This week, rumors of a “10 a.m. Bitcoin airdrop” blamed on quantitative trading firm Jane Street gained traction online after it was sued by court-appointed administrator Terraform Labs, but market watchers said the data did not support a consistent, firm-driven sell-off.

The accusations come a day after Jane Street was sued by administrator Terraform Labs over allegations of insider trading that worsened the collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem in May 2022.

Elsewhere in the market, demand for Bitcoin spot funds has returned after five consecutive weeks of negative net outflows. According to Farside Investors, U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs earned more than $1 billion in three consecutive days this week, with cumulative inflows of $254 million on Thursday data.

Corporate treasuries have also come under pressure. Enterprise Ether (ETH) leader Bitmine Immersion Technologies faced an $8.8 billion paper loss amid the ongoing market downturn.

Analysts reject Jane Street’s ’10am airdrop’ claims, say Bitcoin cannot be easily manipulated

Cryptocurrency investors have accused quantitative trading firm Jane Street of putting pressure on Bitcoin’s price with a daily, programmatic selloff at the U.S. market open, but market analysts and data suggest the pattern is inconsistent and no single company can force Bitcoin into a prolonged bear market.

Reports surged online a day after the court-appointed administrator of Terraform Labs sued Jane Street, alleging insider trading in connection with transactions that worsened the collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem in May 2022.

Several market watchers, including cryptocurrency influencer Justin Bechler, have argued that Jane Street’s ownership of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (ETF), known as IBIT, may be masking a net compact position in Bitcoin through hedging that does not appear in public filings. Bechler argued that Jane Street conducted coordinated algorithmic Bitcoin sales every day at 10 a.m. EST, manipulating the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to purchase the ETF at a discount.

“When Jane Street reports owning $790 million worth of IBIT stock, the filing says nothing about whether those shares are hedged by put options, offset by short futures contracts, or wrapped in a collar that makes the company’s net exposure to Bitcoin zero or even negative.” he wrote Bechler, adding that “the actual position may be a huge short position that looks long because the offsetting half of the trade is invisible under applicable disclosure laws.”

CryptoQuant’s head of research, Julio Moreno, warned that the activities described by Bechler are not circumscribed to one company. He said buying spot exposure when selling futures is a common approach for delta-neutral funds that want to capture spreads rather than directional price movements.

Jane Street’s latest 13-F filing also revealed a stake in Strategy, as well as significant positions in bitcoin mining companies Bitfarms, Cipher Mining and Hut 8.

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Vitalik sells 17,000 ETH in one month after committing $45 million to privacy

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reduced his Ether balance by approximately 17,000 ETH in the month after announcing plans to allocate $45 million worth of tokens to privacy projects.

Buterina wallets tracked Arkham held approximately 241,000 ETH in early February before a series of outflows on Tuesday reduced the total balance to 224,000 ETH.

The reduction came amid continued sales by Buterin, including approximately 2,961 Ether worth $6.6 million over a three-day period earlier this month. Onchain analysts reported that recently accelerated when he sold $7 million worth of tokens in three days.

Arkham Intelligence Data can be seen the ETH sale was routed through the CoW protocol, a decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator, using many smaller swaps rather than one vast trade, a method typically used to minimize market impact.

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Bitmine Paper Loss Closes to $8.8 Billion as Ether Market Crash Tests Cyclical Thesis

Ether corporate treasury bonds are coming under increasing pressure as the cryptocurrency market crisis deepens, with analysts warning that the market is approaching a decisive phase for investing in Ether.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies, one of the largest corporate holders of Ether (ETH), suffers a vast unrealized loss because ETH quotes are much lower than the company’s average purchase price, According to to Bitminetracker’s third-party tracker. Some estimates put Bitmine’s paper losses at $8.8 billion after the price of Ether fell in recent months.

ETH’s price has dropped 60% over the past six months, well below Bitmine’s average cost of $3,843 per token, according to Bitminetracker data.

