details, liquidity depth and a launch timeline have not been disclosed.
Injective rewrites its pitch around institutional finance and RWAs
Injective released a new white paper on Oct. 7 and said it has evolved from an Ethereum-based anti-front-running trading protocol into a Layer 1 centered on institutional finance and RWA tokenization.
The paper highlighted four major design points:
- a native RWA tokenization suite with permission controls intended to meet institutional compliance requirements;
- an iAssets synthetic asset mechanism that lets traders post stablecoins as collateral and track external macro assets and equity indexes through oracle pricing, without cross-chain wrapping or pre-funding used in traditional tokenization flows;
- a native on-chain CLOB and perpetual derivatives execution module that supports batch auctions and front-running protection with roughly 600-millisecond block times;
- a settlement stack for AI agents that uses Model Context Protocol servers, strategy-constrained signatures and the USDC-based x402 machine protocol to enable end-to-end automated micropayments.
The white paper also said all protocol revenue generated on Injective will continue to flow into recurring INJ community buyback auctions, tying network settlement activity to the token’s deflation and value-capture framework.
For PANews, that marks a broader positioning shift from trading infrastructure toward financial infrastructure. Whether the market accepts that framing will depend on RWA issuance, institutional usage and on-chain financial activity.
Founders Fund buys $5 million of ANVL governance tokens
Traditional venture capital is also stepping further 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 joined. Deal terms and valuation were not disclosed, and the tokens came from protocol treasury holdings rather than a new issuance.
ANVL rose more than 80% that day, with market capitalization at about $110 million, according to the report.
Anvil is built on Ethereum and aims to use digital assets as collateral for financial commitments tied to payments and credit. Unlike overcollateralized lending markets such as Aave that rely on loan spreads, Anvil is designed to act as an on-chain proof layer for commercial credit. The protocol’s goal is to back business performance, buy-now-pay-later transactions and cross-border settlement with crypto collateral, without necessarily triggering interest-bearing loans.
To support real-world integration, Anvil Research Labs also introduced an SDK for enterprises. PANews said Consensus, Bitcoin.com and Flexa are already partners.
Founders Fund partner Joey Krug said traditional business operations depend heavily on certainty around payment and performance, and that publicly verifiable digital-asset collateral can materially reduce the cost of credit default between institutions.
PANews also noted that the firms bought governance tokens rather than equity, extending their interest from protocol entities to governance rights over on-chain financial infrastructure. Anvil’s TVL is currently around $13 million and is down nearly 90% from its peak.
ether.fi rolls out ether.fi USD with Ethena
ether.fi, which PANews described as spinning off its LRT business, said on Oct. 6 that it will launch its own stablecoin, 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 debit card has processed nearly $1 billion in cumulative settlement volume and has more than 100,000 cardholders. The protocol plans to build on that existing user base and turn parked balances into a new source of yield through deeper stablecoin integration.
The report said this reflects a broader shift in how DeFi protocols use stablecoins. They are no longer just a medium for payment or trading, but also a tool for retention, treasury-like cash management and revenue expansion. Scale, though, will depend on whether users convert into the asset and whether liquidity and use cases take shape.
Uniswap v4 Hook emerges as a compliance layer for tokenized assets
One of the clearest signals came from experiments that pair DeFi infrastructure with regulated market access. PANews said Uniswap v4’s Hook mechanism is opening a path where compliance logic can sit inside a programmable execution layer, letting open liquidity infrastructure serve regulated assets.
On Oct. 5, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said the tokenized securities venue TSV, built through a partnership between ICE Markets and OKX, will launch on a Uniswap v4 Hook architecture deployed on X Layer, OKX’s Layer 2 network. The setup is intended to embed tokenized stock trading inside AMM pools while using Hook-based identity checks and trading permissions to meet compliance needs. The initial plan covers more than 60 U.S. equities.
In that model, regulated securities rules do not rule out AMMs altogether. Instead, Hook-based controls are being tested as a way to carry those rules inside open DeFi infrastructure.
The same logic is being applied in Japan. On Oct. 2, SMBC Nikko Securities signed a memorandum of understanding with Nethermind, Uniswap Labs, Base and Nyx Foundation to jointly develop a compliant DeFi gateway for the Japanese market. The project is also based on Uniswap v4 Hook and is designed to build liquidity pools that satisfy AML/CFT and investor-protection requirements, while exploring on-chain trading for stablecoins and RWAs. PANews said the rollout is expected by mid-2027.
The report’s takeaway is that major trading venues and traditional capital are moving away from front-end-only compliance approaches and toward code-level compliance embedded in infrastructure. Even so, the commercial value of this route still depends on regulatory approvals, issuer participation and real trading volume.
Aave Labs proposes a foundation to hold protocol IP for the DAO
As DeFi protocols move closer to real-world finance, their legal structures are changing too. On Oct. 2, Aave Labs submitted an ARFC governance proposal titled “Aave Foundation Phase One” on the governance forum. It proposed creating an independent non-profit called Aave Foundation in the Cayman Islands to hold Aave trademarks, domains and protocol code intellectual property on behalf of Aave DAO.
The proposal uses a memberless legal structure. In the first phase, the foundation would only handle registration and appoint independent directors, supervisors and a secretary. Aave Labs and DAO service providers would be barred from serving as directors or supervisors to maintain separation of interests.
Operational sovereignty would stay with AAVE DAO, including parameter changes, market listings and treasury spending. Any future transfer of trademarks or code assets would still require individual on-chain governance approval.
PANews said the move addresses a longstanding weakness for DAOs, which generally lack traditional legal personality and therefore cannot directly hold IP or sign commercial contracts. A foundation structure provides a legal shell without displacing decentralized governance.
Lido changes EarnUSD fees
Lido also revised the pricing of one of its yield products. On Oct. 2, it changed EarnUSD fees from a 1% fixed management fee plus a 10% performance fee to a maximum 0.5% management fee plus a maximum 20% performance fee. At launch, the active schedule will be 0.2% management fee and 15% performance fee.
That lowers the fixed component and increases the variable component tied to results. PANews said the shift moves the product away from a fixed-income approach for the manager and toward one that is more performance-linked, resembling the fee logic used by traditional asset managers. In a lower-yield environment, the change cuts user entry costs while pushing protocols toward more refined operations.
An on-chain FX pool launches on Polygon
Cross-border payments and foreign exchange also appeared in the holiday roundup. On Oct. 1, e-money institution Monerium, hybrid algorithmic-and-collateralized stablecoin protocol Frax, and liquidity orchestration service Capa launched an EURe/frxUSD liquidity pool on Uniswap V3 on Polygon, bringing euro-dollar foreign exchange trading on-chain.
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. Treasuries.
PANews said that if liquidity deepens, on-chain FX could become an alternative to traditional cross-border settlement for European businesses and cross-border users. For now, the pool remains early, and trading depth, slippage and user adoption still need time to develop.
Three themes now define the latest DeFi push
PANews concluded that DeFi product development is concentrating around three areas: broader trading infrastructure that stretches from perpetuals into options and a fuller derivatives stack; deeper links between stablecoins, RWAs, on-chain FX and real financial use cases; and the addition of legal entities, IP structures and compliance systems that mirror parts of the traditional financial system.
Most of the developments, however, are still at the planning, partnership or pilot stage. The report said trading volume, liquidity, protocol revenue and regulatory implementation remain more useful measures than narrative changes or partner lists alone.