Strategy's Preferred Stock Is Now a Stablecoin. And DeFi Has a Security Problem.

“DeFi TVL fell from $99.5 to $86.3 billion in 48 hours after the $290 million Kelp DAO exploit — the latest nine-figure attack attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, this time via a compromised Layer Zero bridge.”

“Essentially what we did was we created stable coin backed by this instrument, put some cash in there as well, a little bit of SATA. But we think a whole bunch of other DATs are going to be issuing very similar variable rate non-convertible preferreds as well. And so this basically ports that yield from the NASDAQ into the on-chain world.”

“Micro strategies, STRC or stretch instrument as they call it is the most traded, most liquid and largest preferred stock ever in history. Preferred stocks are kind of a somewhat niche area of the market. But interestingly, and many people don't know this, stretch's IPO was actually the largest IPO of 2025, full stop.”

“It's very similar to Athena, where we've got APXUSD is the non-staked version, and then APYUSD is the staked version. APYUSD is the only bucket that pays yield. Right now, we've got, let's just call it 50 percent of the balance sheet, or 50 percent of the issued assets are staked. So the whole collateral base is paying yield to just the 50 percent. So that's how you actually get some kind of yield leverage, if you will.”

“As DeFi absorbs yet another devastating security failure, is the industry's core assumption — that incoming transactions should be treated as legitimate — finally due for an overhaul? Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins dig in with Parker White of Apyx and Michael Bentley of Euler.”