Bitcoin Slips $85k, DATs Threatened by ‘mNAV Rollercoaster’

Cryptocurrency markets suffered another week of declines as investor activity slowed ahead of the holiday.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell more than 5% last week, falling to a weekly low of $84,398 on Thursday, before recovering to trade above $87,769 on Friday, TradingView data shows.

Crypto market volatility continues to threaten the sustainability of digital asset treasury (DAT) companies as their longevity is taking them off the multiple-to-net-value-value (MNAV) “roller coaster” that drives these companies to buy value for the tokens held on their balance sheets, Solmate CEO Marco Santori said.

In the broader cryptocurrency space, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has relinquished its four-year investigation to Ave, marking a significant regulatory win for the industry.

Following the development, Ave founder Stany Kulekov unveiled a 2026 “master plan” for the decentralized lending platform, which plans to launch Ave V4, Horizon and the Ave app to capture $1 billion worth of real-world asset deposits.

DAT Longevity Focuses on Eliminating “mNAV Roller Coaster”: Solmate CEO

The rise of digital asset treasury companies will go down as a 2025 meta-narrative, but the longevity of the movement will depend on capital management and sound business strategies.

According to Solmet CEO Marco Santori, all DATs have to contend with the value of the underlying token they hold on their balance sheets. This shouldn't be a problem for revenue-generating businesses, but pure-play DATs are in for a rough ride.

“Multiple-to-net-asset value is how many of these treasury companies survive. If they're trading at a high mNAV, meaning their market cap is greater than the value of the coins on their balance sheet, then they can sell shares in a cryptographic way,” Santori said at Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction X show.

“Every dollar of stock that they sell, they take that and buy the bottom coin and that increases their net asset value. As long as they hold the premium, they can continue to do that. And that's a pure play treasury model. I think that really has a future.”

But the issue is that when the demand for the DAT base token decreases, the mNAV decreases. Suntory explained that falling token prices will result in lower MNAVs.

“This means that many treasury companies are idle because they cannot grow effectively and efficiently. I don't want to be subject to that. I don't want it for our investors. I want them to be exposed to the growth of SOL and the Solana network, but I don't want them to ride the mNAV roller coaster,” Santori said.

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Aave Founder Lists 2026 “Master Plan” After SEC Inspection Ends

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its four-year investigation into the platform after Ave founder Stany Kulekov unveiled a 2026 “master plan” for the decentralized protocol.

Kulekov, in a post sent to X on Tuesday, said that although the While 2025 marks a very “successful year” for the platform, Ave still feels he's at “zero compared to what lies ahead.”

In the year Referring to 2026, the CEO outlined a master plan that focuses heavily on refining the DeFi platform and achieving certain usage metrics, such as $1 billion in real-world asset (RWA) deposits.

“That said, our strategy going into the next year has three main pillars: Aave v4, Horizon and Aave App,” he said.

Aave v4 is a major upgrade to bring significant improvements to the platform's credit and loan pools, user interface and liquidity metrics, among other things.

In the article, Kulekov said v4 will be the “backbone of all finance,” pointing to the customized credit markets that v4's Hub and Spoke model offers.

Under this model, the hub represents a single unified cross-chain liquidity pool that acts as a central location for all assets on the protocol, while the spokes represent highly customizable markets that feed into the hub's liquidity.

This allows Ave to hold trillions of dollars in assets, making it the choice for any institution, fintech or company to access Ave's deep, secure liquidity.

“In 2026, the Ave of new markets, new assets and new integrations will be unprecedented in DeFi. We will continue to engage with fintechs and work closely with the DAO and our partners on the event TVL throughout the year.”

Looking at the next pillar on the horizon, Ave's decentralized real-world property market, the CEO outlined his desire to become a central player in the RWA space by onboarding “several top financial institutions.”

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The high-liquidity administration's vote aims to permanently set aside $1 billion in relief funds.

HYPER Foundation has issued an affirmative vote to identify HYPE tokens held by the HyperLiquid Protocol grant system address as permanently inaccessible, excluding them from asset distribution and general availability.

According to the Foundation, grant funding is a protocol-level mechanism embedded in Layer-1 network performance. It converts transaction fees into HYPE tokens and delivers them to a designated system address. At the time of this writing, the wallet contains about $1 billion worth of tokens.

The system address was designed without control mechanisms, which made the funds irretrievable without a hard fork. HYPER FOUNDATION “By voting ‘yes,' validators have agreed to treat the grant fund HYPE as burned.”

Native Markets, the provider of hyperliquid-native stablecoin USDH, reminded users that 50% of the stablecoin's reserve production will be transferred to the aid fund and converted into HYPE tokens. “If this affirmative vote passes, these contributions will be officially declared burned,” the company wrote.

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ETHGas raised $12 million as Buterin fueled the gas futures debate

Ethereum blockspace trading platform ETHGas has announced that it has raised $12 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital.

The cash announcement comes after Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently discussed the idea of ​​an onchain “gas futures” market, saying such a product could give users a clearer signal of expected payments and prevent future costs.

ETHGas says Ethereum needs to “rethink the way blockspace is allocated on the network” and its newly launched blockspace trading platform is a step in that direction. The company launched the market with $800 million in pledges from realtors, builders and other participants.

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Tokenized shares may be onchain, but the SEC still wants the keys

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Trading and Markets has outlined how broker-dealers can handle stocks and bonds under existing client protection rules, suggesting that blockchain-based crypto-asset securities will fall under traditional securities protections rather than being seen as a new category.

Crypto Asset Securities said it would not object to a section that considers itself to be self-contained as long as broker-dealers meet operational, security and governance conditions under existing consumer protection laws. This applies only to crypto securities including tokenized stocks or bonds.

While the statement is not a law, it provides clarity on how US regulators expect tokenized securities to be consistent with traditional market protections.

The guidance indicates that tokenized securities will not be treated as a new asset class under special rules. Instead, they are being deployed within existing broker-dealer frameworks, albeit embedded in blockchain networks.

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Overview of the DeFi market

Most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the red, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.

Memecoin launchpad Pump.fun's (PUMP) token is down 32%, making it the top 100 biggest decliner of the week, followed by decentralized exchange ASTER's (ASTER) token, which fell more than 27% last week.

Thanks for reading this week's roundup of the most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and lessons about this dynamic and evolving space.