Decentralized stablecoin platform Ethena has partnered with The Open Network (TON) to make its stablecoins available to Telegram’s user base of over one billion people.

The partnership, announced on May 1 at Token2049 in Dubai, will see the deployment of Ethena’s USDe (USDE) and Ethena Staked USDe (sUSDe) natively within the TON blockchain.

The sUSDe variant will be integrated under the name tsUSDe, enabling Telegram users to access US dollar-denominated savings directly within Telegram.

Source: Kirill Malev

The deployment involves two major Ethena integrations, including one in the custodial Wallet in Telegram and the second in the TON Space wallet, a non-custodial wallet integrated in the messenger.

One of Ethena’s “most meaningful launches”

Announcing the news on X, Ethena described its TON integration as “one of Ethena’s most meaningful launches to date.”

“Telegram has truly global distribution across its billion users, with presence in emerging economies in regions like Asia, Africa and Latin America,” it added.

Source: Ethena

According to Ethena, the integration will be progressively rolled out in stages in May, as the deployment involves three major product lines, including support by Wallet in Telegram, non-custodial wallets like TON Space and TON Keeper, as well as TON apps.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

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Metaplanet — a Japanese company focused on accumulating Bitcoin — announced it will launch a United States-based subsidiary.

In a May 1 X post, Metaplanet announced that the firm is launching a wholly owned subsidiary in Florida. Furthermore, the new subsidiary is expected to raise up to $250 million of capital to fuel its Bitcoin (BTC) accumulation strategy and tap US institutional investors.

In a separate announcement, Metaplanet cites Miami as the city that will host the new subsidiary’s headquarters. The firm points to Florida as a particularly favorable environment:

“Florida, a rapidly emerging hub for Bitcoin focused companies and financial innovation, recognized for its business-friendly policies and rising status as a global center of capital and technology.”

The company explained that it decided to go to Florida due to its pro-Bitcoin environment, which purportedly led to Bitcoin corporate adoption and financial liberalization. The new subsidiary is also expected to expand the company’s operations into a new timezone.

Related: Eric Trump joins Metaplanet’s strategic board of advisers

Florida: a crypto stronghold

Metaplanet’s commentary follows Florida’s progress in becoming one of the most Bitcoin-friendly US states. In April, Florida’s House Insurance and Banking Committee approved a bill that would allow the State Treasury to invest in Bitcoin — the bill was proposed in early February.

The cryptocurrency industry has a strong foothold in Florida and is also intertwined with its political landscape. Two Republicans who received a combined $1.5 million from the crypto-backed political action committee (PAC) Fairshake will enter the US House after winning special elections in Florida.

Mid-February analysis also showed that the Florida Retirement System’s State Board of Administration fund held 160,470 Strategy shares worth $46 million at the time. Strategy — previously known as MicroStrategy — is Metaplanet’s bigger brother: a company entirely focused on accumulating Bitcoin and its top corporate holder.

That report followed Florida chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis suggesting that the agency that manages the state’s retirement funds to consider investing in Bitcoin. He shared his ideas with the Florida State Board of Administration’s executive director, Chris Spencer, in a letter sent in late October 2024.

Related: Metaplanet repays 2B yen bonds early, CEO comments on BTC ‘down days’

Metaplanet continues to grow

According to Metplanet’s website, the firm currently holds exactly 5,000 Bitcoin worth $474.7 million at the time of writing. While this is a far cry from Strategy’s holdings, which exceed 2% of all Bitcoin that will ever be mined, it is a 184% increase from the firm’s holdings of 1,762 BTC on the first day of 2025.

Metaplanet’s Bitcoin holdings chart. Source: BitcoinTreasuries.NET

At the beginning of April, Metaplanet announced its acquisition of 696 BTC for 10.2 billion yen ($67 million). Later that same month, the firm acquired 330 Bitcoin for $28.2 million at an average price of $85,605 per BTC, bringing its total holdings to 4,855. Then, toward the end of the month, the firm bought an additional 145 BTC for 1.9 billion Japanese yen (around $13.4 million), boosting its total holdings to 5,000 BTC.

