Regulators set the pace: the DOJ is probing Binance over its $4.3B deal, ESMA gave EU platforms until Jan 8 to drop non-MiCA stablecoins and South Korea blocked 27 exchanges. Ledger's spy-implant scandal passed $86M in losses.

Five that actually mattered:

— DOJ probes Binance's 2023 settlement

— ESMA sets a non-MiCA stablecoin deadline

— Ledger probes implanted reseller devices

— Telegram rolls out its Money wallet

— South Korea blocks 27 exchanges

Anza set the Alpenglow mainnet launch for October 21 at about 14:50 UTC. Its Votor consensus replaces TowerBFT and cuts finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150ms.

Validators will exchange votes directly instead of posting them on-chain, so reported TPS will drop: votes are about 63% of all Solana transactions today. Validators need Agave 4.3.0+ and at least 0.8 SOL in their vote account; Firedancer and Frankendancer, about 15.8% of stake, are not supported at launch. Alpenglow went live on testnet on September 24 and devnet on September 25.

The switch happens in a single slot on the running network, with no restart. Rotor, the planned replacement for Turbine block propagation, is not scheduled yet.

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Real launched the Real Builders Program, an incubator and accelerator for teams building tokenized finance on its network. Applications are open now.

The Incubator track is for early-stage builders and issuers going from idea to launch, with help on architecture, tokenization strategy and go-to-market. The Accelerator track is for established protocols, institutions and issuers, offering technical enablement, institutional introductions, selective grants and validator support.

Real says it has brought $100M+ on-chain so far, with a $3.5B asset pipeline and 50+ ecosystem partners, including custodian Wiener Privatbank.

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Blur's website goes offline on November 12, and it is far from alone. Of 56 top NFT marketplaces launched in 2017-2023, only 21 still trade.

The other 35 shut down, sold, pivoted or turned into zombies, lasting 3.9 years on average. Six exchange and retail NFT shops closed, from Coinbase to Binance.

Fees collapsed with volume: OpenSea earned $25.1M in 2025 against $1.55B in 2022, and monthly NFT sales fell 91% from December 2023 to $167.2M in September 2026.

Ramp launched Glass, an AI workspace that saves employees' best prompts and workflows so the whole company can reuse them instead of starting from an empty chat.

Ramp built it after burning $1.5M in AI tokens in one week in May. Inside Ramp, 323 employees have made 6,500+ edits to what Glass knows. One saved prompt lifted feature requests logged from customer calls from about 300 to 20,000 a month. Requests run through Ramp Router, which picks a model per job and cut Ramp's own AI bill by 30%.

Glass plugs into Slack, Notion, Linear, Gong and more, works with open or closed models and shows a cost meter on every project. Ramp is onboarding the first businesses itself.

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Tether invested in EFY Finance as part of its seed round, to push institutional use of USDT and USAT across Latin America. The amount was not disclosed.

EFY Finance offers stablecoin cross-border payments, accounts, custody, OTC, wallets and cards in 12+ currencies, settling to local accounts in 17 countries. It is licensed in El Salvador and serves 25,000+ active accounts, with a strong presence in Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama and Ecuador.

Latin America saw nearly $1.5T in crypto transaction volume from July 2022 to June 2025, per Chainalysis, and stablecoins now make up over half of exchange purchases there.

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Trezor is cutting its reseller network so it can check the sellers it keeps more closely. It calls the move preventive and says there is no evidence its devices were compromised.

The trigger is the Ledger supply-chain attack: wallets sold by reseller CryptoBilis in Southeast Asia carried LTE implants that read seed phrases off the screen. Bitquery puts the losses at about $93M. Trezor had already removed CryptoBilis from its network, saying none of its devices sold there were affected.

Ledger asks anyone who suspects a tampered device to contact its support and file a police report, and points other buyers to its inspection guide.

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On October 12, Blur announced that its marketplace frontend will go offline on November 12, 2026. Three years ago Blur was the largest NFT marketplace on Ethereum, the platform that took the volume crown from OpenSea with airdrop farming and zero fees. Its monthly volume peaked at about $1.43B in March 2023. By March 2026 it was under $7M, down more than 99.5%. Only the website closes: the contracts stay on-chain and $BLUR keeps control of its fee switch. But the symbol is hard to miss.

Blur is not an isolated case. We checked 56 notable NFT marketplaces launched between 2017 and 2023, then looked at the market they live in: trading volume, fees, chains and the collections that once defined the space. This is what the NFT market looks like in October 2026.

