$4,135 payout for Charles, one of our beta testers on @VerticalPropX .
His take on Vertical
His experience using the app
How his challenge went
He breaks it all down here 👇
DeFi promised to replace the banks. This year it couldn't even hold onto its own money.
TVL dropped 39% in 2026, from $115B in January to around $70B by Q2.
Meanwhile stablecoin supply barely moved, still sitting near $315B.
That gap is the real story. Money didn't leave crypto, it left risk. Leverage got unwound, yields compressed, and Q2 became the most-hacked quarter on record by incident count. Lower dollar losses got sold as progress, but security researchers are calling it what it actually is: attackers hitting smaller, softer targets instead of the hardened ones. Capital consolidating into fewer, safer protocols isn't DeFi maturing. It's DeFi shrinking back to what people actually trust
Vertical CEO breaking down the actual architecture behind onchain propfirms is worth the watch, the gap between simulated execution and real onchain settlement layer is the part most people still get wrong.
Pour ce 4ième épisode de CAPITAL CIRCLE :
J'invite @TheHaapik,CEO de @VerticalPropX, qui nous explique tout sur :
- Les crypto prop firms
- Les dessous de cette industrie
- Pourquoi l'onchain va révolutionner ce marché ?
La vidéo : https://t.co/DLc6uaSAua
Tether is now the 17th biggest holder of US Treasuries on earth. Bigger than most sovereign nations.
$141B in T-bills, backing a "stablecoin" everyone treats like digital cash.
Strip the branding and what's left is a private company running unregulated central bank operations with none of the oversight, no deposit insurance, no lender of last resort, just a quarterly attestation and a prayer. $310B of global crypto liquidity sits on that foundation. Nobody's stress-tested it because nobody's had to, yet.