Balancer has put forward a governance proposal that would wind down the protocol and return its treasury to BAL token holders. The proposal was posted to the protocol’s governance forum on Monday and says Balancer would stop operating under the plan. It also revokes a buyback program that token holders approved in April. In its place, the proposal introduces a redemption model in which BAL would be burned in exchange for treasury assets. The treasury is valued at about $9 million, according to the summary of the proposal referenced by The Defiant. The item was published by The Defiant as an RSS summary, and the full article was not included in the input.

Robinhood says holders of its Stock Tokens will eventually be able to redeem them 1:1 for real shares and vote those shares, according to posts on X from crypto chief Johann Kerbrat and CEO Vlad Tenev. The company has not issued a press release, and its current legal documents still describe the products very differently. Under the existing base prospectus, the tokens are tokenized debt securities issued from Jersey, not shares, and redemptions are paid in cash rather than through physical delivery of the underlying stock. The same documents also state that investors do not have shareholder rights, including voting, participation, attendance, pre-emption, or profit-sharing rights tied to the underlying issuers. TheDefiant’s review shows another complication: shares backing some token series may be lent out, with borrowers retaining incidents of ownership during the loan term while the issuer waives voting rights on those lent securities. Robinhood says the products are backed 1:1 by real shares in secure custody, but final terms for Apple’s Series 14 say lent shares can be replaced by cash or other eligible financial instruments worth at least 100% of market value. On the market side, Robinhood Chain shows $168.47 million across stock tokens on CoinGecko, while DefiLlama puts the chain’s seven-day DEX volume at $12.25 billion and 30-day volume at $32.74 billion.

Kraken has introduced three xStocks vaults that let eligible users earn variable yield on SPYx, QQQx and NVDAx without giving up exposure to the tokenized stock or ETF they deposit. The exchange shows estimated net APYs of 2% for SPYx and QQQx and 1.8% for NVDAx, with a 25% performance fee already reflected in those rates. Rewards are paid back in the same xStock and automatically compounded. The structure routes deposited xStocks through an embedded self-custodial wallet on Ink, then into a Veda vault, with Sentora handling strategy design and risk management. Sentora bridges the wrapped assets to Solana, posts them as collateral in Kamino lending markets, borrows stablecoins against them and deploys those funds into selected DeFi strategies before swapping returns back into the original xStock. Kraken says the product is available at launch in the European Economic Area and other supported markets, but not in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, UAE or sanctioned countries. The exchange also warns that the strategy uses leverage and carries smart-contract, liquidity, bad-debt, liquidation, cross-chain and downstream-asset risks. Holders get economic exposure through the token rather than ownership rights in the underlying shares.

Cross-chain liquidity protocol Symbiosis said its bitcoin bridge was exploited on Friday after an attacker abused an infinite-mint flaw, created 46.1 billion unbacked tokens and swapped them into 4.3 Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), worth about $336,000 at the time. Blockchain security firm Blockaid said the attacker-controlled address 0x0251…3Ba2 carried out the mint and later used a decentralized exchange to convert the tokens into WBTC. Symbiosis said it has recovered 15 BTC, worth roughly $1.1 million, and moved the funds into a team-controlled multisig wallet. The protocol added that all transaction routing remains operational, while only the bitcoin bridge is temporarily offline. DefiLlama’s security tracking page lists the incident loss at $336,000, though Symbiosis has not disclosed the final total damage. The team had initially offered a 20% white-hat bounty to encourage the attacker to return the funds before Sunday in exchange for amnesty. After the deadline passed without a response, Symbiosis said the 20% reward would instead be offered as an informant bounty for information leading to asset recovery. The protocol also said it will publish a compensation plan for affected liquidity providers, but no details have been released yet.

Seattle-based AI startup Nuance has closed a $50 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Accel, Nvidia's NVentures, South Park Commons, and Define Ventures also participating. Founded in 2025 by three former Apple researchers, the company is focused on fixing latency and unnatural interactions in current AI voice assistants and virtual humans. Co-founder and CEO Fangchang Ma said many existing systems stitch together speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech components, which can introduce delays and miss details such as real-time reactions and micro-expressions in human communication. Nuance said it plans to build a single foundational model that can handle audio and video input as well as audio-video output, trained on real audiovisual data collected internally and provided by data partners. The company remains in the product development stage and plans to release a public research preview later this year. It is targeting use cases including AI interviews, public speaking practice, language learning, and enterprise sales and customer service. Nuance currently has a team of eight, and said the new funding will mainly go toward expanding its R&D staff and hiring more go-to-market and commercialization talent.

The past 24 hours brought a dense mix of regulatory, market and infrastructure developments across crypto and adjacent tech sectors. Grayscale’s head of research, Zach Pandl, said U.S. crypto regulation can keep moving even if Congress fails to pass the CLARITY Act this year, pointing to progress already underway in stablecoins, token issuance, tokenized securities and perpetual futures. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, said the company will not go public this year and that an IPO could slip to 2027, citing safety concerns and the company’s ongoing work on alignment and government cooperation. Elsewhere, Strategy published a fresh Bitcoin investor guide framing BTC as the foundation of an emerging digital capital market, while CoinShares argued hotter U.S. CPI data may cap near-term upside for Bitcoin even as failed Treasury buybacks could create a medium-term tailwind. South Korea’s digital asset basic law may be delayed into the first half of next year, Brazil’s new capital rules could force hundreds of exchanges to exit, and Chainflip disclosed a Tron USDT exploit that led to unauthorized payouts. Ripple, TRM Labs, Tom Lee, Jiang Zhuoer and others also added new data points on stablecoins, market structure, AI-linked macro risk and positioning.

Robinhood Chain has cooled sharply, according to dashboard data cited by BlockBeats from DefiLlama and The Block. Since Sept. 7, the chain’s revenue has declined लगातार, with daily revenue falling to $436,306 from a peak of $5.44 million, a drop of more than 90%. The slowdown also showed up in trading activity. DEX volume on Robinhood Chain fell to $1.243 billion, down more than 50% from its $2.611 billion peak. Gas revenue dropped to about $800,000 from a high of $6.04 million, marking a decline of 86.7%. The figures point to a broad retreat across the chain’s key onchain metrics, covering revenue, decentralized exchange activity, and gas income.

According to The Defiant, Daniele Sesta said his in-house automated market maker, Equilibra, will be deployed on Robinhood Chain and that the product belongs to the HeyAnon project token, ANON. The announcement was followed by a sharp move in the token. ANON rose about 220% over the past 24 hours, at one point climbing from $0.2159 to $1 before trading around $0.6967. Trading volume reached $3.2 million, roughly 15 times the previous day’s level. The token’s circulating market capitalization was about $10.7 million, with 15.3 million tokens in circulation and a capped total supply of 21 million. Its main liquidity is concentrated on decentralized exchanges including Uniswap V3 on Ethereum and Raydium on Solana, while the token is also listed on centralized exchanges such as MEXC, Gate, and KCEX.