Key numbers

• 21 of 56 early NFT marketplaces still trade (37.5%)
• 3.9 years: average lifespan of the ones that closed
• $167.2M: NFT sales in September 2026, down 91% from December 2023 (CryptoSlam)
• $25.1M: OpenSea's fees for all of 2025, against $1.55B in 2022 (DefiLlama)
• -75% to -99%: where blue-chip collection floors sit relative to their all-time highs
• 6 exchange-run NFT marketplaces have closed since 2023

Part 1. The market: volume is down 10x

Monthly NFT sales were $167.2M in September 2026, according to CryptoSlam data cited by Decrypt. A year earlier the figure was $554.8M, so the market lost 70% in twelve months. In December 2023, at the last real peak, it was $1.78B.

DefiLlama's chain-level data, which covers Ethereum, Solana, Polygon and a handful of other chains, shows the same slope from a different angle. NFT volume on tracked chains:

• 2024: $6.37B
• 2025: $2.68B
• 2026 (Jan 1 to Oct 13): $0.39B

The bottom so far came in June 2026, at $18.7M for the whole month on DefiLlama's tracked chains.

There are small signs of life. September 2026 rebounded to $68.0M on DefiLlama, and weekly sales tracked by CryptoSlam held around $40M in early October ($39.85M in the seven days to October 10). But the rebounds are small and short. The market has not found a floor so much as a slow drift.

Part 2. Where trading still happens

Ethereum still dominates. It accounted for 44.2% of weekly NFT sales in the week to October 10 ($17.6M), per CryptoSlam. Almost all of the blue-chip collections live there.

Solana's NFT market nearly vanished. Solana NFT volume on DefiLlama fell from $233.9M in January 2024 to $6.0M in September 2026, down 97%. Its biggest marketplace, Magic Eden, cut its Bitcoin and EVM businesses in March 2026 and moved resources to a casino product. Hyperspace, DigitalEyes, Coral Cube and Exchange Art are gone.

Polygon survives on one product. Polygon was second by weekly sales ($8.6M), almost entirely thanks to Courtyard, a marketplace for tokenized, physically vaulted trading cards. Courtyard was the single largest NFT collection of the week, with $7.68M in sales and 19.3% of all NFT activity.

Bitcoin is third. Ordinals trading continues on Ordinals Wallet, UniSat and Gamma ($3.5M weekly), even after Magic Eden left the chain.

A new name: Robinhood Chain. In September 2026, Robinhood Chain did $21.5M in NFT volume on DefiLlama, second only to Ethereum, three months after its mainnet launch. It is too early to call it a trend, but it is the only new chain that moved the NFT numbers this year.

Part 3. Fees: the business model collapsed

Volume tells you how much people trade. Fees tell you whether a marketplace can pay its staff. Here is OpenSea, the largest survivor, by year, per DefiLlama:

• 2021: $1.05B
• 2022: $1.55B
• 2023: $163.5M
• 2024: $28.4M
• 2025: $25.1M
• 2026 (to Oct 13): $18.0M

That is a 62x drop from the 2022 peak to 2025. OpenSea is still by far the strongest earner in the sector: $1.57M in fees over the last 30 days. Everyone else is a rounding error. Over the same 30 days DefiLlama shows Sudoswap at about $19K, Manifold at $3.2K, Element at $2.2K and Stargaze at $1.9K. LooksRare and X2Y2 show zero.

The fee collapse explains the closures better than anything else. The 2022 marketplace war (zero fees, optional royalties and token incentives) pushed take rates down at the exact moment volume started falling. A marketplace earning a few thousand dollars a month cannot sustain a team, and most did not try.

Part 4. Collections: even the blue chips bled out

Floor prices of the collections that defined NFTs, per CoinGecko on October 13, 2026. Floor now, all-time high of the floor, drop from ATH, and floor change over one year in USD:

• CryptoPunks: 31.45 ETH (~$78.7K), ATH 125 ETH (Aug 2021), -75% from ATH, -60% in a year
• Bored Ape Yacht Club: 5.13 ETH (~$12.8K), ATH 153.7 ETH (May 2022), -97% from ATH, -59% in a year
• Pudgy Penguins: 2.19 ETH (~$5.5K), ATH 36.33 ETH (Dec 2024), -94% from ATH, -83% in a year
• Milady Maker: 0.72 ETH (~$1.8K), ATH 7.35 ETH (Dec 2024), -90% from ATH, -74% in a year
• Mutant Ape Yacht Club: 0.73 ETH (~$1.8K), ATH 40 ETH (May 2022), -98% from ATH, -57% in a year
• Azuki: 0.48 ETH (~$1.2K), ATH 31.8 ETH (Apr 2022), -98.5% from ATH, -79% in a year
• Moonbirds: 0.37 ETH (~$0.9K), ATH 38.5 ETH (Apr 2022), -99% from ATH, -92% in a year
• Doodles: 0.22 ETH (~$0.5K), ATH 23.95 ETH (May 2022), -99% from ATH, -84% in a year

