Robinhood made $120 million from crypto in the third quarter of 2026, down 55% from a year earlier. The rest of the company grew. Total net revenue rose 12% to $1.42 billion, and options revenue was up 31% to $399 million, in results Robinhood reported on October 27.

The crypto slump didn’t sink the quarter because something else filled the gap. Event contracts, the prediction markets business, brought in $173 million, more than six times the figure a year ago and $53 million more than crypto. That’s the second quarter in a row. In Q2 event contracts made $156 million while crypto made $100 million.

Kalshi and BitGo announced on October 22 that some Kalshi clients can now pledge Bitcoin, Ether or GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoins as collateral for loans that fund margin on Kalshi’s perpetual futures. The trader keeps the coins. The loan pays the margin. That’s the whole pitch, and it’s aimed squarely at money now trading perps offshore.

The structure has three parties. The client borrows. Kalshi Katalyst, a lending affiliate of Kalshi Prime, makes the loan. BitGo Bank & Trust holds the pledged crypto in custody. Kalshi Prime is the company’s US-registered futures commission merchant, so the margin lands with a regulated broker instead of an offshore exchange’s internal ledger. Kalshi says more custodians will follow BitGo.

ChangXin Memory Technologies begins trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Monday. A market for its shares has already existed for a week and a half — not in Shanghai, but on a decentralized derivatives exchange most of the company’s domestic subscribers have never heard of and cannot legally access.

Trade.xyz deployed a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract on Hyperliquid in mid-July, on the eve of subscriptions opening for what is Asia’s largest share sale of the year and the largest semiconductor offering ever run through China’s domestic A-share market. CXMT priced at 8.66 yuan, roughly $1.28, selling 6.69 billion shares for about 10 percent of the post-offering count and raising close to $8.6 billion. Within days the on-chain contract was trading near $8. Against a post-IPO share count of 66.881 billion, that implied a valuation around $535 billion — about 6.3 times what the underwriters had just settled on with institutional bookrunners in Shanghai.

Binance has launched the OMS Toolkit, a dedicated integration and analytics layer for Order Management Systems and trading technology providers routing institutional and professional order flow through the exchange. The product is live today for both crypto-native platforms and traditional finance OMS operators.

The toolkit addresses a structural gap that has grown more visible as institutional participation in digital assets has matured. OMS and execution management platforms sit between the exchange and the end client, centralizing order routing, execution tracking, and reconciliation across fragmented liquidity venues. That intermediary position creates a problem: providers have historically had limited visibility into how their clients actually perform on individual venues, making it difficult to optimize workflows or justify product decisions with data. Binance OMS Toolkit attempts to solve that at the exchange level rather than pushing the burden onto the provider’s own analytics stack.

The comparison between Ostium and traditional CFD brokers becomes more interesting when you stop treating it as a simple “DeFi versus TradFi” contrast and instead look at what each system is actually doing under the hood. Ostium Labs, the developer of the Ostium Labs protocol, is essentially trying to rebuild the user experience of CFD trading while changing where risk is held, how execution is sourced, and who ultimately controls custody. Traditional CFD brokers, by contrast, remain centralized intermediaries that internalize a large part of the flow, manage exposure on their own balance sheets, and operate within a comparatively opaque execution and risk framework.

Liquid, a trading platform targeting the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, has closed an $18 million Series Seed round co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital. The round also drew participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, and Sunflower Capital, alongside existing backers Paradigm and General Catalyst — a heavyweight roster that signals serious institutional confidence in the platform’s thesis.

The core premise is straightforward: modern traders don’t stop when Wall Street closes, and their tools shouldn’t either. Liquid consolidates access to over 500 markets — spanning crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO assets — into a single interface available on iOS, Android, and desktop. Users can trade with up to 200x leverage without surrendering custody of their assets. The platform launched in August 2025 and has already processed over $3 billion in trading volume across 40,000 users.

Tangem, the Swiss hardware wallet company, has published a research report arguing that the cold wallet user profile has been fundamentally misread by the broader market. The report, titled From Storage to Participation: The Rise of Active Self-Custody, was commissioned by Tangem and developed by Protocol Theory, an independent consumer research firm, drawing on data from more than 3,172 U.S.-based crypto users.

The central finding cuts against the conventional image of the cold wallet as a passive vault. Cold wallet users are 1.83x more likely to be active traders than passive holders, and short-term traders represent the single most likely cohort to use a cold wallet at 46%, compared to just 11% of passive owners. Only 9% of cold wallet users qualify as passive holders, versus 25% of centralized exchange users. Cold wallet holders are also 20 percentage points more likely to hold stablecoins than CEX users and 12 percentage points more likely to hold altcoins and other non-core assets — a pattern consistent with active, diversified portfolio management rather than long-term storage.

Decentralized finance and the traditional financial system both offer lending, trading, and asset management services. The similarity largely ends at the product description. The underlying structures — how participants are identified, how transactions are authorized, how risk is managed, and who bears it — diverge in ways that carry significant implications for regulation, access, and stability.

The most fundamental difference is intermediation. Traditional finance is built on institutions that stand between parties to a transaction, holding assets, processing orders, underwriting loans, and taking on counterparty risk in exchange for fees and regulatory compliance. A bank borrower is not a direct counterparty to a depositor; both are clients of an institution that intermediates. Even in securities trading, where buyers and sellers are nominally matched, brokers, exchanges, and clearinghouses layer between the transaction and its settlement. Each of those intermediaries is licensed, regulated, supervised, and legally accountable.

A decentralized exchange, or DEX, is a trading platform that holds no assets in custody, employs no order book in the traditional sense, and requires no registration from its users. It executes trades directly from pooled liquidity through a smart contract, and the mechanism by which it prices assets is encoded in mathematics rather than determined by a counterparty.

The central innovation enabling DEXes is the automated market maker, or AMM. In a traditional exchange — including a centralized crypto exchange — buyers and sellers are matched based on the quantities and prices at which they are willing to transact, recorded in a central order book. An AMM eliminates the order book entirely. Instead, it manages a liquidity pool: a smart contract holding two assets in a trading pair, into which liquidity providers deposit equal values of both assets. Users trade directly against the pool, depositing one asset and withdrawing the other, with the price determined by the ratio of the two assets in the pool at the time of the trade.

The NFT market’s collapse from its 2021 peak was faster and more complete than almost any comparable speculative episode in recent memory. Trading volumes that had reached billions of dollars monthly fell by more than ninety-five percent. Projects that had sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars became effectively worthless. The journalists who had written breathless profiles of digital artists selling JPEGs for millions wrote equally breathless obituaries two years later. Both sets of articles were, in different ways, missing the point.