Chaos Labs has ended its three-year role as Aave's primary risk service provider, saying Aave's planned move to Aave V4 created added operational and legal exposure it would not take on. Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg said Aave Labs supported raising the engagement to $5 million, but the parties diverged on how risk management should work. Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov said the split was not hostile and claimed Chaos sought to become the sole risk provider and replace Chainlink oracles.

DeFi recorded $169 million in losses across 34 protocols in Q1, with incidents including a $40 million key compromise and Resolv's $24.5 million breach. While many current attacks focus on access control and key management, Circle is moving early on post-quantum cryptography, as networks face slow upgrade cycles and address-reuse exposure.

India's tax authorities are issuing Section 148A notices that may reopen earlier crypto-related filings, with many cases tied to financial year 2021–22. The alerts can be triggered when automated systems treat trading volume as income or detect mismatches across exchanges, PAN-linked KYC, bank transfers, and tax returns. Koinx says the flagged figure may be an estimate rather than actual profit, and responses with complete records can determine whether reassessment proceeds.

Ethereum is attempting to stay above $2,150 as on-chain trackers highlighted a large move in the past hour. A newly created wallet withdrew about $82 million worth of ETH from institutional prime brokerage FalconX, drawing attention to who may be behind the transfer. Analysts cited by the report said the wallet's behavior resembles Bitmine's past acquisition patterns, though attribution is not confirmed.

Development data tracked over the past 30 days highlights widening gaps among leading DeFi protocols, with Chainlink (LINK) ranked first and DeepBook (DEEP) second. Key milestones include Swift and major banks completing Chainlink CCIP tokenized-transfer trials on April 5, 2026, Aave V4 launching on Ethereum mainnet on March 30, 2026, and Euler reporting more than $100 million in new deposits across Base, Swell, and Sonic.

Bitcoin (BTC) was nearing $70,000 at press time after trading below that level for about eleven days. Apparent demand fell to negative 86,000 BTC, valued at roughly $5.95 billion, while CryptoQuant data showed long-term holders moving older coins even as whales drove short-term buying over the past 48 hours.

High-leverage trader James Wynn recorded another forced closure after Bitcoin moved higher, bringing his total liquidations to six over the past two weeks. Lookonchain said Hyperliquid wallet data shows the latest liquidation occurred around the $68k area, after a series of short attempts failed. The report also noted BTC was trading in the high $69k range at the time of writing.

On April 6, 2026, the Solana Foundation and Asymmetric Research introduced STRIDE, a tiered security initiative for Solana-based DeFi protocols that emphasizes continuous evaluations, threat monitoring, and formal verification. Protocols with more than $10 million in TVL can receive foundation-funded 24/7 monitoring, while those above $100 million in TVL may qualify for formal verification. The rollout follows the Drift Protocol exploit on April 1, 2026, when $286 million was taken in 12 minutes.