Three things stand out:

1. CryptoPunks held up best. At -75% from its ATH, it is the only collection in the group that kept a quarter of its peak floor in ETH. It is also the oldest, and its market is built into its own 2017 contract, so it never depended on a marketplace surviving.
2. The 2024 cycle did not save anyone. Pudgy Penguins and Milady hit their all-time highs in December 2024, the most recent NFT rally. Both are down 90%+ from there, and Pudgy lost 83% of its floor in dollars in a year. Brands that build outside crypto (Pudgy's toys, for example) still trade actively, with Pudgy volume jumping 125% in the week to October 10, but floors did not follow.
3. Real-world assets lead activity. The most-traded collection today is not a PFP at all. It is Courtyard, tokenized trading cards stored in a vault. The NFT format survives where it represents something people already wanted to buy.

Part 5. The survival study: 56 marketplaces, 21 left

We built a roster of notable NFT marketplaces launched from 2017 to 2023 and verified the current status of each:

• Still trading: 21
• Shut down: 23
• Shutdown announced: 2 (Blur, Mintable)
• Absorbed by a buyer: 3 (Gem into OpenSea, Genie into Uniswap, Bitski into Phantom)
• Pivoted away from NFTs: 5 (Zora, Fractal, Paras, Mintbase, NFTX)
• Zombies: 2 (LooksRare and Solanart: the site is up, but there is practically no trading)

Every one of the 21 survivors has been running for more than three years. In this market, year three is the real survival line.

The dead lived about four years. Across the 20 closures with month-level dates, the average lifespan was 3.9 years (median 3.7). Hic et Nunc on Tezos lasted eight months before its founder took it offline in November 2021. KnownOrigin (about 6.7 years) and MakersPlace (6.4 years) lasted longest. Closures are not slowing down: six in 2024, six in 2025 and six so far in 2026 (Nifty Gateway, Foundation, jpg.store, Binance NFT, Exchange Art, fxhash). Blur will be the seventh this year.

Exchanges walked away. Six exchange or retail NFT marketplaces closed: HTX (May 2023), GameStop (February 2024, citing regulatory uncertainty), Coinbase (August 2024), Kraken (February 2025), Bybit (April 2025, about six weeks after its $1.46B hack) and Binance (July 2026). The exchange storefronts still running, OKX, Bitget Wallet, Gate and Crypto.com, are mostly wallet-based aggregators. OKX is the exception that still invests: it introduced new trading fees in September 2026.

Getting acquired did not help. Nine marketplaces changed hands. eBay bought KnownOrigin in 2022 and closed it in 2024. Gemini bought Nifty Gateway in 2019 and closed it in February 2026. BONK bought Exchange Art in March 2025 and closed it in August 2026. Uniswap bought the Genie aggregator in 2022, and its NFT section has since disappeared from the app. Foundation agreed to sell to Blackdove in January 2026, the deal collapsed after the handover, and the site went offline in April. Only Rarible (bought by IMPOSSIBLE), Tensor (bought by its own foundation) and the CryptoPunks market (IP moved to the nonprofit Infinite Node Foundation) still operate after a sale.

Pivots: from NFTs to coins, games and casinos. Zora turned every post into a tradable "content coin" and removed NFT minting in February 2025. LooksRare's homepage now leads with on-chain games. Magic Eden, once the leader on Solana and Bitcoin, said 80% of its operating costs were tied to products generating 20% of revenue, cut those products and moved resources into Dicey, a casino and sports-betting app.

Who is still standing. The oldest survivors are the CryptoPunks market (9.3 years), OpenSea (8.8 years) and SuperRare (8.5 years). The full list: CryptoPunks Market, OpenSea, SuperRare, Sorare, Rarible, NBA Top Shot, Crypto.com NFT, Element, OKX NFT, Magic Eden (Solana only), objkt.com, Stargaze, ThetaDrop, Gate NFT, