hodler

12 May 2026, 19:49

Aptos Pushes Encrypted Mempool Upgrade to Protect Users From Frontrunning and Censorship

Aptos has introduced a proposal for a native Encrypted Mempool system that would allow users to submit transactions privately while still maintaining the speed and transparency of the network. If approved through governance, Aptos said the feature would make it the first Layer 1 blockchain to offer built-in encrypted transaction submission directly at the protocol level. Aptos Targets MEV Exploitation The system is designed to protect users from frontrunning, censorship, and orderflow manipulation. Users would be able to send encrypted transactions with a single click, while all transaction data would still become visible on-chain after block confirmation. Aptos said the proposal comes as decentralized exchange activity continues to grow rapidly. It added that DEX spot trading volumes regularly surpassed $200 billion per month in 2025 and averaged roughly $476 billion monthly during the third quarter. While decentralized exchanges removed reliance on centralized custody and settlement systems, Aptos noted that most blockchains still expose pending transactions before they are finalized, which allows validators and other network participants to observe and potentially exploit trading activity before execution. According to Aptos, this visibility has contributed to the rise of the MEV market, where validators and traders profit by reordering or exploiting pending transactions. The proposed Encrypted Mempool aims to eliminate that exposure by ensuring transaction intent remains confidential until execution while preserving the network’s same security assumptions. Aptos Labs explained that the system relies on threshold cryptography and a distributed key generation process that occurs before each validator epoch. Transactions are submitted as encrypted payloads, and validators collectively decrypt them only after a block has been ordered. The company added that traditional encrypted transaction systems face major scalability issues because validators must individually communicate and process partial decryptions for every encrypted transaction. This ends up creating heavy communication, computation, and latency costs across the network. To solve this problem, its research team developed a batched threshold decryption scheme that allows validators to generate a single partial decryption for an entire batch of encrypted transactions instead of handling them individually. Aptos said this significantly reduces communication and computation overhead while allowing most processing work to happen in advance. The company further revealed that the system prevents replay attacks, removes the need for users to compete for encryption slots, and avoids transaction resubmissions. Aptos said the encrypted mempool integrates directly into the network’s consensus protocol and introduces minimal additional latency. APT Price Action Its native token, APT, has climbed steadily over the past 30 days, rising from around $0.82 in mid-April to nearly $1.10 by mid-May. APT saw several sharp upward moves during the month, briefly crossing $1.20 before pulling back slightly. Over the past 24 hours, however, it declined by almost 2% to trade near $1.10. The post Aptos Pushes Encrypted Mempool Upgrade to Protect Users From Frontrunning and Censorship appeared first on CryptoPotato .

12 May 2026, 19:17

Ethereum’s TVL share holds at 53 percent as DeFi hacks rise

🚨 $ETH’s share of DeFi TVL holds steady at 53 percent despite a surge in major protocol hacks. Professional investors are not showing clear bullish or bearish trends as market optimism fades. 🔑 Critical point: Security lapses in DeFi protocols, rather than the Ethereum network, triggered over $298 million in losses. Continue Reading: Ethereum’s TVL share holds at 53 percent as DeFi hacks rise The post Ethereum’s TVL share holds at 53 percent as DeFi hacks rise appeared first on COINTURK NEWS .

12 May 2026, 19:00

Key XRP Metric Skyrockets 65% In Record Time, Why It Could Change Everything For Buyers

