If you find yourself in the middle of a Venn diagram between a Bloomberg terminal, self-custody, and securities law (as our reader, you most likely do), then this was your week.
The past few days brought three launches that push DeFi further into institutional territory:
On Tuesday, Morpho Midnight went live, a lending protocol built for fixed-term, fixed-rate credit. See our analysis.
Yesterday, Uniswap announced Permissioned Pools. Built with tokenization platforms including Superstate and Securitize, it lets tokenized equities and real-world assets trade through AMMs while preserving issuer-defined controls.
The same day, Zama opened a private beta for Confidential RFQ, which executes trades onchain without revealing asset, size, or direction.
DeFi is levelling up, and so are regulators.
On Wednesday, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce put out her first public statement on onchain vaults and lending.
Her main message: moving vaults and lending strategies onchain doesn’t move them out of the securities laws. The key variable is discretion. The more a vault depends on someone actively picking investments, setting rates, or reallocating capital, the more likely it is to raise investment-contract, investment-company, or adviser questions. Fully autonomous designs sit at the safer end of the spectrum.
Sounds like common sense, right? For some actors, it might also sound like a warning shot. Peirce noted that anyone doing “headstands, backflips and other gymnastics” to argue the law doesn’t apply “will have a painful fall.”
Still, the message was less “ban” and more “do the analysis, and come talk to us if you land inside the perimeter.”
Which is indicative of where DeFi is heading: one step closer to both the trading floor and the regulator's desk.
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Housekeeping: Starting next week, the Blockstories editorial team is taking a two-week summer break. We’ll be back in August. Enjoy your summer!
In today’s Briefing:
Ramp rolls out stablecoins to 70,000 businesses
BlackRock, Strategy and Galaxy address Bitcoin’s quantum threat
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Crypto exchange BitMEX shuts down. After 12 years of operation, the platform will shut down on September 23, 2026. The closure follows years of declining market share and growing competition from centralized and decentralized exchanges. BitMEX was the first platform to launch and popularize the modern crypto perpetual swap. ❌
Ramp rolls out Stablecoin Accounts. More than 70,000 businesses using the finance operations platform can now pay vendors in USDC or USDT and earn up to 3.25% in rewards on their stablecoin balances. 💸
Alpaca partners with Broadridge. Through the integration, eligible investors holding tokenized U.S. equities via Alpaca’s broker network will gain access to proxy voting, investor communications, regulatory disclosures, and voting-entitlement reconciliation through Broadridge’s platform. Alpaca reportedly custodies ~90% of the underlying shares backing all tokenized equities. 🤝
TOP STORY
BlackRock, Strategy and Galaxy Join Forces to Address Bitcoin’s Quantum Threat
Quantum threat: Yesterday, a group of leading financial institutions and Bitcoin companies, including BlackRock, Strategy, ARK Invest and Galaxy, announced the formation of the Bitcoin Security Consortium. Its members have pledged a combined $15 million over three years to strengthen Bitcoin’s long-term security, with a focus on risks posed by quantum computing.
Why it matters: The pledge is small against what it protects. Roughly 7 million BTC, some $455 billion at current prices, sits in addresses a quantum computer could one day drain, and the day may be closer than assumed: In March 2026, separate studies from Google Quantum AI and researchers at Caltech and UC Berkeley suggested that breaking the cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other blockchains may require far less powerful quantum computers than previously thought. The findings remain theoretical, and no such machine exists today, but some estimates now place the threat in the early to mid-2030s.
The threat explained: What such a machine could do is derive any wallet’s private key from its public key, forge a valid transaction, and move the funds. That only works once the public key is out in the open, which for many Bitcoin address types happens when the owner first spends, though older formats expose it from day one. Exposure, in short, is a question of whose key is visible.
Coins that cannot run: For active holders, a visible key is a solvable problem, since they can move their funds to an unused wallet. But there are 2.3 million exposed BTC that likely won’t move. Those coins sit in addresses untouched for five years or more, most of them lost or abandoned, with no owner left to move them. Nearly half, around 1 million BTC, is associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, making the network’s largest exposed holder the one entity who cannot bring their coins to safety.
