Hub Deep-Dives
10 long-form hub deep-dives from the DeFi Intel research desk. Each entry runs 2,000–3,500 words with a 7–9-section structure, executive summary, and bull/bear/watch-points rail.
Stablecoins in Europe
Europe is the first major economy with a comprehensive, in-force stablecoin regime. MiCA Title III (asset-referenced tokens) and Title IV (e-money tokens) went live on 30 June 2024 and have since reshaped which dollar…
MiCA Enforcement
MiCA's first eighteen months of full application have transitioned the regulation from a paper rulebook to a working supervisory regime. The stablecoin titles created the most visible enforcement footprint — USDT deli…
DeFi Summer 2 (2025-2026)
DeFi has emerged from its 2022-2024 contraction into a genuine second growth cycle. Total value locked has rebounded from a $40 billion trough in late 2022 to roughly $230 billion by April 2026, but the more important…
AI x Crypto
AI x Crypto has moved through its first full hype-and-disillusionment cycle and is now in the productive deployment phase. The ASI Alliance — the merged entity combining Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol — c…
Bitcoin ETF Era
The Bitcoin ETF era, which began on 11 January 2024 with simultaneous spot Bitcoin ETF approvals in the United States, has become arguably the most consequential structural shift in Bitcoin's market history. By April …
Bitcoin Treasury Companies
The Bitcoin treasury company has graduated from a Michael Saylor curiosity into a recognised category of public-equity vehicle. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) holds approximately 553,000 BTC, roughly 2.6% of total …
Memecoin Era
The Q4 2024 - Q1 2025 memecoin cycle was the largest attention-extraction event in crypto history. Pump.fun, the Solana bonding-curve launchpad, processed an estimated $4-5 billion in cumulative trading volume across …
Restaking Era
Restaking — the practice of pledging already-staked ETH or BTC as economic security to additional protocols — has matured from EigenLayer's mainnet launch in April 2024 into a recognisable layer of crypto infrastructu…
Stablecoin Yield Economy
Yield-bearing stablecoins have become the dominant growth vector in the dollar-stable market. By April 2026, Sky's USDS and DAI Savings Rate (DSR) collectively pay yield on circa $9-11bn of float; Ethena's USDe and sU…
Layer 2 Wars
Ethereum's L2 ecosystem has consolidated into a tier of dominant general-purpose rollups led by Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, with a mid-tier of zk-rollups (zkSync, Linea, Scroll, Starknet) and Polygon's pivoted CDK/Ag…
Subscribe to DeFi Intel research
One weekly email summarising every new paper review, incident post-mortem, jurisdiction guide and chain deep-dive. Free tier; Pro for the analyst-grade breakdowns.