81 Crypto Projects Shut Down in 2026 The bear market keeps claiming victims. Since January, 81 crypto projects have announced they’re shutting down, including some of the industry’s biggest names: • Exchanges: BitMEX, BitMart, CoinEx, AscendEX, Bit.com Chains & L2s: Blast, Abstract, Polygon zkEVM, Loopring, Sophon • DeFi: Balancer, Radiant, ZeroLend, Angle, Seamless • NFTs & wallets: Blur, Foundation, Magic Eden Wallet, Leap Wallet The reasons are mostly the same: trading volumes collapsed, airdrop farmers left, and some protocols never recovered from hacks, as with Balancer and Radiant. April was the worst month with 16 shutdowns, and the pace hasn’t slowed since: Blur, Abstract and Blast all announced closures in October alone.

Top 5 Most Valuable US Companies 2006 vs 2016 vs 2026 - 2006: Exxon Mobil $447B · GE $384B · Microsoft $294B · Citi $274B · BofA $240B - 2016: Apple $618B · Alphabet $532B · Microsoft $483B · Berkshire $404B · Exxon $374B - 2026: NVIDIA $5.09T · Apple $5.07T · Microsoft $3.89T · Alphabet $3.88T · Amazon $2.67T In 20 years the top five grew from $1.64T to $20.6T – 12.6x. Each of today's five is bigger than the whole 2006 list. Most of it came lately: 1.5x by 2016, then 8.5x. Microsoft is the only name in all three – $294B → $483B → $3.89T, 13x. Oil and banks are out: Exxon fell from No. 1 to No. 5 by 2016, now gone. The top is tight – NVIDIA leads Apple by $20B, Microsoft beats Alphabet by $14B. Data source 🔗 FT Global 500, companiesmarketcap.com Photos: Wikimedia Commons

Weekly Recap: Oct 19–25 AI money kept getting bigger and stranger. Anthropic’s prospectus showed what it really costs to be a frontier lab, OpenAI had to trim its valuation target after investor pushback, and DeepSeek raised anyway just days after Washington ordered agencies to remove its technology. Crypto, meanwhile, spent the week laying quieter plumbing - faster Solana settlement, new CME futures and a BlackRock Bitcoin fund with a safety net built in.

Top 10 Biggest Token Unlocks This Week Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2026 $M → $54.63M on Nov 1 $FF → $20.28M on Oct 29 $SUI → $18.66M on Oct 31 $CC → $15.30M ongoing daily $TRUMP → $10.49M ongoing daily $PEARL → $9.41M ongoing daily $WLD → $8.85M ongoing daily $EIGEN → $7.38M on Oct 31 $GRASS → $7.29M on Oct 28 $TAO → $6.35M ongoing daily $158M+ in tokens unlocking this week: $108M from five cliff events, another $50M dripping out daily from five linear schedules. Nov 1 is the heaviest day — $M alone releases $54.63M, a third of the weekly total. Oct 31 follows with $SUI and $EIGEN, $26.0M combined. The real pressure points are $FF (2.03%) and $EIGEN (1.98%), then $GRASS (1.04%) and $M (1.03%) — every other token stays under 1% of total supply. Data source 🔗 DefiLlama, CoinGecko, CryptoRank

World’s Defense Giants The world’s 20 most valuable defense contractors are worth a combined $1.29T. RTX tops the list at $257.8B, almost twice the value of Lockheed Martin at $139.6B. Lockheed is the mover of the month: it jumped 15% and overtook France’s Safran for second place. America still runs the arsenal, with six US companies holding 52% of the total. Europe answers with eight names worth $429B, from Rheinmetall and Thales to Saab and Kongsberg. India, China, Israel and Türkiye complete the list.

Extended introduces XTEN, launch is planned for November, with 30% allocated to Airdrop $XTEN total supply is 1B, with 300M allocated for eligible participants in the Extended Points programme. Eligible participants will receive $XTEN in a self-hosted Arc wallet. $XTEN whitepaper has been prepared under MiCA, the EU’s crypto-asset rules, and notified to the competent authority. It is expected to be published on 31 October 2026. Extended is built by ex-Revolut team on Starknet. It raised $19M, backed by Cyber Fund, StarkWare, Semantic Ventures, and Tioga Capital. • TVL: $115M • 30D Volume: $6.38B • Open interest: $104M Get 10% discount on fees with our Extended link 🔗 app.extended.exchange/join/T…

