HashStack #012

Cantor Fitzgerald, SoftBank, Tether and Bitfinex announced a joint venture, 21 Capital, which will be seeded with $3B to invest in Bitcoin. 

Fragmetric introduced FragBTC, a yield-bearing BTC on Solana, in collaboration with Solv Protocol and Zeus Network

Lombard partnered with Eigenlayer to bring LBTC into the eigenlayer restaking ecosystem. 

Bitcoin Core’s PR of removing the 80 byte cap of OP_RETURN data carrier size received lots of controversy, with some worried that this might overload the network. 

Bitcoin miner, Riot Platform, received a $100M secured credit facility from Coinbase.

Ethereum core devs have decided to remove EOF from the Fusaka upgrade due to technical uncertainties. 

Scroll announced the sunsetting of Session 2 incentive campaign with the final mark snapshot taken on 30th April.

Ant Digital announced Jovay, an Ethereum L2 for RWA that is able to support 100,000 TPS. 

Unichain recorded significant growth in April with bridged TVL surging past $250M following the launch of a liquidity mining campaign on 15 April. 

Base now overtakes Arbitrum as the largest ecosystem in terms of TVS. 

Base and Scroll reached stage 1 decentralization

SOL strategies announced a convertible note facility of up to $500M which will be used to acquire more SOL. 

Solana powered DePIN network, Helium, announced partnership with AT&T

Solana developers fixed a bug that would have enabled unauthorized token withdrawals and unlimited token minting. 

Jupiter announced Universal Send on Jupiter Mobile and also launched Ultra v2, an upgrade to their DeFi swap engine. 

Solana-powered DePIN, Natix partners with Grab to cooperate on mapping and autonomous driving. 

Helius Labs released information about the upcoming Agave 2.2 update that will boost Solana block size and increase TPS. 

DeFi Dev Corp intensifies its Solana treasury strategy by acquiring a validator business with a delegated stake of $72.5M.

Fetch.ai introduced ASI-1 Extended, an enhanced iteration of ASI-1 mini which is its own Web3-native LLM. 

Nous Research released Atropos, its open-sourced framework for reinforcement learning environments. 

Gensyn announced RL Swarm 72B, allowing anyone to participate in training a 72B model on advanced math dataset (DAPO-Math-17K). 

Bagel outlined Return of Experience, a new metric that tracks how much progress a RL agent makes per unit of experience. 

io.net launched Container-as-a-Service, allowing users to quickly and easily deploy containers with one line of code. 

Sentient announced the formation of the Sentient Verifiable Compute Consortium consisting of Lit Protocol, Lagrange and Nillion Network to collectively drive verifiable AI models. 

Alibaba announced the release of the Qwen3 family of models that consists of 2 MoE and 6 dense models. Its flagship model is Qwen3-235B-A22B that outperforms leading models like DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking. 

Both Visa and Mastercard announced support for AI Agent commerce. Visa released an Intelligent Commerce Platform that allows agents to make recommendations and execute transactions on behalf of users. Mastercard also unveiled Mastercard Agent Pay that will scale agent commerce through their partnership with Microsoft. 

AI Robotics Startup, Rice Robotics will partner with Floki Inu to launch a custom FLOKI AI-powered robot with $RICE as main utility token. 

Sahara AI announced the launch of testnet on 19 May. 

Spectral Labs announced the opening of its autonomous AI agent hedge fund vault on Hyperliquid. 

Flock.io announced partnership with Alibaba Cloud for model co-creation, leveraging on Flock’s federated learning.

SEC ends its investigation into Paypal’s PYUSD. 

Mastercard unveiled the launch of a global stablecoin payment system to provide a more seamless transaction experience for users and merchants. 

Visa and Bridge partnered to provide fintech developers with access to stablecoin-backed cards through a single API. 

Ethan partners with TON Foundation to introduce USDe and sUSDe across the TON ecosystem. 

RLUSD is now supported on Aave.

Paypal and Coinbase partnered to drive adoption of PYUSD through fee-free purchase on Coinbase platform and seamless 1:1 redemption of PYUSD. 

Paypal introduced 3.7% yield for users with PYUSD holdings in Paypal or Venmo. 

Circle announced the launch of Circle Payment Network to drive cross-border transactions and real-time settlement of regulated stablecoins. 

Tether’s USDT goes live on Kaia blockchain. 

Visa expands its stablecoin efforts as it invests in BVNK.

DogeOS received $6.9M led by Polychain to develop the Dogecoin app layer. 

DeFi asset management firm, Sentora, completed a $25M Series A funding round led by New Form Capital. 

AI-powered social engineering defence platform, Doppel, raised a $35M series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. 

Fuze, a digital asset infrastructure firm, completed a $12.2M Series A round led by Galaxy and e& Capital. 

Camp Network, which is building a blockchain for enforceable IP, has completed a $25M Series A round led by 1kx and Blockchain Capital.

Polygon spin-off, Miden, completed a $25M seed round led by a16z Crypto, Hack VC and 1kx to develop a compliant privacy solution for institutions. 

Nous Research completed a $50M Series B funding led by Paradigm to deploy a decentralized AI training network on Solana.

Pendle PT has launched as a collateral option on the Aave Core Market and hit the $250M quota. 

Yala and Plume announced strategic partnership to to enable Bitcoin holders to earn yields from tokenized fixed income assets through Yala RealYield. 

Lumoz announced the launch of Lumoz MCP server. 

UXLINK partners with Solv Protocol