On January 13, Polygon Labs announced agreements to acquire Coinme and Sequence for over $250 million, signaling a decisive push into regulated U.S. payments. Coinme brings money-transmitter licenses, while Sequence adds embedded wallets and one-click cross-chain orchestration that abstracts wallets, swaps, and gas. Together, they form the core of Polygon’s “Open Money Stack,” combining blockchain rails with compliant fiat access and seamless onchain UX. The move builds on strong momentum: in 2025, Polygon processed roughly $1.4B in payments services volume from large merchants like Stripe and BlindPay, rising from $57M in Jan to $239M in December, and $7.7B in payments app transfer volume, from $364M in Jan to $1.43B in Dec.
Why this matters: Polygon is repositioning from a scaling layer to end-to-end payments infrastructure and fintech company. Owning regulated on/off-ramps and wallet orchestration lets it offer banks and fintechs a single, compliant entry point for issuing and settling money onchain, while reducing reliance on third-party providers. Combined with already-proven payments traction, the Open Money Stack turns organic usage into an enterprise-ready platform, bringing Polygon closer to competing with incumbents like Stripe at the settlement and orchestration layer, where stablecoins enable faster, cheaper, and more global payments.
The Commerce Payments Protocol, jointly developed by Shopify and Coinbase, has surpassed $1M in net settled onchain payments on Base. Launched in mid-2025, the protocol brings traditional e-commerce payment mechanics—authorization, capture, escrow, refunds, and voids—fully onchain, primarily using USDC. As of mid-January 2026, it has processed ~5,400 payments, with ~$1.1M authorized and ~$1.08M settled, showing clear acceleration from early activity in mid-2025. The system supports gasless checkouts (via ERC-3009 and sponsored gas), integrates directly into Shopify Payments, and operates through a permissionless operator model that abstracts wallets, fees, and UX for merchants and buyers.
Why this matters: The protocol demonstrates that stablecoin payments can support real retail workflows without custodial intermediaries, while maintaining sub-second settlement and low fees. For Shopify, this embeds onchain payments directly into a global merchant platform; for Base and Coinbase, it validates L2s as production-grade settlement layers for commerce.
In early January 2026, Rain raised a $250M Series C at a $1.95B valuation to expand its enterprise-grade stablecoin payments stack. Onchain data from Rain-linked card programs shows rapid real-world adoption through 2025: transfer volume (collateral deposits) grew from ~$7.7M in January to ~$280M by December, while the number of active collateral addresses increased from 31 to 161 over the same period. Monthly deposit activity also scaled materially, rising from ~31k transactions in January to ~177k by year-end, reflecting broad-based growth across issuing partners such as EtherFi Cash, KAST, Dakota, Takenos, and others.
Why this matters: Rain’s trajectory highlights how stablecoin payments are scaling via card-based distribution, not standalone crypto apps. By embedding onchain collateral and settlement beneath familiar Visa rails, Rain enables enterprises to preserve global acceptance and UX while materially improving settlement speed, treasury efficiency, and cross-border economics. The data indicates this is no longer pilot activity: increasing collateral volumes, issuer participation, and transaction frequency point to stablecoins becoming a production-grade payments backend. For enterprises, this model offers a low-friction path to adopt programmable money; for the ecosystem, it reinforces that payments are one of the clearest channels through which onchain activity converts into sustained, real-world demand.
Institutional adoption of Ethereum staking is accelerating, with Lido increasingly positioned as the core infrastructure. In late 2025, WisdomTree launched a fully staked ether ETP in Europe using stETH, listed across major venues including SIX, Euronext, and Xetra. The product stakes 100% of its ETH exposure rather than holding unstaked buffers, setting a new benchmark for institutional ETH products. In parallel, market participants expect a VanEck staked ether ETF—also likely using stETH—to follow in the U.S. as early as mid-2026, pending regulatory approval. Beyond ETFs, Lido is expanding its institutional offering through Lido v3 and native staking vaults, enabling allocators to select node operators, custodians, and liquidity configurations while maintaining diversified exposure across hundreds of validators.
Why this matters: Staking is shifting from a yield enhancement to a defining feature of ETH exposure for institutions. Fully staked structures better reflect Ethereum’s economics, improve return efficiency, and reduce the opportunity cost of idle capital. At the same time, customizable vaults and delegated staking models address institutional requirements around risk management, diversification, and regulatory clarity. The broader implication is that ETH is being re-priced less as a passive asset and more as a yield-bearing position, with staking depth and liquidity becoming central to product design. As this transition continues, protocols like Lido are posed to become market infrastructure that shapes how institutional capital accesses and holds ETH.
New research on Aave Horizon highlights how integrating real-world assets (RWAs) fundamentally changes DeFi mechanics. Horizon combines permissionless stablecoin liquidity with permissioned, NAV-priced RWA collateral. Anyone can supply USDC and earn yield, but only allowlisted institutions can borrow against tokenized RWAs, whose value is updated via off-chain NAV reports rather than continuous market pricing. The result is a hybrid system where interest rates adjust in real time based on utilization, while collateral values, borrowing power, and liquidation events update discretely based on issuer and oracle pipelines (mechanics observable via Horizon pool utilization and borrow/supply flows on Dune).
Why this matters: Horizon shows that RWA-backed DeFi redefines risk and liquidity expectations. Supplier yield still comes from borrower interest, not underlying Treasury or credit returns, while liquidation risk shifts from price volatility to operational factors like NAV timeliness and oracle integrity. For institutions, this structure resembles a regulated credit market more than a traditional DeFi pool; for allocators, it means evaluating execution quality and reporting reliability alongside headline APYs. As RWAs scale onchain, Horizon offers a preview of how DeFi protocols may evolve into market infrastructure that blends open liquidity with bank-like controls, an important signal for anyone assessing the next phase of onchain credit markets.
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Nothing in this newsletter constitutes financial advice.
Always do your own research.
Dune Digest surfaces the onchain trends that matter, combining open data with institutional-grade analysis. If you’re working on dashboards or research that deserves a wider audience, get in touch.