Upcoming TGEs Backed by Top VCs This map shows projects the biggest crypto funds have already backed, but that have no token yet. The names to watch: Polymarket and Andrena have 5 funds each. Variational is backed by Coinbase Ventures and Dragonfly, OpenSea by Y Combinator, Tempo by Paradigm, Ribbit and Sequoia. More backers usually means more hype at launch. Still, not every launch will be a hit, and dates often slip, so always DYOR. Data source 🔗 @CryptoRank_io

Top 10 Real-World Assets Projects by Fully Diluted Valuation The 10 biggest RWA projects are worth $32.78B fully diluted, 81% below the $176.58B they were worth at their peaks combined: • $LINK – $12.1B (ATH $52.7B) • stellar:native – $8.83B (ATH $43.8B) • $ONDO – $4.34B (ATH $21.4B) • $QNT – $2.70B (ATH $6.25B) • $XDC – $1.32B (ATH $7.34B) • algorand:native – $975M (ATH $32.3B) • $INJ – $798M (ATH $5.26B) • solana:CARDSccUMFKoPRZxt5vt3ksUbxEFEcnZ3H2pd3dKxYjp – $701M (ATH $755M) • $HASH – $656M (ATH $5.71B) • ethereum:0x526526528f35ac738177003b8773b402b8df8143 – $380M (ATH $1.08B) The sector is top-heavy: $LINK, stellar:native and $ONDO hold 77% of the list's FDV, and $LINK alone is worth more than Numbers 4 to 10 combined. Half the list trades at 15–23% of its peak value. algorand:native is the deepest at 97% below its ATH. solana:CARDSccUMFKoPRZxt5vt3ksUbxEFEcnZ3H2pd3dKxYjp is the outlier at 93% of its high, with $QNT (43%) and ethereum:0x526526528f35ac738177003b8773b402b8df8143 (35%) next. Data source 🔗 CoinGecko

Top 10 Projects by YTD Generated Revenue The top ten have earned $1.88B in revenue since January 1, and half of it went to just two names: • Hyperliquid – $536M • pump.fun – $410M • GMGN – $147M • Sky – $146M • Polymarket – $134M • Axiom – $118M • World Liberty – $110M • Paxos – $99.6M • Collector Crypt – $93.9M • Titan Builder – $89.0M Hyperliquid makes $1.82M a day, 1.3x pump.fun, and together they earned as much as the other eight combined ($946M vs $938M). Below them the gap closes fast: Nos. 3 to 10 are just $58M apart. Memecoin trading is the biggest theme: pump.fun, GMGN and Axiom brought in $675M, 36% of the top ten and 1.26x Hyperliquid. Dollar tokens are the second pillar: Sky, World Liberty and Paxos made $356M, or 19%. Data source 🔗 @DefiLlama

Highest-Paid NBA Players in 2026 • Stephen Curry – $203.6M • Kevin Durant – $104.9M • Giannis Antetokounmpo – $103.5M • LeBron James – $93.9M • Anthony Edwards – $87.9M • Jayson Tatum – $86.5M • Jimmy Butler – $70.8M • Shai Gilgeous-Alexander – $70.8M • Devin Booker – $68.1M • Joel Embiid – $68M Curry makes 1.9x Durant and almost as much as Durant and Giannis combined ($208.4M). Numbers 2 to 10 are just $36.9M apart. Golden State pays the most: Curry and Butler bring $274.4M, 29% of the top ten. The four players aged 37+ take $473.2M, almost half the total. Edwards is the youngest at 25 and already out-earns Tatum, Butler and SGA. Data source 🔗 Forbes

The Trillion-Dollar Club: 15 Companies Worth $1T As of October 21, 15 companies are worth at least $1 trillion, with a combined value of $36.45T. Nvidia leads at $5.31T and was the first company ever to hit $5T, followed by Apple at $5.02T. Together with Alphabet and Microsoft, these four hold $18.3T, about half of the entire club. The AI hardware boom is all over the list. Five of the 15 are chipmakers: Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, Samsung, and Micron, which only just made the cut at $1.02T. SpaceX already ranks #7 at $2.14T. The club is still mostly American. Twelve of the 15 members are US companies, and the only exceptions are TSMC, Saudi Aramco and Samsung. Walmart is next in line at $935B.

Fhenix Brings Encrypted Smart Contracts to Ethereum and Arbitrum @fhenix has launched CoFHE, its encryption coprocessor, on @ethereum and @arbitrum mainnet. It’s built on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which lets smart contracts work with data that is never decrypted. The heavy computation runs off-chain, and developers add it with a single Solidity import. Its dual-mode tokens can switch a balance between public and confidential mode in one transaction, with no wrapping or bridging. Privacy is one of the biggest things institutions miss on public chains, where everyone can see balances, positions and trading strategies. Fluton and AlphaEngine are the first apps live, with three more due in Q4. Fhenix is also building a confidential stablecoin with Tandem, the venture arm of Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs.

