The state of AI agents in DeFi right now:

👉 19% of all onchain activity is automated or agentic
👉 76% of stablecoin transfer volume is generated by bots
👉 17,000+ agents launched since 2025
👉 $39M+ TVL held by agents directly

There is significant room for agentic activity to grow in DeFi but trust, execution, and infrastructure are still the bottlenecks.

DWF Ventures explores where this goes next in their article here.

If you are building, the DWF Ventures team is always looking to back exceptional projects. Reach out here.

Institutional capital is increasingly moving into production-grade onchain infrastructure, and the data from the past two weeks reflects that shift in concrete terms.

1️⃣ Legal & General Asset Management put $68B in funds onchain via the Calastone token network, the kind of move that marks the difference between institutions studying tokenization and institutions committing to it.

2️⃣ Stablecoin supply on Ethereum reached a record $180B, with Ethereum now holding roughly 60% of the global stablecoin market.

3️⃣ New users on Ethereum jumped 82% quarter-over-quarter, with transaction volumes hitting record highs.

4️⃣ Strategy added another 13,927 BTC, bringing total holdings past 780,000.

Meanwhile, DEXs are on pace to capture more than 25% of combined spot trading volume by year-end, and crypto-backed loans are increasing as institutional participants increasingly use DeFi protocols for capital deployment.

Our latest edition of Eyes on the Market breaks down what's happening. Read more here.

Agentic activity now covers an estimated 19% of all onchain activity.

However, most AI agents in DeFi today sit at the analyst or copilot level - meaning humans are still in the loop for execution and approval.

There are 4 levels of agent autonomy. Each level comes with its own limitation, from information overload at the analyst stage to alignment drift at full autonomy.

DWF Ventures deep dives on where agents are today.

3 defining aspects for a project's success.

Andrei Grachev explains with Cointelegraph and Robert Baggs👆

15 years ago today, Satoshi sent his final message and walked away.

"I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands."

It was.

Tokenized RWAs: ~$30B onchain with 40+ institutions actively issuing.

Tokenized U.S. Treasuries: $13.4B → up from $380M in Q1 2023.

Private credit: $14B → now the largest non-stablecoin RWA segment.

This is infrastructure, not speculation.

Source: BitcoinNews, RWA.xyz

5x outperformance by humans. In a head-to-head competition hosted by Trade.xyz, the top human outperformed the top AI agent.

More data comes from an intra-agent leaderboard from @the_nof1. Across 32 models, most agents lost money.

The ones that performed best generally shared three traits: longer hold times, lower leverage, and a prompt strategy focused on risk management over external inputs.

The leaderboard results show that agents tend to perform better within well-defined constraints, which means the human role is still needed for goal configuration.

DWF Ventures explores more here.

Products shouldn't revolve solely around a token.

Andrei Grachev explains what matters more with The Rollup 👆

Save the date! We're hosting "Onchain Assets and the Next Wave of Killer Apps?" live on our social media 🔥

Speakers:
👉 Andrei Grachev, Managing Partner, DWF Labs
👉 Artem Tolkachev, Chief RWA Officer, Falcon Finance
👉 Liam Karwan, Head of RWA & Stablecoins, Chainlink

Host:
👉 Diksha Sharma, VP of Marketing, DWF Labs

Tune in here at 2PM UTC on 30 April 2026.

The infrastructure layer of crypto is developing something it has historically lacked: the ability to absorb shocks collectively rather than individually.

That's the takeaway from the past two weeks: KelpDAO's bridge was exploited for $292M on April 18, by compromising off-chain infrastructure that a single node verifier setup left exposed. DeFi TVL dropped $13B in 48 hours.

Within 10 days, DefiUnited was formed to cover the hole. That capability didn't exist a year ago.

At the same time:
→ Tokenized RWAs crossed $30B
→ Goldman Sachs filed for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF
→ Strategy added over 37,000 BTC in two weeks

The response to crisis showed that the cost of failure is now high enough that the ecosystem is willing to organize around preventing it.

