IOSG Ventures argues that Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 has made it possible for more teams to launch perpetual markets, but not to build durable defenses. Drawing directly from Hyperliquid’s public APIs and Flowscan routing data, the report says 10 teams have registered their own perp venues on Hyperliquid and most locked roughly $40 million in HYPE to do it. Yet one venue, Trade[XYZ], still accounted for 97.8% of HIP-3 volume over the past 30 days, even after its own monthly turnover dropped 44.2%. The study says HIP-3 builder markets represented 25.8% of total Hyperliquid perpetual volume over the last 30 days, down from 57.1% in the previous 30-day window. IOSG attributes much of that shift to a booming core crypto book rather than a clean transfer of share away from HIP-3. It also argues that settlement asset choice has been decisive: every venue that used a non-USDC stablecoin has already stopped trading, while every venue still alive uses USDC. IOSG’s broader conclusion is that assets, listing slots and staking capital can all be bought, while the harder thing to copy is market infrastructure itself. In the report’s framing, the only meaningful edge seen so far has come from infrastructure such as oracles, funding-rate design, settlement logic and distribution, not from simply listing a different set of markets.

IOSG researcher Mario Chow published a data-heavy review of Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 builder market, arguing that most teams that launched their own perpetual venues on the protocol are still effectively trailing far behind the leader. Using only public Hyperliquid API data, the report says 10 teams have ever registered a perpetual DEX on Hyperliquid. Four are still trading, five have stopped, and one never launched. Over the latest 30-day window from Aug. 15 to Sept. 13, 2026, builder-deployed markets accounted for 25.8% of Hyperliquid perpetual volume, down from 57.1% in the previous 30-day period. Trade[XYZ] alone represented 97.8% of HIP-3 volume over the latest 30 days, even as its own volume fell 44.2% month over month to $64.60 billion. IOSG argues that the decline should not be read simply as competitive loss. The report says about half of the drop tracked lower real-world activity in storage and AI-related equities, while the other half was venue-specific. It also identifies settlement currency as the clearest dividing line among survivors and failures: every venue that used a non-USDC stablecoin has already stopped trading, while all surviving venues settle in USDC. With asset slots available through auctions, fee floors shared across venues, and frontend distribution largely separate from venue operation, IOSG concludes that launching another HIP-3 venue looks economically unattractive unless a team brings something competitors cannot simply buy, such as proprietary oracle infrastructure or contract design.

Protos said HTX’s June proof-of-reserves showed a drop of roughly 700 million TRX, a stash worth about $238 million at current prices cited in the report. The outlet traced that outflow back to May, when 700 million TRX left an HTX cold wallet disclosed in the exchange’s reserves report and was split across several addresses. According to the report, 200 million TRX moved through addresses tied to HTX disclosures and 180 million of that amount ended up at an unlabeled address, TEF9, which TRONScan shows voting 928 million TRX for Poloniex’s Super Representative. The other 500 million TRX was sent to TT2, an address Arkham Intelligence tags as “Justin Sun?” and one that Protos described as controversial and connected to TrueUSD redemptions. Protos also highlighted transfers made by TT2 one day before it received the 500 million TRX. Those transactions included 100 million TRX that ultimately reached an address labeled Binance-Hot 7 on TRONScan, as well as another 180 million TRX that looped through HTX 4 and then reached TEF9. The report added that HTX, since that June disclosure, has been sanctioned by the European Union and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, while the same reserves report also shifted more than $1 billion in other assets to an undisclosed “ThirdParty” custodian.

A detailed analysis published by MarsBit argues that a yield gap inside Morpho’s stablecoin lending ecosystem is being driven by risk allocation and product design rather than token incentives. Using data from Morpho’s interface captured on Sept. 8, 2026, the article compares three layers of exposure linked to Steakhouse Financial: the conservative Steakhouse USDC vault with a 7-day average APY of 3.96%, the Steakhouse High Yield USDC vault at 5.09%, and direct supply to a single Ethereum market, USDC / PT-reUSD-10DEC2026, with an implied 7-day supply yield of about 7.7%. The author says the extra return is not hidden spread capture or emissions farming. Instead, depositors who bypass curated vaults are taking on risks that conservative products avoid, including single-collateral concentration, weaker liquidity on exit, and the loss of monitoring and reallocation by professional managers. The piece also lays out how displayed rates can overstate realizable returns, since pool utilization drops when new capital enters. The article discloses that its author built the Vane tool, which charges a small fee per transaction, and sets out specific entry checks and exit signals. Those include monitoring collateral maturity, withdrawable liquidity, changes in verified curator participation, and whether the direct-market yield premium over a conservative vault narrows below 2 percentage points.

OpenReserve, a one-year-old company founded by MoneyLion veterans, has raised a $25 million seed round led by a16z crypto and secured preliminary conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter. The company wants to combine a full-service banking license with blockchain-based settlement, offering safeguarded deposits, lending, tokenized deposits, digital asset custody through a subsidiary, and stablecoin-based cross-border remittances for institutional and corporate clients. A key product is rUSD, or ReserveUSD, a planned compliant stablecoin to be issued by ReserveUSD, LLC on OpenReserve’s in-house Open Core platform, which the company says can settle a transaction in 950 milliseconds with ledger hash verification. Still, approval comes with steep conditions: OCC requires at least $210 million in paid-in capital within 12 months, launch within 18 months, and a minimum 12% leverage ratio for the first three years. With $25 million raised so far and more than $24 million already received according to an SEC Reg D filing, OpenReserve still needs another $185 million by September 2027.

Wintermute's on-chain lending vault brand Armitage has introduced two USDT vaults on the Morpho protocol, following two USDC vaults. The conservative Prime vault targets 3-4% APY, while the Select vault targets 4-6% APY, covering blue-chip and audited markets.

A thinly traded Pendle yield market triggered $36.1 million in liquidations on Morpho early Tuesday, closing leveraged positions in roughly 14 minutes while lenders were left whole. Pendle and Steakhouse Financial said the oracle worked as designed, not as a misconfiguration. The episode centered on a maturity-linked reUSD pool, a large mismatch between collateral and liquidity, and a sequence of onchain trades that PeckShield and analyst 0scar say pushed principal-token prices lower. Re Protocol said it is investigating whether the PT market price was intentionally manipulated, while no protocol involved has said manipulation occurred. The incident also revived attention on earlier public warnings about the size gap in the market and on Steakhouse’s prior comments that market-based oracles can be thinly traded and susceptible to manipulation.

About $36 million in liquidations hit lending platform Morpho after a roughly 3% move in a Pendle-linked token, according to CoinDesk. The move began when one wallet heavily bought YT-reUSD, a yield token issued by Pendle, pushing the implied annualized yield to 20% before quickly selling. That selloff drove the price of the corresponding principal token, PT-reUSD, down by about 3%. Before the drop, some traders had been using PT-reUSD as collateral on Morpho, borrowing the stablecoin USDC and then buying more PT-reUSD in a looping strategy. Those leveraged positions were left with less than 3% liquidation buffer. Morpho uses an oracle pricing model that takes the lower of the token’s 15-minute average market price and a fixed path that gradually converges to $1 by maturity. Once the market price fell below that curve, liquidations were triggered. Pendle said the price source had been configured correctly and worked as designed. Steakhouse Financial, which manages the related lending market, said lenders in its vault were unaffected, no bad debt was created, and liquidation proceeds were enough to repay the loans. The firm added that it withdrew funds during the investigation and later redeployed them, while the underlying asset reUSD was not affected.