Top 15 Protocols by Buybacks When buybacks are measured against fully diluted value, PONS is far ahead of everyone else. The Robinhood Chain launchpad buys back about 32% of its FDV a year, or $63M. BONK is second at 16%, and Pump.fun third at 8.8%, even though Pump.fun spends the most among the top three at $367M a year. Hyperliquid is still the biggest buyer by far, at about $822M a year. But only ~22% of HYPE’s max supply is in circulation, so that’s just 1.1% of its $76.8B FDV. Lighter is in the same position, at 0.9%, with 75% of LIT still locked. Measured against FDV, the leaders are tokens that are already almost fully unlocked, like PONS, BONK and CAKE, where future unlocks won’t eat into the buybacks. Yearly figures are the last 30 days × 12. Data source 🔗 @CryptoRank_io

Next in Line to Shut Down? After 81 crypto projects shut down in 2026, these 15 could be next. Together they raised $855M from investors, but today they hold just $171M in TVL, and their tokens are down an average of 98.6% from all-time highs. ZKsync Era alone raised $258M and now has only $14.5M left. Some are already close to zero: Dymension holds just $154K in TVL and Mode about $621K, while Flow and Mode tokens are down 99.93%. With liquidity and users gone, the question isn’t whether they recover, but how long they can keep the lights on.

Anthropic vs OpenAI: The Race Before the IPOs @AnthropicAI is heading for a mid-November IPO, and @OpenAI is rushing to raise $30B at a $1.4T+ valuation before it lists. Here’s where they stand: • Valuation: $965B vs $852B (latest private rounds) • Revenue run-rate: $65B+ vs ~$50B Anthropic grew from a ~$1B run-rate to $65B+ in 18 months, driven by business and coding customers. In Q2 2026 it out-earned OpenAI for the first time: $11.6B vs $6.7B. OpenAI still dominates with consumers, although the two count partner revenue differently, so the figures aren’t fully like-for-like.

The $1 Trillion GDP Club The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook shows which economies are worth more than $1 trillion in 2026. The top 5: • USA: $32.64T, in the club since 1969 • China: $21.55T, since 1998 • Germany: $5.47T, since 1986 • Japan: $4.34T, since 1978 • UK: $4.27T, since 1990 The US and China alone make up more than half of the club’s combined GDP. The US is now bigger than China, Germany and Japan combined, while China is ~21x larger than when it first crossed $1T in 1998. The club keeps growing: Switzerland and Poland joined in 2025, and Taiwan is set to cross $1T in 2026 as AI demand boosts its chip exports.

Top Perpetual DEXs by Open Interest About $15.8B in open interest sits across the top ten perp DEXs, and nearly half of it is on one venue: • Hyperliquid – $7.50B • tradeXYZ – $3.85B • Aster – $1.32B • Variational – $997M • Lighter – $742M • Grvt – $442M • Antarctic – $329M • GMX – $255M • edgeX – $181M • SoDEX – $150M tradeXYZ runs on Hyperliquid via HIP-3, so together they hold ~72% of top-10 OI. Its OI equals 7% of 30-day volume, twice Hyperliquid's rate: traders hold stock and commodity positions instead of flipping them. Hyperliquid made $82.0M in fees over 30 days, ~3x the rest combined, earning ~3.9 bps per dollar traded vs ~1 bp at Aster, Lighter and edgeX. Variational is second by volume at $82.0B but fourth by OI, a sign of high-turnover trading. Data source 🔗 @DefiLlama

Highest-Paid Football Players in 2026 • Cristiano Ronaldo – $300M • Lionel Messi – $145M • Kylian Mbappé – $100M • Erling Haaland – $85M • Vinícius Júnior – $76M • Lamine Yamal – $55M • Sadio Mané – $54M • Jude Bellingham – $45M • Harry Kane – $42M • Mohamed Salah – $40M Ronaldo at 41 makes 2x Messi and $55M more than Messi and Mbappé combined. The two oldest players on the list take $445M, 47% of the total. Al-Nassr pays the most: Ronaldo and Mané bring the club $354M, 38% of the top ten. Real Madrid has three names – Mbappé, Vinícius and Bellingham – at $221M together. Yamal is the youngest at 19 and already out-earns Mané, Kane and Salah. Data source 🔗 @Forbes