DuneDigest035

Google just took a major step into prediction markets. On November 6, the company announced the integration of Kalshi and Polymarket data into its Search and Finance platforms, letting users view real-time odds on elections, economic indicators, and financial outcomes directly in search results and finance pages. This marks Google’s first foray into prediction markets, harnessing the “wisdom of the crowds” to add a new layer of insight to public information, combining Kalshi’s CFTC-regulated credibility for U.S. investors with Polymarket’s global, crypto-native reach. The integration ties into Google’s new Gemini AI “Deep Search” feature, where Gemini performs multi-step reasoning and simultaneous searches to generate fully cited reports, such as forecasting 2025 GDP growth by blending real-time market probabilities from Kalshi and Polymarket with traditional economic data. The announcement coincided with record activity across the sector: Kalshi hit an all-time high of $1.2B in weekly volume, Polymarket was near its peak with $1.1B, Opinion surged to $748M in its second week, and Myriad grew 7x week-over-week to $21M. This comes amid a flurry of partnerships and growing enthusiasm from major institutions, marking a broader recognition of prediction markets as one of crypto’s most successful products, and perhaps the first truly crossing the chasm into mainstream adoption.

On November 3, Balancer experienced a major exploit targeting vulnerabilities in its V2 Composable Stable Pools, stemming from a rounding-error precision loss that allowed attackers to drain over $128 million in assets, primarily across Ethereum and other chains like Arbitrum, Base and Sonic, mostly from WETH/staked-ETH pools like wstETH. A portion of funds has since been recovered. Despite years in production and multiple audits, the flaw slipped through, a reminder that audits aren’t foolproof and legacy code needs continuous scrutiny. The blast radius extended to forks, with Berachain’s BEX pausing and executing an emergency hard fork. This Dune dashboard provides a structured view of the attack’s impact and aftermath through key onchain metrics and analytical visualizations, quantifying chain-by-chain outflows, pool impacts, and recovery. Net-net: DeFi’s composability remains a double-edged sword, great for building, unforgiving in failure.

The Balancer hack directly triggered the xUSD depeg, exposing Stream Finance’s external fund manager to $93 million in losses tied to compromised liquidity positions. Withdrawals were frozen, and the yield-bearing token plunged from $1 to $0.24, setting off cascading redemptions. The shock spread through Morpho and Euler, where xUSD was widely used as collateral in curated vaults, amplified by recursive yield strategies that inflated TVL while creating fragile, interconnected exposures and over $285 million in bad debt. Contagion soon reached Elixir’s deUSD forcing halted support. Days before the exploit, Rekt had warned of a recursive minting loop between Stream’s xUSD and Elixir’s deUSD, where the same $1.9M in capital allegedly minted $14.5M in xUSD through circular borrowing, a financial perpetual-motion machine masquerading as “market-neutral yield.” October saw nearly 300M xUSD minted, with 40M on October 3 alone, likely the result of this loop. The fallout reignited debates around vault design, risk management and curator accountability, arguing that yield curators should pair incentives with guarantees rather than offloading opaque risks onto users. Overall, when liquidity crunches like the Balancer hack hit, they strip away illusions of stability, revealing which projects were built on solid ground, and which were swimming naked.

In a landmark step for the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance, VanEck’s VBILL fund, originally tokenized in May 2025 in partnership with Securitize to provide onchain exposure to short-term U.S. Treasury bills, has now been integrated into Aave’s Horizon RWA market on Ethereum. This new phase allows qualified institutions to use VBILL as collateral to borrow stablecoins like USDC, GHO or RLUSD, transforming the token from a passive, yield-bearing asset into an active DeFi participant. The setup leverages Chainlink’s NAVLink oracles for real-time NAV pricing, ensuring transparency and compliance while mitigating market risk. Since its launch three months ago, Horizon’s TVL has surpassed $530 million, underscoring rapid institutional adoption. This integration marks a key inflection point: tokenized Treasury funds are no longer just sitting in wallets or custodial treasuries, they’re now embedded in DeFi, powering overcollateralized onchain lending. It signals the evolution of tokenized assets from static representations to productive, composable instruments, bridging TradFi and DeFi with tangible utility, liquidity, and capital efficiency.

Lighter, a leading perpetual futures DEX and the largest application-specific zk rollup, has rapidly emerged as a top contender in the onchain trading landscape. The protocol uses custom zero-knowledge proofs to verify every order match and liquidation onchain. In the past 24 hours, Lighter generated $9.5B in trading volume, capturing 21.1% market share, just ahead of Aster (21%) and just shy of Hyperliquid’s 21.5%, signaling a near-flippening in the ongoing “perps DEX wars.” While Lighter now rivals Hyperliquid in volume, its open interest (OI) remains much smaller, Hyperliquid holds 52%, Aster 18%, and Lighter 11%. Some analysts note that such high trading volume combined with relatively low OI can sometimes indicate wash trading or incentive-driven churn, a pattern occasionally seen in early-stage points programs. Still, with $1B+ TVL, the highest 7-day average daily volume ($10.3B), Chainlink Data Streams as its official oracle solution, and expansions into RWAs, forex, equities, and prediction markets, Lighter is positioning itself as the next major contender to Hyperliquid’s dominance.

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes financial advice.

Always do your own research.

Dune Digest is all about cutting through the noise and surfacing the most relevant onchain trends. If you have insights, dashboards, or data-driven stories that belong in the Digest, drop your suggestions here.

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Dune Team