SoFi’s new Big Business Banking platform and Telegram’s integration of leveraged derivatives trading signal an aggressive push to mainstream crypto financial services, even as a $285 million DeFi hack and criticism of Circle’s response underscore mounting systemic risk.

SoFi bets on unified fiat–crypto banking for enterprises

SoFi Technologies has launched “Big Business Banking,” a new platform that lets enterprises manage traditional fiat and digital assets under a single regulated umbrella, according to reporting from Crypto Briefing. Built on SoFi Bank, N.A.’s national charter, the service aims to merge the compliance and safety of conventional banking with the speed and programmability of public blockchains.

The offering leverages SoFi’s federally regulated infrastructure — including FDIC insurance and Federal Reserve membership — while tapping Solana and other networks for high-throughput, low-cost settlement. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto framed the move as a response to the mismatch between 24/7 global business and legacy banking rails constrained by business hours and batch processing.

Key features include large-scale deposit accounts, API-based payments, a 24/7 internal payments network, real-time settlement, and support for SoFiUSD, the bank’s own stablecoin, alongside tokenized deposits issued directly by the bank. With more than 13.7 million members and over $50 billion in assets on its balance sheet, SoFi is pitching itself as a single, regulated counterparty that can handle both side of a company’s treasury — dollars and on-chain assets.

The launch caps a multi‑year regulatory and product build. SoFi secured conditional approval for its national bank charter in early 2022, but was initially restricted in its crypto activities. Subsequent guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2025, plus passage of the GENIUS Act, created a clearer framework for federally regulated banks to issue and manage stablecoins. SoFi moved quickly, adding consumer crypto trading and, in December 2025, rolling out SoFiUSD, reportedly becoming the first nationally chartered bank to issue a stablecoin on a public blockchain.

Perpetual futures come to 150 million Telegram users

While SoFi targets enterprises, consumer-facing risk is rising sharply as advanced derivatives land inside mainstream apps. Wallet in Telegram — the crypto wallet integrated into the Telegram messenger — has teamed up with decentralized exchange Lighter to bring perpetual futures trading to more than 150 million users, according to Crypto Briefing.

Through the Telegram Crypto Wallet interface, users can now open leveraged long and short positions on more than 50 crypto and real-world assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Toncoin, oil, gold, stocks, and ETFs, with up to 50× leverage. The instruments are the same perpetual swaps that dominate crypto derivatives markets and allow traders to profit from both rising and falling markets without expiry dates.

Andrew Rogozov, founder and CEO of The Open Platform (TOP) and Wallet in Telegram, said the integration removes traditional frictions such as complex exchange UIs and separate onboarding flows. “By integrating Lighter directly into Wallet, we are making advanced leveraged trading simple and accessible where millions of users already communicate and hold crypto,” he said, emphasizing speed and convenience.

Lighter CEO Vlad Novakovski added that the goal is to let users move “from chat to market in seconds,” positioning the integration as an expression of the ethos that powerful financial systems should be open and accessible. The deal follows booming interest in derivatives: perpetual trading volumes reportedly exceeded $8 trillion in 2025, and Lighter itself raised $68 million at a $1.5 billion valuation late last year, building an architecture that aims to match centralized exchanges on speed and cost.

Drift hack and Circle backlash highlight security fault lines

Against this backdrop of rapid expansion, a major security incident on Solana is amplifying concerns about whether the industry’s infrastructure — and its largest stablecoin issuers — can keep pace with the risk. Solana-based Drift Protocol suffered a hack that drained roughly $285 million in multiple assets, including Circle’s USDC stablecoin, AMBCrypto reports.

On-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly accused Circle of failing to act swiftly to protect users, alleging that the company had roughly six hours to freeze about $230 million in USDC that was bridged from Solana to Ethereum via Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP). During that window, he noted, more than 100 transactions moved the stolen funds while Circle “slept,” and he labeled both the firm and CEO Jeremy Allaire as “bad actors” for the industry.

The criticism comes uncomfortably soon after Circle faced backlash for freezing 16 wallets at the request of authorities, some of which reportedly involved legitimate business activity. The company has since begun unfreezing some of those addresses, but the combination of over-freezing in one case and alleged under-response in another has sharpened doubts about its monitoring and incident response procedures.

The Drift exploit rippled across the Solana DeFi ecosystem, with at least 11 protocols suspending most activity and Ranger Finance alone losing around $900,000, according to Solana analytics outlet SolanaFloor cited by AMBCrypto. A senior Solana Foundation product executive called the incident “isolated” and argued it does not reflect on Solana DeFi as a whole, expressing confidence the community would “pick up the pieces and rebuild fast.” But the episode has already weighed on Circle’s publicly traded stock, which extended an ongoing decline as technical indicators pointed to capital outflows and oversold conditions.

Institutional polish vs. DeFi risk: A widening gap

Taken together, these developments illustrate a widening split within crypto markets. On one side, players like SoFi are importing the discipline of regulated banking into on-chain finance, with capital buffers, supervisory oversight, and clearly identified legal entities. Their pitch to enterprises emphasizes continuity, compliance, and the ability to integrate digital assets into existing treasury and payments workflows without sacrificing regulatory safeguards.

On the other side, the frontier of DeFi — now reaching users via social platforms like Telegram — continues to prioritize accessibility and permissionless access, often at the expense of robust guardrails. Bringing 50× leveraged derivatives into a chat app used by hundreds of millions introduces profound questions about suitability, investor protection, and how to handle cross-border compliance in a largely pseudonymous environment.

The Drift hack and the scrutiny on Circle underscore how interlinked these worlds are. Even regulated institutions rely on on-chain mechanisms to manage assets, and failures in protocol security or incident response can erode confidence not just in a single platform, but in the broader promise of tokenized dollars and bank-issued stablecoins. As more corporate treasuries and retail users adopt these tools — whether through a SoFi API or a Telegram bot — the cost of such failures will rise.

What’s next: Regulatory focus and product convergence

Regulators are likely to zero in on several fronts. SoFi’s Big Business Banking will test how far a nationally chartered bank can go in embedding public blockchain infrastructure into core financial services while staying within supervisory comfort zones. Expect scrutiny of its SoFiUSD stablecoin, tokenized deposits, and use of high-speed networks like Solana for settlement, particularly around reserve management, operational risk, and consumer disclosures.

At the same time, Telegram’s derivatives integration and the Drift exploit may accelerate efforts to treat DeFi front-ends and wallet interfaces more like regulated intermediaries, especially where leveraged products are marketed to retail users. Questions about who bears responsibility for monitoring, freezing, and unwinding illicit flows — whether it is stablecoin issuers like Circle, protocol teams, or wallet providers — are likely to feature prominently in upcoming policy debates.

For market participants, the direction of travel is clear: crypto is being woven into both corporate banking stacks and everyday messaging apps. The open question is whether risk management, security practices, and regulatory frameworks can evolve quickly enough to match that pace — before the next multihundred-million-dollar exploit or misstep erodes the trust that mainstream adoption now depends on.