The post-quantum race: These vulnerabilities are not unique to Bitcoin. Other major blockchain networks face similar risks, prompting the foundations behind them to launch dedicated efforts to prepare for a post-quantum future. The Ethereum Foundation established a Post-Quantum Security team in January 2026 and aims to have key parts of Ethereum’s post-quantum infrastructure in place by around 2029. The Solana Foundation, meanwhile, has proposed a gradual migration that would accelerate as the threat becomes more credible.
Bitcoin’s dilemma: Bitcoin has proposals but no foundation to carry them: any change needs developers, miners, businesses, and users to agree, and the decentralization that anchors its appeal is also what makes agreement slow.
Investor concerns: That slowness has started to carry a price. In January, Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at investment bank Jefferies, cut Bitcoin’s 10% allocation from one of his model portfolios, citing long-term quantum risk. While the direct market impact was likely limited, it helped bring the issue to the attention of more institutional investors.
What $15 million buys: The consortium is the industry’s answer to those allocators, made up largely of firms whose businesses depend on confidence in Bitcoin. Its $15 million will fund what funding can fix, from research on signature schemes to migration tooling. It remains unclear, however, exactly how the funds will be used, as each member will independently choose which developers, researchers and organizations to support.
Galaxy’s lead: Galaxy has been more specific about its own contribution. On Tuesday, the firm announced a separate initiative offering up to $5 million in grants for researchers and developers working on quantum-resistant transaction designs, new signature systems, migration tools for wallets and custodians, and independent security audits.
Outlook: Alongside the grants, both Galaxy and the consortium plan to publish regular updates on Bitcoin’s progress toward quantum resistance. The funded research may well arrive on schedule. Whether the network can also agree on deploying it by the early 2030s will require a historic coordination effort.
Alex Pruden is co-founder and CEO of Project Eleven, a leading company in post-quantum cryptography for digital assets.
What makes Bitcoin’s post-quantum transition so difficult?
Bitcoin has no central foundation or development team that can simply choose a post-quantum signature scheme and enforce a migration timeline. Many Bitcoin developers also see themselves as protocol stewards, not managers responsible for coordinating the ecosystem.
The second challenge is technological risk. Post-quantum cryptography is still relatively new and not yet battle-tested. In my view, however, that is exactly why these schemes should enter testing environments now, while the industry still has time to study them. Waiting until a capable quantum computer arrives would force unfamiliar cryptography into production under emergency conditions, when rushed implementations and software mistakes become far more likely.
This challenge becomes even more pressing once you consider that upgrading the underlying blockchains is only the first step. Wallets and custodians would need to support new address types, every holder would need to migrate, and MPC systems, bridges, stablecoin infrastructure, and other services may require fundamental redesigns. The coordination challenge is therefore much larger than the research problem itself.
What should the industry do before the threat becomes imminent?
The good news is that I do not think quantum computing will destroy Bitcoin or other blockchains. But if the industry moves too slowly, the transition will be far messier, leading to greater losses and uncertainty that could weigh on adoption and asset prices.
Ideally, we never reach that point. So it is encouraging to see large institutional holders step up, work together and fund research. But the next step cannot just be backing individual projects. They also need to help develop and execute a coordinated roadmap.
Arbitrum Foundation: Head of Foundation, Europe 🇪🇺
Bitpanda: Director, Product Growth, Vienna 🇦🇹
Centrifuge: Tokenization and Investment Operations Specialist, Global 🌐
Gnosis: CTO, Germany 🇩🇪
M1 Capital: (Senior) Director, Institutional Sales & Capital Raising, Amsterdam 🇳🇱
Offchain Labs: Head of Enterprise, Global 🌐
Particula: Director Digital Asset Ratings (EMEA), Germany 🇩🇪
Robinhood: Product Marketing Manager, International, Luxembourg 🇱🇺
Augustus | $180 million | Series B : Builder of a global bank providing international fintechs and banks with direct access to U.S. dollar and euro accounts and payment rails.
Digital Asset | $10 million | Undisclosed : Development company behind the Canton Network, a Layer 1 blockchain focused on institutional use.
Cordant | $8 million | Seed : Provider of real-time infrastructure for monitoring and coordinating money movement across financial systems.
Tenor Labs | Undisclosed | Seed : Fixed-rate lending platform on top of Morpho Midnight.
What do you think of today's briefing?
Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.
