Coinbase has opened account registration to users in mainland China, expanding the identity documents and residential addresses accepted during onboarding. Users can now complete verification with a Chinese national identity card and a mainland China address. The previous process required a Chinese passport alongside a residential address in Hong Kong. Coinbase staff confirmed the registration change after users began sharing screenshots from the updated verification flow on July 14. Coinbase has not published a separate launch announcement or disclosed which…
DeFi
Which DeFi platforms dominate in TVL, volume, and active users?
DeFi has become a core part of crypto, powering on-chain lending, swaps, stablecoins, and yield products. The opportunity is real, but outcomes depend on protocol quality, risk controls, and market conditions.
UniSwap
Uniswap is a decentralized exchange wearing a DeFi skin. It is an onchain trading protocol where users keep custody and interact through smart contracts. There is no account to freeze, but there is also no support desk that can reverse a mistake.
Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid is a trading-first, onchain order book venue that prioritizes execution quality and transparent mechanics over generalized DeFi design. Its strongest advantages come from unified trading and smart contract state, clear funding and fee rules, and protocol liquidity tooling, while its main tradeoffs center on leverage risk, L1 operational exposure, and bridge assumptions.
Sky Protocol
Sky Protocol is a modern stablecoin stack built around USDS and SKY, with a clearer separation between simpler savings lanes and higher-risk yield lanes like stUSDS. Sky can suit users who want self-custodial stablecoin utility, collateralized borrowing, and a more structured approach to stablecoin yield.
Compound
Compound is a decentralized money market that lets users supply assets and borrow against collateral. It is one of the oldest names in DeFi lending, but the product surface in 2026 is split between legacy v2-style markets and the newer Compound III design.
Aave
Aave is a non-custodial liquidity protocol where users supply assets to earn interest and borrowers take collateralized loans. Aave fits users who want non-custodial borrowing and lending with a mature protocol track record, and who understand liquidation and collateral risk.
Morpho
Morpho is a decentralized lending protocol built around isolated markets. Instead of placing all assets into a single shared pool with global risk, Morpho’s design centers on individual markets that each pair one collateral asset with one loan asset, with parameters that do not change after deployment.
PancakeSwap
PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that lets users trade directly from a wallet. It started as a BNB Chain-native AMM and evolved into a multichain product suite that includes swaps, liquidity, farms, and advanced routing.
Lido
Lido is a liquid staking protocol that lets users stake ETH without running validators and without locking capital into an illiquid position. Users deposit ETH and receive stETH, which represents staked ETH plus accrued staking rewards over time.
GMX
GMX is a decentralized spot and perpetuals exchange that runs directly from a user’s wallet. It focuses on low-friction leverage trading with oracle-based pricing and a pool-backed execution model rather than a traditional centralized order book. GMX is available on Arbitrum and Avalanche.
Synthetix
Synthetix is a derivatives liquidity protocol focused on perpetual futures and related on-chain trading primitives. Instead of matching every trade peer-to-peer, Synthetix aims to route trades against protocol-backed liquidity with risk controls that can support high-throughput perps.
Jupiter
Jupiter is a Solana-first trading superapp that focuses on execution quality. It routes swaps across multiple liquidity sources, adds automation layers like limit orders and recurring buys, and offers a perpetuals venue for leveraged long and short exposure.
0x Protocol
0x is trading infrastructure that helps apps embed token swaps without building their own liquidity network. Instead of being a single DEX, 0x routes swaps across multiple liquidity sources and exposes that routing through developer-facing APIs and contracts.
THORChain
THORChain is a cross-chain liquidity protocol that functions like a DEX at the network level. It is not a single app. It is an independent Layer 1 that holds liquidity in protocol vaults and coordinates swaps between native assets across supported chains.
Pendle
Pendle is a yield trading protocol that turns future yield into tradable assets. It does this by splitting yield-bearing tokens into principal and yield components, letting users lock fixed yields, speculate on rates, and route protocol revenue through sPENDLE.
Ethena
Ethena is a synthetic dollar protocol on Ethereum that issues USDe and a yield-bearing variant, sUSDe. Its design aims to keep USDe around $1 by holding spot crypto collateral and offsetting price exposure with short derivatives hedges, while passing net yield to participants.
dForce
dForce is a DeFi ecosystem built around three things: a stable unit, a lending layer, and additional modules that route capital into different risk lanes. The ecosystem aims to keep stablecoin utility and borrowing capacity connected instead of forcing users to stitch multiple protocols together.
Polkadot
Polkadot is a multi-chain network built around a Relay Chain that provides shared security and a model for connecting application-specific chains, commonly called parachains. Polkadot fits builders who want application-specific execution environments with shared security, and who benefit from the ability to scale resources dynamically via coretime and elastic scaling.
Balancer
Balancer is a decentralized liquidity protocol that powers automated market making through configurable pools, with a design that separates token custody and accounting from pool logic. Balancer’s differentiator is flexibility. It can run weighted pools, stable pools, composable pools, and specialized pool types used for launches and structured liquidity.
