Mois : octobre 2025

Floki (FLOKI), a cryptocurrency project that started as a memecoin and has since evolved with its own ecosystem, has seen its price jump nearly 23% in the last 24 hours after the launch of its first exchnage-traded product (ETP) in Europe.

The new offering, called Valour Floki SEK ETP, launched on Oct. 3 on Sweden’s Spotlight Stock Market, making Floki the first BNB Chain ecosystem token to secure an ETP besides BNB itself.

Developed by Valour, a subsidiary of DeFi Technologies, the product is designed for both retail and institutional investors who want exposure to the FLOKI token without holding crypto directly.

Floki, which exists on both the Ethereum and BNB chains, has an ecosystem that includes a play-to-earn non-fungible token (NFT) game, a DeFi asset locker, an NFT marketplace, and a crypto education platform.

The launch coincides with renewed momentum in BNB Chain projects. BNB itself surged past $1,150 this week to a new all-time high, before seeing a correction to just below that level.

Happy Uptoper! In today’s « Crypto for Advisors » newsletter, Gregory Mall, chief investment officer at Lionsoul Global, explains the evolution of bitcoin-backed lending in both decentralized and centralized financial systems.

Then, Lynn Nguyen, CEO of Saros, answers questions about tokenized stocks in « Ask an Expert. »

Thank you to our sponsor of this week’s newsletter, Grayscale. For financial advisors near San Francisco, Grayscale is hosting an exclusive event, Crypto Connect, on Thursday, October 9. Learn more.

– Sarah Morton

Crypto as Collateral: What Wealth Managers Should Know About the Resurgence of the Institutional Loan Market

Lending and borrowing have long been central to financial markets — and crypto is no exception. In fact, collateralized lending emerged in the digital asset space well before Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols gained prominence. The practice itself has deep historical roots: Lombard lending — using financial instruments as collateral for loans — dates back to medieval Europe, when Lombard merchants became renowned across the continent for extending credit secured by movable goods, precious metals, and eventually securities. By comparison, it has taken only a short time for this centuries-old model to conquer digital asset markets.

One reason lending against crypto collateral is so compelling is the unique liquidity profile of the asset class: top coins can be sold 24/7/365 in deep markets. The speculative nature of crypto also drives demand for leverage, while in some jurisdictions Lombard-style loans offer tax advantages by enabling liquidity generation without triggering taxable disposals. Another important use case is the behavior of bitcoin maximalists, who are often deeply attached to their BTC holdings and reluctant to reduce their overall stack. These long-term holders typically prefer borrowing at low loan-to-value ratios, with the expectation that bitcoin’s price will appreciate over time.

The History of the Collateralized Lending Market

The first informal bitcoin lenders appeared as early as 2013. But it was during the ICO boom of 2016-2017 that institutional-style players such as Genesis and BlockFi emerged. Despite the crypto winter of 2018, the centralized finance (CeFi) market expanded, with retail-focused firms like Celsius and Nexo joining the fray.

The rise of DeFi in 2020-2021 further supercharged lending. Both CeFi and DeFi platforms proliferated, competing aggressively for depositors. But as competition intensified, balance sheet quality deteriorated. Several major CeFi players operated with significant asset–liability mismatches, leaned heavily on their own governance tokens to bolster balance sheets, and relaxed underwriting standards, especially with regard to haircuts and LTVs (loan-to-value ratios).

The fragility became clear in the second quarter of 2022, when the collapses of the stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) and the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) triggered widespread losses. Prominent CeFi lenders — including Celsius, Voyager, Hodlnaut, Babel, and BlockFi — were unable to meet withdrawal demands and entered bankruptcy. Billions of dollars in customer assets were erased in the process. Regulatory and court-led post-mortems pointed to familiar failings: thin collateral, poor risk management, and opacity around inter-firm exposures. A 2023 examiner’s report on Celsius described a business that marketed itself as safe and transparent while in reality issuing large unsecured and under-collateralized loans, masking losses, and operating in what the examiner likened to a « Ponzi-like » fashion.

Since then, the market has undergone a reset. The surviving CeFi lenders have generally focused on strengthening risk management, enforcing stricter collateral requirements, and tightening policies around rehypothecation and inter-firm exposures. Even so, the sector remains a fraction of its former size, with loan volumes at roughly 40% of their 2021 peak. DeFi credit markets, by contrast, have staged a stronger comeback: on-chain transparency around rehypothecation, loan-to-value ratios, and credit terms has helped restore confidence more swiftly, pushing total value locked (TVL) back toward its 2021 record levels.(DefiLlama).

Source: Galaxy Research

Does CeFi have a role next to DeFi?

Crypto has always been driven by an ethos of on-chain transparency and decentralization. Yet CeFi is unlikely to disappear. Following the crisis, the space is more concentrated, with a handful of firms, such as Galaxy, FalconX, and Ledn, accounting for the majority of outstanding loans. Importantly, many institutional borrowers continue to prefer dealing with licensed, established financial counterparties. For these players, concerns around anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) exposure as well as regulatory risks, make direct borrowing from certain DeFi pools impractical or impermissible.

For these reasons, CeFi lending is expected to grow in the coming years — albeit at a slower pace than DeFi. The two markets are likely to evolve in parallel: DeFi providing transparency and composability, CeFi offering regulatory clarity and institutional comfort.

– Gregory Mall, chief investment officer, Lionsoul Global

Ask an Expert

Q. How will Nasdaq’s integration of tokenized securities into the existing national market system and related investor protections benefit investors?

This step immediately brings three thoughts to mind — distribution, efficiency, and transparency. It’s a game-changer for everyday investors who aren’t engaging much in traditional finance. Blockchains are becoming more scalable each year, and I love the idea of efficient, composable Decentralized Finance (DeFi) use cases for tokenized securities. Plugging these assets into our industry means we’ll also see far more transparency compared to legacy systems.

Stats back this up — the global tokenized asset market is hitting around $30 billion this year, up from just $6 billion in 2022. This means broader distribution — imagine a small investor in rural America earning 5 to 7% yields on tokenized stocks without needing a broker’s blessing. Moving from traditional finance to DeFi, I’ve seen myself how blockchains can optimize while also being more transparent and inclusive. This isn’t just hype — it’s about helping more people build wealth through smarter, digitized tools that level the playing field.

Q. What are the challenges investors might face if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approves Nasdaq’s proposal to trade tokenized securities?

It’s not going to all be plain sailing. Firstly, there will be technical hurdles that need to be overcome, and these will affect timeframes as well as user experience for investors. Mixing blockchain infrastructure with legacy systems is not straightforward, and this will likely affect early adopters, as well as the initial prevalence of liquidity.

Early investors will also need clearer guidance on regulation. There’s a need for crystal-clear guidance on token rights, as investors may face issues related to events such as dividends or voting. When introducing new technologies, it is also essential to take security very seriously. Cyberattacks have spiked 25% year-over-year, and we’ve all seen the high-profile cases related to blockchains. Though you would assume this would be a priority for Nasdaq.

All of these issues are solvable as far as I’m concerned. So I’m not too worried.

Q. Nasdaq has mentioned Europe’s trading of tokenized stocks is « raising concerns » because investors can access tokenized U.S. equities without actual shares in companies. How will Nasdaq’s proposal to offer « the same material rights and privileges as do traditional securities of an equivalent class » benefit investors?

Here, we’re talking about benefits that include access to the same rights as traditional securities — voting, dividends, and equity stakes. In Europe, investors have been able to acquire securities without full rights, which I view as similar to holding an exclusive non-fungible token (NFT) without gaining the membership benefits it grants. Imagine owning a Cryptopunk but not having access to the PunkDAO and the venture opportunities available to holders.

Nasdaq is essentially trying to prevent investors from getting shortchanged. This is a major benefit because you are not just getting access to a more dynamic but limited version of the asset — you’re still getting all of the perks. When I think of the potential here, it’s exciting — imagine fully fledged stocks with 24/7 trading, lower fees, and significantly shorter settlement times.

– Lynn Nguyen, CEO, Saros

Keep Reading

BlackRock’s spot ETF IBIT now allows for in in-kind creation and redemptions of bitcoin.Canadian Royal Mounted Police have dismantled a crypto trading platform along with a seizure of over $56 million for operating illegally.The Bank of England Governer has stated the stablecoins could form a major shift in the banking system.

Once the face of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), OpenSea is in the middle of a reinvention. The marketplace that helped turn digital collectibles into a global craze is now trying to position itself as a Web3 home where users can seamlessly trade not just NFTs but also tokens and, eventually, a broader range of DeFi activity and other on-chain assets.

Earlier this year, OpenSea announced that it would be coming out with a SEA token, creating much anticipation around what the token would be used for and what the platform would become. Little is known about the token, but OpenSea’s CMO Adam Hollander shared that the OpenSea Foundation would release more details in early October.

In this conversation with CoinDesk, Hollander discusses how the platform is expanding beyond NFTs, the long-delayed SEA token, and the challenge of keeping both longtime users and newcomers engaged in an increasingly crowded crypto market.

CoinDesk: With the rebrand of OpenSea, who are you trying to compete with and where is this pivot heading?

Adam Hollander: I would say we broadly want people to view OpenSea as their Web3 home, which means that you should be able to easily trade any type of asset across any chain or wallet extremely seamlessly and easily, regardless of your level of experience in crypto.