Full analysis: https://www.dwf-labs.com/research/eyes-on-the-market-when-the-infrastructure-gets-tested

Happening in 1 hour! Tune in here.

Tune in here: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1PKqrEZbavEGb

Billions flow into prediction markets, but most of it is not capital-efficient.

Capital is unable to be borrowed against, leveraged, or deployed elsewhere. Jump risk, pricing difficulty, and regulatory uncertainty have led to slower adoption.

But the structural barriers are dropping, and DWF Ventures explores what's shifting and why it matters.

If you are building, reach out to the DWF Ventures team here.

Catch up with us in our April recap👇

1. Our media presence continues to grow. In print in The Korea Times, Andrei Grachev discussed why Asia should be paying closer attention to South Korea's stablecoin opportunity.

2. Andrei was also featured in Euronews on why Wall Street is turning to tokenization and 24/7 trading.

3. FinanceFeeds featured Andrei discussing perpetual funding rates and what positioning indicators they can provide for traders.

4. We hosted the webinar "Onchain Assets and the Next Wave of Killer Apps?", live on our social media.

5. DWF Ventures explored a question the market is still uncovering: will AI agents take over DeFi? The research covers autonomous execution, risk management, and what happens when agents start allocating capital at scale.

6. DWF Ventures published a deep dive on the evolution of RWAs, from tokenized securities to perpetual-style structures and 24/7 markets. The infrastructure layer is being rebuilt in real time.

7. Additionally, the DWF Ventures team researched prediction markets as financial derivatives: why billions in capital remain locked and unproductive, and what structural shifts are starting to change that.

8. We published Eyes on the Market Vol. 9 - "From Concept to Rails." The thesis: tokenization is moving past proof-of-concept into production infrastructure.

9. Eyes on the Market Vol. 10 "Rails, Rotation, and Real-World Deployment" looks into how capital is rotating into productive onchain assets, and the data backs it up.

10. A major DeFi exploit tested market confidence, but the response was faster and more coordinated than in previous cycles. RWAs kept climbing regardless. Vol. 11 unpacks it.

11. Falcon Finance announced its integration with Ondo Finance.

Still early. Still building. See you in May 🛠

Join us for HotDesk Wednesday at our Dubai office 🤝

Register to work alongside our team and enjoy access to our premium workspace: https://luma.com/vf1t2d7s

The office address will be shared upon approval.

Prediction markets hit $6B+ in weekly notional volume across 8 of the last 15 weeks.

Kalshi is valued at $22B while Polymarket is at $12B, with a $15B round reportedly in the works.

However, a disconnect exists: a trader sitting on $500K in prediction market positions can't borrow against, leverage, or deploy it elsewhere.

The sector has institutional scale but lacks some structural frameworks for maximum efficiency.

DWF Ventures on the gap holding prediction markets back: https://x.com/DWFVentures/status/2049836194792689966

RWAs need to trade seamlessly.

Andrei Grachev explains👆

TradFi will have to compete with crypto, not the other way around.

Andrei Grachev shares with Cointelegraph's Robert Baggs 👆

Prediction markets today behave like spot markets with a built-in ceiling, and leverage has been difficult to introduce into prediction markets due to the presence of jump risk.

Every share is capped at $1 with limited upside.

Now two solutions are being built:

→ Epoch-based fee models where risk is repriced in short rolling windows
→ Perp contracts on prediction outcomes themselves, wrapping binary events in familiar derivatives infrastructure

DWF Ventures explores more here.

AI agents may already be outperforming humans in one specific area of DeFi: yield optimization.

Gizatech's ARMA application has generated over $4B in agentic volume with just $19M in AUM - a volume-to-AUM ratio that reflects how frequently the agent rebalances capital to capture yield.

The result is over 9.75% APR for USDC, clearing vanilla lending on Aave or Morpho even after fees. However, scalability remains an open question, and the protocol is not yet battle-tested at the size of major DeFi protocols.

More from DWF Ventures here.

Join us for HotDesk Wednesday at our Dubai office 🤝

Register to work alongside our team and enjoy access to our premium workspace: https://luma.com/56v1o9ga

The office address will be shared upon approval.