Happy Wednesday, August 19, 2026.
The price of ETH is up nearly 20%, trading at $2,262 at the time of writing. ETH hit a daily high above $2,300. The price surge followed remarks from the White House in a briefing featuring President Trump, SEC Chair Paul Atkins, and leaders of Coinbase, Robinhood, Kraken, Gemini, and Chainlink. During the briefing, Trump noted that the CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. market in a legal fashion.
RWA tokenization platform Securitize proposed to onboard HINC, the Neuberger Securitize High Income Tokenized Fund, as a collateral asset on Aave Horizon, Aave's institutional RWA lending market on Ethereum. HINC is a tokenized high yield credit fund sub-advised by Neuberger Berman, which manages approximately $567 billion in AUM. The fund invests primarily in high yield corporate bonds.
It is NAV-priced, non-rebasing, and targets an illustrative annualized return of ~7.21% based on a 10-year index blend. Tokenized shares are issued as permissioned DSTokens on Ethereum under Securitize's DS Protocol. KYC/AML is enforced at the token transfer level. If approved, HINC would be accepted as supply-only collateral on Aave Horizon, allowing investors to borrow USDC, GHO, and RLUSD against it. . The proposal is currently at the ARFC stage pending community feedback and technical assessment.
GnosisDAO approved a proposal to make Gnosis Chain the first instance of the Ethereum Economic Zone. The vote authorizes transitioning Gnosis Chain from a standalone Layer 1 into a ZK-proven rollup that settles natively on Ethereum. EZZ rollups support synchronous composability with Ethereum, allowing a contract on Gnosis Chain to call a contract on Ethereum L1 and use the result in the same atomic transaction.
The feature brings interoperability with every asset, pool, oracle, and liquidity venue on Ethereum accessible by the rollup in a single atomic call. The Gnosis validator set will be wound down as settlement moves to Ethereum's validators. A genesis activation is targeted for December 2026 to January 2027. with bidirectional composability and real-time ZK proving to follow later in 2027.
In other news, Binji joins Ethlabs. Arbitrum hits 10k RWA holders. The Interfold activates its FOLD TGE. Base announces Base Batches 4. And Obol runs clusters on two clients.
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