DEX

A large leveraged ARC perpetuals long on Lighter unraveled after ARC fell around 6:00 pm ET on Wednesday, according to the platform. Auto-deleveraging engaged as the LLP briefly absorbed 200 million ARC worth $14.7 million; the trader lost about 8.2M USDC while LP losses were held near $75,000 under risk caps. Lighter later set a $40 million ARC open-interest limit and shifted the pair to a capped liquidity strategy with about $100,000 USDC.

On 25 February 2026, President Vladimir Putin signed a law empowering Russian courts and investigators to seize cryptocurrency, which the act classifies as "intangible property." It takes effect ten days after publication and precedes a July 1, 2026 regime with a 300,000‑ruble annual cap for non‑qualified retail and domestic licensing rules for exchanges.

Developers have proposed XLS-56d to add Batch Transactions to the XRP Ledger, enabling atomic bundling of up to eight transfers for more predictable outcomes. The amendment remains under validator voting, and a bug discovered prior to activation led to a temporary veto recommendation. A software update is expected next week to deprecate the current version before a fixed release.

On February 24, 2026, Meteora emerged as the leading candidate on Polymarket to be named in ZachXBT's upcoming insider trading investigation scheduled for February 26. Traders pushed Meteora's implied odds as high as 53%, while MET fell over 15% to around $0.18 amid short positions and growing speculation. The Solana-based DEX currently supports $494M in liquidity and significant USDC trading activity, particularly in TRUMP-related pools.

According to Arkham, wallets attributed to Ethereum co‑founder Vitalik Buterin declined from about 241,000 ETH in early February to 224,000 ETH by Tuesday, a net outflow of roughly 17,000 ETH. In January, he said he had earmarked 16,384 ETH (about $45 million) to support privacy‑focused projects and related open hardware and verifiable software efforts.

On Feb. 23, World Liberty Financial's USD1 slipped to $0.994 and recovered within minutes, a 0.6% deviation, according to DEX Screener. WLFI attributed the move to a "coordinated attack," while Arkham's tracking shows Binance controls roughly 93% of the about $5 billion circulating supply, concentrating peg tests on one venue.

On February 24, 2026, in a client memo, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan argued that DeFi’s governance reforms and rising institutional participation could help lift crypto from its downturn. He highlighted Uniswap’s periods of higher trading volume than Coinbase and Aave’s more than $100 million in annual revenue, even as AAVE fell about 50% over the past year. Separately, Michael Saylor told Fox Business the pullback is milder than prior cycles.

HYPE's surge to $38.42 in the first week of February, following a break above the $28.4 lower high in early January, marked a shift to a bullish market structure. The subsequent decline below $30 and down toward key Fibonacci levels between $28.44 and $20.02 is viewed as a retracement within this uptrend, with $24.3 and $20 highlighted as important support areas for bulls. A drop below $23.4 or especially under $20 would signal weakening buyer strength and could invalidate the current bullish setup.

On 22 February 2026 at 15:14, weekly activity on spot decentralized exchanges reached a record 38.1 million transactions over the past seven days, largely propelled by prediction markets. Polymarket registered 19.6 million weekly transactions by mid‑February 2026, ahead of Kalshi at 17.4 million, while sector volumes have grown more than 130x since 2024 and surpassed $13 billion.

An analyst said Aster had only six daily active addresses, 51 weekly, and 346 monthly, prompting scrutiny of the perpetual DEX. Aster disputed the figure, citing a mislinked contract, while metrics show fees rising from a $5 million weekly average in January to over $8 million in early February and 91k new users in the past seven days.