Polymarket USD Stablecoin

Polymarket will replace bridged USDC.e with a new native collateral token, Polymarket USD.

Polymarket announced a major infrastructure upgrade rolling out over the next few weeks that will replace bridged USDC.e with a new native collateral token, Polymarket USD, backed 1:1 by USDC. The shift transitions Polymarket to have direct control over its settlement layer, reducing reliance on third-party bridges. The upgrade also includes a rebuilt trading engine and new smart contracts designed to improve execution speed, lower gas fees, and streamline the overall system. According to 0xngmi, more than $1.25 billion is currently held in Polymarket user wallets. During the transition, all open orders will be canceled during a short, pre-announced maintenance window. Developers and advanced users will need to make updates.

Ethena is expanding the collateral backing of its USDe stablecoin to include overcollateralized institutional lending, liquid real-world assets (RWAs) beyond t-bills, commodity basis trades, and prime lending. Previously, USDe’s yield was primarily driven by crypto perpetual futures funding rates. USDe is an overcollateralized, yield-bearing stablecoin, backed by crypto assets and delta-neutral strategies managed by Ethena. The shift aims to create a more resilient, diversified reserve portfolio that can perform across different market conditions, reducing reliance on funding rates alone. Ethena states that the core architecture and redemption mechanism remain unchanged, and all new strategies are conservatively sized and overcollateralized.

Chaos Labs, a risk service provider to the Aave DAO, announced it is stepping down from its role managing risk for the Aave protocol. The departure follows the recent exits of other major contributors, including the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) and BGD Labs. Chaos Labs said the decision was driven primarily by a disagreement over how risk should be managed, particularly as Aave V4 expands. In response, Stani Kulechov stated that Aave Labs was open to increasing Chaos Labs’ compensation to $5 million, but did not support other aspects of their proposal, which he says included making Chaos Labs the sole risk manager, replacing Chainlink as the default oracle provider, and adopting Chaos Labs’ vaults as the default. Kulechov confirmed that risk management responsibilities will continue without disruption.

Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter launched txdelay.xyz, a tool that tracks average Ethereum transaction inclusion times. He estimates that the current delay is around 6 seconds, but expects it to increase by ~2 seconds under ePBS (EIP-7732), a feature planned for the upcoming Glamsterdam hardfork. He noted ePBS has a similar effect to increasing slot times to 16 seconds, meaning Ethereum would need ~8-second slots to return to today’s inclusion delay. The tracker uses data from ethPandaOps’ Xatu nodes, comparing when transactions are first seen in the mempool versus when they are included onchain.

• Resolv postmortem

• Polygon stablecoin sandwich

• Aave v4 hits $10m deposits

• Staked ETH hits ATH

• Opsec SEAL Frameworks

• Drift Protocol incident update

• Sreeram on AI x crypto

• BitMine adds $71k ETH

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.

Polymarket announced a major infrastructure upgrade rolling out over the next few weeks that will replace bridged USDC.e with a new native collateral token, Polymarket USD, backed 1:1 by USDC. The shift transitions Polymarket to have direct control over its settlement layer, reducing reliance on third-party bridges. The upgrade also includes a rebuilt trading engine and new smart contracts designed to improve execution speed, lower gas fees, and streamline the overall system. According to 0xngmi, more than $1.25 billion is currently held in Polymarket user wallets. During the transition, all open orders will be canceled during a short, pre-announced maintenance window. Developers and advanced users will need to make updates.

Ethena is expanding the collateral backing of its USDe stablecoin to include overcollateralized institutional lending, liquid real-world assets (RWAs) beyond t-bills, commodity basis trades, and prime lending. Previously, USDe’s yield was primarily driven by crypto perpetual futures funding rates. USDe is an overcollateralized, yield-bearing stablecoin, backed by crypto assets and delta-neutral strategies managed by Ethena. The shift aims to create a more resilient, diversified reserve portfolio that can perform across different market conditions, reducing reliance on funding rates alone. Ethena states that the core architecture and redemption mechanism remain unchanged, and all new strategies are conservatively sized and overcollateralized.

Chaos Labs, a risk service provider to the Aave DAO, announced it is stepping down from its role managing risk for the Aave protocol. The departure follows the recent exits of other major contributors, including the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) and BGD Labs. Chaos Labs said the decision was driven primarily by a disagreement over how risk should be managed, particularly as Aave V4 expands. In response, Stani Kulechov stated that Aave Labs was open to increasing Chaos Labs’ compensation to $5 million, but did not support other aspects of their proposal, which he says included making Chaos Labs the sole risk manager, replacing Chainlink as the default oracle provider, and adopting Chaos Labs’ vaults as the default. Kulechov confirmed that risk management responsibilities will continue without disruption.

Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter launched txdelay.xyz, a tool that tracks average Ethereum transaction inclusion times. He estimates that the current delay is around 6 seconds, but expects it to increase by ~2 seconds under ePBS (EIP-7732), a feature planned for the upcoming Glamsterdam hardfork. He noted ePBS has a similar effect to increasing slot times to 16 seconds, meaning Ethereum would need ~8-second slots to return to today’s inclusion delay. The tracker uses data from ethPandaOps’ Xatu nodes, comparing when transactions are first seen in the mempool versus when they are included onchain.

• Resolv postmortem

• Polygon stablecoin sandwich

• Aave v4 hits $10m deposits

• Staked ETH hits ATH

• Opsec SEAL Frameworks

• Drift Protocol incident update

• Sreeram on AI x crypto

• BitMine adds $71k ETH

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.

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