Katana, a new decentralized finance (DeFi)-focused blockchain incubated by industry heavyweights Polygon and GSR, shared on Wednesday that its private mainnet has gone live.

The new layer-2 blockchain will unify “all liquidity in a set of protocols and collect yield from all potential sources,» the team shared in a press release sent to CoinDesk. Katana’s goal is «to power a self-sustaining DeFi engine for long-term growth,” it said.

Marc Boiron, the CEO of Polygon Labs, told CoinDesk that Katana emerged to address DeFi fragmentation, where digital assets are distributed across various apps and ecosystems, making certain types of investing cumbersome.

Katana was built using AggLayer — Polygon’s platform for building interoperable blockchains. “One of the things that we want is a super deep liquidity hub on the AggLayer, so that every chain can tap into that,” Boiron said. “When you look across everything in crypto, what you realize is that there’s actually no chain that’s built very well for actually having deep liquidity.”

Katana aims to improve blockchain liquidity — including lending, trading, and yield bearing strategies — by integrating with popular apps like Sushi, a major decentralized exchange, and Morpho, a popular decentralized lending ecosystem.

Polygon Labs, the team behind the layer-2 network, helped design the chain, while GSR, the crypto market-maker, advised on the user experience and is lending liquidity to help get the platform off the ground. “We are providing the on-chain liquidity — or ‘grease’ — to make sure that people can actually use the chain on day one,” said Jakob Palmstierna, President at GSR.

Currently, Katana is open to a limited group of users. It includes a pre-deposit phase that allows users to park their ETH, USDC, USDT, and WBTC for a chance to win KAT tokens, the network’s new governance and utility token.

Though activity is limited at this private stage, early deposits are being incentivized through a lootbox-style reward system. Katana’s public mainnet is expected to arrive at the end of June.

Read more: Polygon Starts Aggregator Program, Successful Projects Will Airdrop Up to 15% Native Token to POL Stakers

Bergen County, New Jersey is turning to the Avalanche AVAX network to put its entire property record system on blockchain, claiming to be the largest property deed tokenization project in the U.S.

Under a five-year agreement with land record blockchain firm Balcony, the well-to-do county across the Hudson River from New York city will migrate 370,000 property deeds — representing about $240 billion worth of real estate — onto an immutable, searchable blockchain ledger, according to a press release. The system, powered by Avalanche, will serve nearly a million residents across 70 municipalities.

«This initiative is about improving the lives of our residents,» said John Hogan, County Clerk of Bergen. «By digitizing property records, we are making the process simpler, faster, and more secure for homeowners, businesses, and future generations.»

The move aligns with a broader trend of using blockchain rails for moving and recording ownership of assets like bonds, funds and real estate — a process also known as tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). The tokenized asset market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033, with real estate amounting to a significant share, a recent report by Boston Consulting Group and Ripple projected. Most recently, the Dubai Land Department debuted a real estate tokenization platform built on the XRP Ledger XRP network as part of its strategy to bring 7% of all real estate transactions, worth roughly $16 billion, to blockchain rails.

Balcony, which has already introduced similar systems in several counties across New Jersey, claims that its blockchain-based platform can cut deed processing time by 90% while addressing risks like fraud and record discrepancies. It can boost municipal revenue, too: the platform detected almost $1 million in lost municipal revenue in Orange, NJ, previously hidden due to incomplete or outdated property records, the company said.

«Blockchain is continuing to solve complex, real-world problems,» said Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo, chief strategy officer of ecosystem development organization Ava Labs. «[Avalanche’s] infrastructure is built to handle large amounts of data quickly and securely, which is exactly what’s needed to modernize how property records are managed and transform how public institutions operate.»

Last year, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) digitized 42 million of car titles on Avalanche to modernize the state’s title transfer process with software development firm Oxhead Alpha.

Read more: Dubai Unveils Real Estate Tokenization Platform on XRP Ledger Amid $16B Initiative

Trading platform eToro (ETOR) has expanded its crypto offerings in the U.S., adding 12 new digital assets including Dogecoin DOGE, Cardano ADA and XRP XRP, the company said Wednesday.

The additions bring the total number of cryptocurrencies available to U.S. users to 15. The new tokens also include Aave AAVE, Chainlink LINK, Compound COMP, Ethereum Classic ETC, Litecoin LTC, Uniswap UNI, Stellar XLM, Shiba Inu SHIB, and Yearn Finance YFI. Previously, U.S.-based users could only trade Bitcoin BTC, Bitcoin Cash BCH and Ethereum ETH on the platform.

The move is part of eToro’s push to widen its footprint in the U.S. market and to meet retail demand and match offerings from larger players like Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD).

The announcement comes just weeks after eToro made its public debut on Nasdaq, marking the first U.S. crypto firm to go public after months of trade tensions and shaky markets. Stablecoin issuer Circle, who has long had plans to go public, filed for its initial public offering on Tuesday.

Despite the turbulent macro backdrop, eToro’s IPO was well-received. The company raised around $310 million, surpassing expectations and signaling investor interest in the combined stock and crypto trading platform model.

Shares are modestly lower on Wednesday at $64.15, but remain nicely above the IPO price of $52.

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