Hyperliquid confirmed this week that a wallet tied to a former employee dismissed in Q1 2024 executed large short trades against HYPE. On December 17, the address deposited about $53,000 USDC and opened roughly $223,000 in leveraged shorts, including a $180,000 HYPE position. The exchange reiterated a zero‑tolerance policy on insider trading and defended the protocol's solvency.

Token swaps let users exchange crypto assets on decentralized platforms using smart contracts and liquidity pools. They underpin DeFi activities including lending, staking, yield farming, and governance while giving beginners wallet‑based control without intermediaries. Swaps provide instant access across tokens, keeping liquidity flowing and making participation permissionless.

Ondo Finance plans to expand its Global Markets product to Solana in early 2026, offering tokenized US stocks and ETFs that are backed by securities held with US-registered broker-dealers. The structure is designed so that holders receive economic exposure, including dividend effects, while compliance is enforced via Solana Token Extensions such as Transfer Hooks. Minting and redemption are expected to run 24 hours a day, five days a week, with transfers and trading available around the clock on Solana.

After Balancer disclosed a vulnerability on November 3, Gnosis validators carried out a hard fork earlier this week to strip the attacker of control over the exploited assets. With more than $116 million drained and roughly $28 million later recovered by white‑hats, the plan now focuses on DAO custody and community governance to manage restitution.

In late 2025, demand for anonymous gambling surged; in 2026, a comparison ranks five no-KYC crypto casinos. According to the review, Mega Dice offers 4,000+ games with wallet-connect, TG.Casino operates inside Telegram with a Curaçao license, Lucky Block supports high withdrawals, WSM links gameplay to the $WSM token, and Betpanda uses Bitcoin Lightning for rapid settlement.

On December 24, 2025, India's Enforcement Directorate conducted coordinated searches under the PMLA, raiding 21 residential and office locations across Karnataka, Maharashtra, and New Delhi. The case names 4th Bloc Consultants and involves allegedly fake crypto investment platforms that targeted investors in India and abroad; no arrests have been announced.

Crypto.com is expanding its US prediction market platform by recruiting a quantitative trader for an internal market‑making desk that will trade event contracts, including sports outcomes. The company says the desk is designed to improve liquidity and that it remains risk‑neutral, stressing that the market maker has no special access to customer order flow and operates under rules disclosed to the CFTC, even as critics warn such structures can resemble sportsbooks and raise conflict‑of‑interest concerns.

Alex Davis, CEO of Mavryk, argues that tokenizing real-world assets marks an inevitable next phase for global capital markets and is no longer a speculative idea. Drawing on his prior work at Tezos and in DeFi, he explains how Mavryk is building a dedicated tokenization network and the Maven platform to connect assets, lending and data in one ecosystem. Davis expects institutional and retail access to expand rapidly by 2026 as regulation, infrastructure and macroeconomic pressures converge.