So if you are somebody that is in the trenches trading every day, then we have a lot of very robust features for you. And if you’re somebody that doesn’t have a lot of experience in crypto, then we’re going to be building a lot of very easy to use seamless features to onboard you into crypto and make sure that you can experience what it’s like to trade tokens, NFTs, other types of assets on-chain.

So if you are moving away from the NFT marketplace and include trading on the platform, what are some of those features you mentioned that will be available?

We are the world’s largest NFT marketplace. We expect we will always be the world’s largest NFT marketplace, and we care very deeply about that customer base and creators and artists and so we are not moving away from NFTs. We are evolving and expanding our platform so that it can be a single place where you can come and trade anything. Now the natural evolution of that over the last few months has been token trading, and so you can already come to OpenSea, and you can trade fungible tokens now across 22 chains extremely seamlessly

But we are building new features, literally, by the day.

I wouldn’t say that our vision is limited to just tokens and NFTs, there are a variety of really interesting things that people are doing now on-chain with real world assets and tokenization of things in the real world, anything from pokemon cards to real estate.

And not to say that OpenSea has immediate plans in any one of these particular places, but we are viewing this as a single place that you can call your web3 home for virtually anything that you would be doing on-chain.

Given that NFT volume is not near the highs it once was, and given that the exchange market has become so saturated, how do you plan to keep up?

The volume today for NFTs is not what it was at the peak when, literally, Jimmy Fallon and presidents and everyone else were talking about NFTs every day. That being said, there were several billion dollars of volume in just Q1 of this year alone on NFTs. And so it is a vibrant market.

We are actually seeing significant upticks in that market over the course of the year. And when it comes to token trading and memecoins, and everything else that happens on-chain, outside of NFTs, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of volume that are happening in market, and OpenSea is seeing significant growth.

Since we launched our new rewards program, we’ve seen almost 400% growth in volume just on OpenSea, and that’s really exciting for us, because it means that we have built an incredible product.

The airdrop announcement came from the OpenSea foundation 10 months ago. It hasn’t been released yet, so why have people been waiting so long?

The foundation is releasing the token. I would likely challenge the assumption that tokens are supposed to be released quickly from the day that they’re announced. There are lots of examples of tokens that have been hinted at or even formally announced and didn’t actually come out for years subsequent and I would say there’s no right or wrong way to do this, other than, of course, to validate that everybody wants it to happen immediately, because everybody’s very excited about being rewarded for all of the time and energy and loyalty and volume that they drove through a site like OpenSea.

I would simply say to you that it’s very important for the OpenSea foundation that this is not a memecoin to be released and forgotten. If you look at the majority of coins to your example, they tend to go up into the right very quickly, and then they immediately go down into the right very quickly.

And most of them, we’re not really talking about anymore, and that’s because they don’t really serve a purpose. They weren’t released for any particular reason other than the company decided, let’s launch a token. And people are always excited about the opportunity to have free money dropped on their heads, but at the end of the day, what’s important for us is that SEA token needs to be an integral part of the OpenSea ecosystem.

We are being very deliberate in our creative discussions with the foundation around ways that that can transpire, and a lot of what we’re trying to do is innovative, and a lot of what the foundation is planning simply takes time.

We believe that we will release our token when the time is right to release it. That goes for what’s right for OpenSea, what’s right for the community, what’s right for macro factors. There’s a number of calculus that go into that. When we release it, we believe the market will appreciate that the foundation and OpenSea have been extremely thoughtful and deliberate about the way that this token should exist as a part of our ecosystem not as a memecoin to be released and forgotten, and hopefully as something that has a lot more staying power than the tokens people are used to seeing airdropped.

There has been some chatter online from OGs who may be angry at newcomers who might come onto the platform and find ways to get free money, while the OGs have stuck around for years might not get their fair share.

How do you balance bringing on new users on the platform and incentive them to stay on post airdrop while also keeping your original users engaged who may feel like the new folks are looking for ways to make fast money?

We of course, appreciate all of the historical users that have driven volume through OpenSea in the last seven to eight years, and we have a plan where we see those individuals, and the Foundation believes that it’s going to be able to reward them appropriately.

We also as a business, need to have people continuously using the platform and leveraging it today as one of their main tools in crypto, and we also believe that we’re going to be able to effectively reward people that are participating with our platform today and participating in our different phases of rewards. And so I would simply say that it does not serve OpenSea or the Foundation well to have entire cohorts of customers, whether it’s our long-term most loyal customers upset, and it also does not serve us well to have people that are using the platform actively today upset.

