Compiled by: ChainCatcher
Key Information:
- Ondo Finance founder Nathan Allman passed away unexpectedly, with President Ian De Bode taking over as CEO.
- Hyperliquid announced the launch of off-chain event prediction market contracts.
- Kelp DAO announced that rsETH has been fully restored after five weeks of repairs, following a $293 million hack.
- Strategy completed a $1.5 billion debt buyback, with BTC yielding 13.3% year-to-date.
- CME launched Avalanche and Sui futures contracts.
- Report: AI Agents have completed over $73 million in on-chain payments, with USDC becoming the default settlement asset.
What important events happened in the past 24 hours?
Strategy completed a $1.5 billion debt buyback, with BTC yielding 13.3% year-to-date.
Hong Kong's Financial Services and Treasury Bureau and SFC release consultation conclusion on virtual asset regulatory regime.
ChainCatcher news, according to a Jinshi report, the Hong Kong Financial Services and Treasury Bureau and the Securities and Futures Commission published a consultation conclusion on the regulatory regime for virtual asset advice and management services. The proposed licensing regime for virtual asset advice and management received broad market support during the consultation period.
The new licensing regime will follow the principle of "same business, same risks, same rules," aligning its scope with the relevant regulated activities under the Securities and Futures Ordinance. This new series of regimes will enhance participation in Hong Kong's digital asset market and help build a robust and secure ecosystem.
Report: AI Agents have completed over $73 million in on-chain payments, with USDC becoming the default settlement asset.
ChainCatcher news, a report titled "Who Pays the Agent?" released by crypto market maker Keyrock, in collaboration with Coinbase, Tempo, and Virtuals Protocol, states that AI Agents are rapidly becoming key participants in the on-chain economy. Data shows that between May 2025 and April 2026, AI Agents have cumulatively completed approximately 176 million on-chain transactions, with a total settlement amount exceeding $73 million. The report notes that the average single payment amount for AI Agents is only $0.31 to $0.48, indicating the formation of a machine-native micropayment economy. About 76% of transaction amounts are below the $0.30 fixed fee threshold of Visa, showing that traditional card and bank payment systems are increasingly ill-suited for AI's high-frequency, small-amount, autonomous payment demands.
Data shows that 98.6% of AI Agent payments are settled using USDC. As of Q1 2026, over 104,000 AI Agents have completed registration. The report states that on the Base network, the cost of a USDC transfer is about $0.0001, accounting for only about 0.03% of a $0.31 transaction amount, demonstrating significant cost advantages over traditional payment systems. The report believes that stablecoins are gradually becoming the "default monetary infrastructure" for economic activities between AIs and machines. However, Keyrock also warns that the current high dependency of the AI payment ecosystem on USDC poses centralization risks, meaning this emerging AI payment system relies heavily on the regulatory and infrastructure stability of a single stablecoin issuer.
Furthermore, several tech and payment companies have begun building AI Agent payment infrastructure, including Coinbase's x402 protocol, Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), Google's AP2 delegated payment system, and Visa's extended tokenized payment credential services. The report also points out that current regulatory frameworks, including Europe's MiCA regulation, the US GENIUS Act, and the EU AI Act, still lack comprehensive regulatory standards for AI autonomous financial transactions and inter-machine payments.
ZachXBT: Same entity linked to multiple BSC token manipulations, ESPORTS plunges 93% in a day.
ChainCatcher news, on-chain detective ZachXBT posted on a personal channel stating that a certain entity previously received ESPORTS, RIVER, and LIGHT tokens via Sablier vesting contracts and is directly linked to three multisig wallet signers of the LAB multisig. These BSC tokens have all experienced market manipulation incidents on centralized exchanges.
ZachXBT had previously flagged anomalies with LAB and RIVER, and now the ESPORTS token has experienced a flash crash, plummeting 93% briefly. The CEX deposit addresses linked to this entity and the LAB signer addresses have been publicly disclosed.
Crypto industry invests over $500 million in 2026 US elections, with Republicans receiving far more funding than Democrats.
ChainCatcher news, according to a Cointelegraph report, crypto-related political action committees (PACs) and industry executives have invested over $500 million in the 2026 US elections.
Data from Follow the Crypto shows that crypto industry companies and related individuals have contributed over $320 million, while crypto-related PACs still hold more than $245 million in cash; Republican-related candidates/committees received approximately $127 million in support, significantly higher than the approximately $11.5 million for Democrats.
Arthur Hayes: Monetary privacy will be "very necessary," therefore holds Zcash as second-largest position.
ChainCatcher news, Arthur Hayes stated that as large tech companies, governments, and AI expand their surveillance scope, monetary privacy will "become very necessary" in the future.
Arthur Hayes said this is why he holds the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) as his second-largest personal asset position.
Kelp DAO announces rsETH fully restored after five weeks of repairs, following $293 million hack.
ChainCatcher news, Kelp DAO announced on Monday that rsETH has been fully restored after five weeks of repairs following the April 18 attack by North Korea's Lazarus Group, which resulted in a $293 million loss. Kelp DAO stated that the final batch of 20,373.7 rsETH has been sent to the LayerZero smart contract responsible for cross-chain transfers, officially concluding the operational phase of the rsETH recovery plan.
Multiple crypto protocols contributed funds to support the restoration of rsETH through the DeFi United initiative. The first batch of 25,000 rsETH was transferred on May 13, with withdrawals reopening the following day; currently, minting, redemption, and reward operations are all functioning normally. The attack caused a chain reaction in the DeFi lending market, with the attacker using a large amount of stolen rsETH as collateral on Aave to borrow WETH, resulting in $190 million in bad debt for Aave and causing its TVL to drop from $26.4 billion to below $14 billion, where it remains, fluctuating between $13.9 billion and $15.1 billion without recovery. There were 25 crypto hack incidents in April, with total losses of $630 million.
Meme Popularity Ranking
According to data from the meme token tracking and analysis platform GMGN, as of 09:00 on May 27,
The top five popular ETH-based tokens in the past 24h are: HEX, SHIB, LINK, PEPE, mUSD
The top five popular Solana-based tokens in the past 24h are: TROLL, neet, WORLDCUP, SAOS, Buttcoin
The top five popular Base-based tokens in the past 24h are: toby, ELSA, SKI, cbETH, CYPR
Which noteworthy articles are worth reading from the past 24 hours?
Those Betting on Musk in the Inner Circle Are Reaping "Historic-Level Returns"
The largest initial public offering (IPO) in global history has entered the countdown phase. Elon Musk's SpaceX is expected to price its IPO on June 12 and begin trading the next day.
Investors are eyeing a valuation of around $2 trillion. At that level, Musk himself would directly become the world's first trillionaire. But the real drama of this deal is that the wealth won't flow only to Musk. With the disclosure of the prospectus, the value of the holdings of a group of long-time loyal lieutenants and early allies who have remained in Musk's shadow has surfaced for the first time.
Their "loyalty" and patience are being rewarded with one of the most substantial payouts in history.
Easy to Conquer, Hard to Rule: Polymarket Must Humble Itself Everywhere to Plant Its Flag Globally
Last week, the prediction market went dark in India. Users connecting to polymarket.com only saw an "This site can't be reached" error message. India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had issued a blocking order, requiring domestic internet service providers to cut off access, on the grounds that India had classified the platform as "online money gambling," a category that is completely prohibited.
Moreover, on the same day, Bloomberg cited informed sources revealing that Polymarket has appointed a local representative in Japan and is preparing to lobby for the "legalization of prediction markets," aiming to obtain Japanese government approval before 2030.
This simultaneous advance and retreat accurately describes Polymarket's situation: while the prediction market continues to grow in scale, regulatory hurdles in various countries are making progress difficult.
Deconstructing On-Chain Vaults in 10,000 Words: Eight Tracks, Who Is Rising and Who Is Declining?
This section of the report provides a quantitative analysis of the vault landscape to offer a comprehensive picture of the field and its evolution. We analyze the ecosystem by category, tracking TVL shifts across different vaults and curators.
We dissect the concentration of curators and provide an outlook on major capital flows, placing the structural shifts defining this year's vault landscape into specific context.
Vaults should not be viewed as a single, all-encompassing market but should be assessed based on their different implementations, each with distinct parameters, risk vectors, and responses to stress tests. Aggregate data only provides a partial picture; a more nuanced analytical perspective is urgently needed.
Before beginning the analysis, it's important to define the term "vault" as the foundation of our methodology.