XRP transaction volume on the XRP Ledger surged 65% over the past twelve months — from 43 million to 71 million transactions — setting a new record that a digital asset treasury firm argues reflects something far more significant than speculative activity: measurable, institutional-grade utility arriving quietly on the ledger while most of the market is watching price charts. Related Reading: Bitmine ETH Holdings Cross 5.2 Million—CEO Announces New Phase For Crypto Markets The data was shared by Evernorth (@evernorthxrp), a purpose-built digital asset treasury focused on XRP, in a post on X. The firm was pointed in its framing: speculative volume on a blockchain comes in bursts. What the XRPL is recording looks different — steady, programmatic, and tied to real businesses moving real money, according to the post. XRP Ledger sees massive increase in network utility driven by transactions from crypto exchanges and other institutional users. Source: evernorthxrp on X Who Is Actually Driving The XRP Volume The top drivers behind the 12-month transaction surge, per Evernorth’s analysis, span a notably diverse institutional base. Bitstamp, one of the world’s oldest regulated cryptocurrency exchanges, sits alongside RLUSD — Ripple’s US dollar stablecoin — as well as Justoken, Braza Bank, a Brazilian financial institution settling cross-border payments on the ledger, and VERT. Exchanges, stablecoin issuers, DeFi protocols, and a Latin American bank are all settling on the same infrastructure, the firm noted — a composition that signals demand distribution rather than concentration in a single use case. The Institutional Plumbing Most Investors Are Missing The transaction surge does not exist in isolation. In a separate blog post published May 8, Sagar Shah, Chief Business Officer at Evernorth, laid out what he described as the most under-discussed XRP story of 2026 — a series of protocol-level upgrades that have quietly built the compliance and settlement infrastructure that regulated capital requires before committing to a public blockchain. The upgrades, shipped across a six-month window, include Multi-Purpose Tokens with compliance rules embedded directly into the token itself, per the XLS-33 standard activated in October 2025. Permissioned Domains went live in February 2026, enabling banks to establish closed on-chain environments where every participating wallet has been KYC’d and credentialed. Token Escrow followed days later — delivering on-chain Delivery-versus-Payment settlement, the standard that backs trillions of dollars of traditional securities trades daily, according to the Evernorth post. A Permissioned DEX, functioning as the on-chain equivalent of a regulated dark pool, completed the settlement layer. A native zero-knowledge proof verifier, developed by Boundless and XRPL Commons and currently live on testnet, adds a programmable privacy layer that allows institutions to settle large trades on a public blockchain without broadcasting transaction details to competitors, per the post. Institutional Access Has Been Compounding The protocol upgrades are running in parallel with a growing institutional access stack, per Evernorth’s analysis. CME Group launched XRP futures in May 2025, with open interest crossing $1 billion within three months — the fastest any CME crypto contract has reached that threshold. Guggenheim issued tokenized commercial paper directly on XRPL in June 2025, backed by US Treasuries and rated Prime-1 by Moody’s, with over $280 million in volume. Société Générale, a European bank managing approximately $1.8 trillion in assets, chose XRPL as one of only three public blockchains to host its EU-regulated euro stablecoin, which went live in February 2026. Five US spot XRP ETFs launched between November and December 2025, with inflows crossing $1 billion by mid-December — the fastest institutional adoption of any digital asset since Ethereum’s ETF launch, according to the Evernorth blog. Two additional protocol primitives currently in development — a native lending protocol and Smart Escrows combining zero-knowledge proofs with conditional settlement — are expected to complete what Evernorth describes as a full financial system on the ledger, covering treasury management, prime brokerage, and programmatic credit. This development marks a pivotal juncture for XRP in the current market cycle. A 65% surge in on-chain transactions driven by exchanges, stablecoin issuers, and institutional banks settling on the same ledger is the kind of structural demand signal that typically precedes sustained price appreciation in the nascent sector — not because of speculation, but because the infrastructure underpinning real utility is quietly becoming impossible to ignore. Related Reading: Something Shocking Just Happened To The XRP Price, Analysts Are Using It To Make A Bold Prediction As of this writing, XRP trades at around $1.4, consolidating above key support as the institutional buildout that analysts like Evernorth have been tracking continues to compound beneath the price chart. XRP's price sees small losses on the daily chart. Source: XRPUSD on Tradingview Cover image from Grok, XRPUSD Chart from Tradingview

12 May 2026, 18:30

DTCC to adopt Chainlink CRE for its collateral appchain integration. launch target set for Q4 2026

The DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) has announced it would adopt Chainlink’s Runtime Environment (CRE) for its blockchain-based Collateral AppChain today, May 12. The launch of the product has been slated for Q4, 2026. The Collateral Appchain platform’s objective is to automate collateral pricing and valuation, margining, and ensure settlement 24/7. This is intended to further improve the relationship between legacy markets and blockchains. DTCC processed about $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions in 2025, which has led to the need for a platform like the Collateral AppChain. The platform will operate as shared infrastructure for easing collateral movement between providers, receivers, and other financial stakeholders. The Collateral AppChain will run on Hyperledger Besu and rely on the use of smart contracts in tokenizing traditional assets, enabling near real-time collateral transfers and settlements across institutions and time zones. Chainlink’s CRE will be integrated into the platform to provide the infrastructure needed to coordinate information and workflows across both blockchain networks and traditional financial systems. It would serve as the data layer for the platform, where new collateral use cases can be expanded upon without rebuilding a data pipeline or performing custom integrations for each asset class or data type. Chainlink’s integration The Chainlink layer will handle several core functions within the AppChain. It will ensure eligibility checks and optimizations for collateral, valuation of multiple assets using on-chain price data, margin calculations, in addition to settlement instructions. “By leveraging tokenization and distributed ledger technology to modernize collateral mobility, our goal is to enable 24/7, near real-time collateral management across global markets and blockchains,” said Nadine Chakar, DTCC Managing Director and Global Head of Digital Assets, in the announcement statement. Chainlink Co-Founder Sergey Nazarov called collateral management “the killer application that institutional finance has been waiting for from the blockchain sector.” He also said CRE can “pull together and orchestrate many critical outputs in a secure, private and compliant manner.” DTCC tokenization efforts The company has continued to expand its tokenization efforts across multiple areas of finance. Earlier in the month, DTCC announced that more than 50 firms had joined a working group tied to the Depository Trust Company’s separate tokenization platform. According to the organization, limited production trades are expected to begin in July, with a broader commercial rollout planned for October . In 2024, JPMorgan, Franklin Templeton, and BNY Mellon all took part in a pilot by both DTCC and Chainlink, where the transfer of asset data to blockchain networks for tokenization purposes was explored. Collateral management in Traditional Finance DTCC’s depository subsidiary was in charge of about $114million in securities in 2025 while processing more than 25 billion trade messages yearly. Collateral management across traditional finance still remains a broken process since assets are often locked across multiple institutions and time zones, creating delays in how market risks are assessed and acted on. Tokenization is viewed as a solution to these inefficiencies. Automating workflows through smart contracts and converting collateral has the potential to reduce settlement times and free up capital tied between counterparties. The Collateral AppChain is designed to reduce reconciliation errors by using a consistent data format for collateral information flowing between blockchains and traditional systems. If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter .

12 May 2026, 18:14

ZachXBT exposes alleged 18-year-old crypto thief tied to $19 million in scams

On Tuesday, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT named Dritan Kapllani Jr. as the US-based alleged scammer linked to about $19 million (185 BTC) taken from crypto holders through social engineering. According to Zach, Dritan has been showing off cars, watches, private jets, and club trips online, while blockchain trails allegedly connected him to stolen funds. On an April 23 Discord call, Zach said Dritan joined a band-for-band contest, where scammers were boldly comparing money on screen. During the call, Dritan allegedly showed $3.68 million inside an Exodus wallet to prove he had deeper pockets than another scammer. Zach listed Dritan’s Ethereum wallet as 0x4487db847db2fc99372a985743a26f46e0b2bba6 and gave his Discord ID as 1485730459483902103. Zach links Dritan’s wallet to the 185 BTC theft and the Trenton Johnson case Zach explained that the Ethereum wallet that ends with the number 0x4487 was involved in the theft of 185 BTC, which had a value of about $13 million on March 14. The Bitcoin wallet that was involved in the robbery is bc1qc07ytw5eh32khhvhtlw63kc5yfypvezru6gnue. On March 15, Dritan received $5.3 million via his Exodus wallet from the stolen money. By the time there was the Discord discussion six weeks after the event, Zach mentioned that about $1.6 million had been withdrawn from it. A criminal complaint against Trenton Johnson was unsealed on May 11 over the same 185 BTC theft. Trenton faces up to 40 years in prison. Zach said the complaint’s Co-Conspirator 1, listed as CC-1, is Dritan, though Dritan has not been charged. Yelo, the meme coin KOL known as @yelotree, was also charged. Prosecutors accused Yelo of helping wash funds through his Miami rental car business. Yelo faces up to 30 years. Dritan’s name also came up through John Daghita, known as Lick. Zach said Dritan once did another band-for-band with John, which led to Zach’s January 2026 investigation into John’s alleged $46 million theft from the US government. John was later arrested. After that, John posted one of Dritan’s older wallet addresses in a deleted Telegram post: 0x97da0685dbba50b4cbabb0ca9e8336f4fbe41122. Zach said the address matched his own review because Dritan sent funds to the same laundering service within minutes of the 185 BTC theft. That older wallet allegedly led to more than $5.85 million across five other high-confidence social engineering thefts in 2025. Zach listed three October Bitcoin addresses: bc1qfv64ltd7fzfr9h6wcn540wv2jpadm6zswnj90w, bc1qsh43dxcze5vfdf5utqv2qyp86epz9xjweuvqj6, and bc1qtzwzn9r6a0d32mcva7txvsden8srm05gaxpz5z. He also named a September address, bc1qky6zk8fkuwg5a7nr9923ts4k3ftjj2nmvrknnx, and an August Ethereum address, 0xea9fccb3ea820f080f38e9c49fc1a201066010c7. Authorities arrest 276 suspects as Meta helps trace scam-center accounts Additionally, Zach claimed that Dritan always showed off his luxurious life on Instagram and even used the same picture with suspected actors of threats in Telegram. He said that he helped one of the affected people by researching Trenton’s and Dritan’s on-chain activity. However, Zach decided not to publish it until Dritan was officially charged. Moreover, Zach highlighted that Dritan has “tons of plot armor” because many people around him from such organizations as ACG and 41/RM Boyz were arrested for their illegal actions, but he managed to avoid being prosecuted. As far as it concerns, Dritan was a minor recently, and it can be explained by the fact that law enforcement tends to postpone official charges for minors. However, a large-scale crackdown on cryptocurrency scams organized by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation took place on Friday, resulting in 276 arrests and the closure of at least nine scam centers linked to cryptocurrency scams. U.S. government agencies and several technology companies, along with Dubai Police, Thai authorities, and representatives from other countries, participated in the investigation. The suspects now face federal wire fraud and money laundering charges. According to investigators, scam centers functioned as companies and employed recruiters, managers, and special mechanisms for deceiving potential victims. The majority of scams used pig-butchering. Scam centers usually used attractive-looking platforms with fictitious profits, and sometimes victims borrowed money for investments which then vanished. On its part, Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) provided substantial assistance to the authorities during the investigation and reported the removal of more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and the blocking of 10.9 million user accounts linked to scam centers. If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter .

12 May 2026, 18:13

Drift faces backlash over plan to convert exploit-linked assets into USDT

Drift's latest recovery proposal has sparked criticism after the protocol moved to convert remaining exploit-linked assets into a USDT-backed settlement pool.