Magazine: Rise of MicroStrategy clones, Asia dominates crypto adoption: Asia Express 2024 review

Opinion by: Amitej Gajjala, co-founder and CEO of Kernel DAO

The restaking narrative has moved fast — from side conversations in validator circles to the forefront of DeFi infrastructure discussions.

It’s not hard to see why. DefiLlama states that major liquid restaking protocols now hold over $12 billion in total value locked (TVL), with dozens of middleware services aligning their security with Ethereum’s economic base layer. What started as an idea to increase capital efficiency for validators has evolved into a serious attempt to redefine how security is provisioned across decentralized systems.

While restaking is gaining momentum among crypto-native participants, institutions — the kind with multi-year horizons and regulatory constraints — still keep DeFi at arm’s length.

Not because the rewards aren’t attractive. Risk is still poorly understood, isolated and mitigated.

Restaking can change that.

Adding friction — where it’s needed most

Restaking isn’t about reducing risk to zero; it’s about introducing friction, which deters bad actors without killing protocol composability.

Enabling validators to opt into securing new protocols using already-staked assets, restaking creates a second validation layer. This strengthens middleware like oracles, bridges and data availability layers without bootstrapping entirely new trust networks.

Unlike traditional validator sets, restaking aligns existing economic incentives with broader infrastructure needs. Instead of competing for security, protocols can now share it — with customizable slashing conditions, service-specific operator sets and dynamic risk parameters.

Recent: Unlocking the potential of dormant Bitcoin in DeFi

For institutions, this is meaningful; it signals the beginning of a modular security stack, where exposure can be configured and audited per protocol.

Slashing becomes a risk class — not a red flag

One of the main blockers for institutional staking has been slashing: the risk that validator misbehavior (or simply technical error) could lead to capital loss.

Restaking introduces slashing segmentation. On all major platforms, operators choose which services they secure. Slashing, therefore, is scoped to the context of misbehavior — not the entire validator lifecycle.

This distinction matters. It transforms slashing from an unpredictable liability into a quantifiable, bounded risk, similar to how fixed-income traders model default risk.

It also opens the door to restaking insurance markets, actuarial modeling and structured risk products.

Risk offloading through exposure diversification

DeFi’s volatility isn’t going away. Price swings, gas spikes and liquidation cascades are part of the terrain. But restaking enables cross-protocol exposure less correlated than holding multiple tokens.

A validator restaking into a curated mix of oracle, bridge and data availability layer services fundamentally builds a portfolio of security commitments — each with different risk and reward profiles. That’s diversification in the validator economy, not just in the asset layer.

It also makes network-level attacks harder. Restaking dilutes attack vectors by spreading economic security across a web of services, making DeFi’s attack surface less monolithic and more modular.

Oracles get more credible

A single point of failure in many DeFi protocols? Oracle feeds. And it’s not just flash loans — even minor price feed delays can be exploited.

ScienceDirect research shows that staking-based oracle models significantly reduce manipulation risks, especially when tied to performance-based incentives and slashing conditions.

Restaking supports this by allowing oracle operators to secure feeds with economic weight, aligning truthfulness with profit. When misreporting can cost you slashed Ether (ETH), the game theory changes.

This creates stronger guarantees for protocols relying on price data — a prerequisite for serious capital to flow in.

Restaking as the institutional wedge

Institutions won’t enter DeFi because of vibes or community incentives. They’ll enter when infrastructure risk can be scoped, quantified and mitigated when the stack looks more like a layered security model than a black box of smart contracts.

Restaking isn’t the whole answer. But it is one of the first scalable primitives to make DeFi security modular, composable and economically aligned.

As regulation matures and tokenized finance becomes more interoperable with TradFi, restaking may be the layer that bridges trust between networks and entire financial systems.

We’re not there yet. But the path looks a lot clearer than it did a year ago.

Opinion by: Amitej Gajjala, co-founder and CEO of Kernel DAO.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.