And so we have a number of plans in place that we think we’re going to be able to do a very good job at rewarding everybody in an effective way. I can’t speak to the details of that, other than to say, You know what we’ve said in our announcements, that if you’ve been on OpenSea for years and you’ve driven a lot of historical volume, we see you, you are not forgotten. And if you’re using the platform today and you’re participating in our rewards programs, then you will be meaningfully considered by the Foundation at TGE.

Read more: OpenSea Teases SEA Token With Final Phase of Rewards Amid App Launch

« Maintenu à flot ». Alors que certains auraient pu penser que sa fortune venait de Telegram, Pavel Durov a révélé dans le podcast aux presque 5 millions d’abonnées de Lex Fridman, qu’elle venait en fait des bitcoins qu’il a achetés en 2013 et que ces BTC l’avaient carrément « maintenu à flot ». Dans cet entretien de plus de quatre heures, il livre notamment ses convictions sur la première crypto du marché et se remémore les gens qui riaient de son choix à l’époque. Morceaux choisis.

Pavel Durov, un maximaliste Bitcoin de la première heure

En 2009, Bitcoin a vu le jour et rapidement, ce dernier a su séduire les amateurs de nouvelles technologies. Ainsi, dès 2013, Pavel Durov, le fondateur de Telegram, a décidé d’investir dans cette nouvelle monnaie numérique. À l’époque, le prix du BTC était d’environ 700 $. Un prix qui peut paraître dérisoire aujourd’hui, mais qui représentait déjà une somme conséquente à l’époque.

Dans une interview accordée à Lex Fridman, Pavel Durov a donc révélé avoir acheté ses premiers milliers de BTC en 2013. Bien évidemment, le prix du BTC a connu de nombreuses variations depuis 2013 et il raconte que certains de ses proches se sont moqués de lui lorsque le prix est passé sous les 200 $. « Je m’en fiche », leur a-t-il alors répondu.

Il les a donc conservés précieusement, expliquant à qui voulait l’entendre qu’il croyait en cette technologie et qu’il ne comptait pas les vendre :

« Je n’ai pas l’intention de le vendre. Je crois en cette chose. Je pense que c’est ainsi que l’argent devrait fonctionner. Personne ne peut vous confisquer vos bitcoins. Personne ne peut vous censurer pour des raisons politiques. »

Pavel Durov, patron de Telegram – Source : podcast Lex Fridman (YouTube)

Pavel Durov au micro de Lex Fridman – Source : YouTube

Le BTC, son passeport pour la liberté

Au fil des années, l’investissement de Pavel Durov dans Bitcoin s’est avéré être un choix judicieux. Le prix du BTC a, comme tout le monde sait, explosé depuis, lui permettant de financer son style de vie :

« Certaines personnes pensent que si je suis capable de louer de beaux endroits ou de prendre l’avion en privé, c’est parce que j’extrais d’une manière ou d’une autre de l’argent de Telegram. Comme je l’ai dit, Telegram est une opération déficitaire pour moi personnellement. Bitcoin est quelque chose qui m’a permis de rester à flot. »

Pavel Durov, patron de Telegram – Source : podcast Lex Fridman (YouTube)

Dans la suite de l’entretien, le patron de Telegram a partagé sa vision de l’avenir de Bitcoin. Il a notamment prédit que le BTC atteindra un jour 1 million de dollars, une prédiction basée sur l’impression monétaire effrénée des gouvernements :

« On en arrivera au point où le bitcoin vaudra 1 million de dollars. Les gouvernements impriment de l’argent comme si de rien n’était. Personne n’imprime de bitcoins. »

Pavel Durov, patron de Telegram – Source : podcast Lex Fridman (YouTube)

Enfin, il a évoqué le projet TON, lancé par Telegram en 2018. Rapidement abandonné en raison de problèmes réglementaires, il a été repris par la communauté et a été rebaptisé The Open Network. Relativement fier de ça, il a rappelé, cette blockchain avait récemment dépassé Ethereum en termes de volumes de transactions NFT.

Il est intéressant d’entendre Pavel Durov se confier sur sa vie personnelle et sur l’origine de sa fortune, lui qui est plutôt discret lorsqu’il s’agit de parler de lui. Le fondateur de Telegram préfère en général s’exprimer sur des sujets liés à ses activités professionnels et à ce titre, il a dernièrement lancé de graves accusations contre les autorités françaises. Il leur reproche notamment une ingérence caractérisée dans les dernières élections législatives en Moldavie qui ont vu la victoire des proeuropéens. M. Durov aime sa liberté de mouvement, sa liberté de parole, et manifestement, il a acquis tout ça grâce à Bitcoin.

L’article Bitcoin : Pavel Durov, le fondateur de Telegram, révèle qu’il a acheté des milliers de BTC en 2013 est apparu en premier sur Journal du Coin.