Crypto Research Point 10x Research he said As of Monday, Ether is currently trading near valuation and cost basis levels that test whether an asset is simply in a cyclical downturn or entering a period of deeper, structural weakness.

“Investors must therefore carefully assess whether an asset is simply in a cyclical crisis or is entering a phase of deeper structural impairment.”

Bitmine continues to buy ETH despite mounting paper losses. Last week, Bitmine acquired 45,749 Ether at an average total cost of $1,992 per ETH, signaling confidence in the world’s largest Ether treasury company.

Huge Wall Street participants maintain exposure to Bitmine despite the market downturn.

Bitmine’s 11 largest shareholders, including Morgan Stanley, Ark Investment Management and asset manager BlackRock, increased their exposure to the treasury company in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Bitmine’s share price has fallen approximately 59% over the past six months and traded at $19.68 on the pre-market Monday. data from Google Finance showed.

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Aave Surpasses $1 Trillion in Loan Volume on Institutional Expansion

Decentralized finance protocol Aave has surpassed $1 trillion in cumulative lending volume, marking a historic first for the DeFi industry.

“Ten years ago, DeFi and Aave didn’t exist. They were just ideas. Today, Aave is the backbone of onchain lending, powering a new financial system that is open, global and unstoppable,” Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov he said in post X on Wednesday.

This achievement marked another step towards Aave’s goal of becoming “the largest and most efficient liquidity network in the world,” Kulechov added. “One that construction companies, banks and fintechs plug into by default, fundamentally improving liquidity and cost structures in global finance.”

In August, Aave Labs fired Aave Horizon, a fresh lending marketplace on Ethereum specifically for time-honored finance companies and other institutional investors to lend out stablecoins in exchange for real-world assets.

VanEck, WisdomTree and Securitize were among the first participants to take advantage of Aave’s institutional offering.

On February 15, Kulechov said that DeFi lending could benefit from the tokenization of “asset stocks” such as solar power, batteries for energy storage and robotics for work. It expects these assets to be worth a total of $50 trillion by 2050.

Kulechov originally launched Aave as ETHLend in November 2017, then changed its name to Aave in September 2018. Currently secures over $27.2 billion in total locked value, enabling users to earn interest on deposits and borrow instantly using cryptocurrencies as collateral.

Aave leads several of the leading DeFi lending platforms on TVL, including Morpho, JustLend, SparkLend, Maple, Kamin Lend and Compound Finance, each of which has over $1 billion in total secured value.

Over the last 30 days, Aave generated over $83.3 million in fees, almost four times more than its closest competitor, Morpho.

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Curve’s founder says DeFi needs to abandon token issuance to achieve real revenue

Decentralized finance (DeFi) can no longer rely on token inflation incentives to sustain growth, according to Curve Finance founder Michael Egorow.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Egorov said that protocols must generate real revenues and not depend on issuance to attract liquidity.

“Your profit should come from revenue, not tokens,” Egorov told Cointelegraph. “You need real, flowing revenue.” He added that if a token “does nothing, then maybe it’s better for you not to make a token at all.”

Egorov compared the current environment to the “summer of DeFi” in 2020, when triple-digit and even 1,000% annual interest rates attracted capital to fresh protocols. He said that at the time, speculative premiums were driving token prices and taking a total value lock (TVL) for the protocols.

“At this point, the news is no longer changing token prices,” Cointelegraph said, arguing that users have “reassessed the risk.”

According to DefiLlama, his comments come after DeFi’s TVL dropped by approximately 38% over the past six months. Data from the analytical platform can be seen TVL fell from $158 billion on Aug. 23, 2025, to about $98 billion on Monday.

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DeFi market overview

According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the green.

The Pippin token (PIPPIN) surged 55% as this week’s biggest gainer in the top 100, followed by the Decred token (DCR) which surged over 44% over the past week.

Thank you for reading our roundup of the most essential events in DeFi this week. Join us this Friday for more stories, insights and education about this vigorous space.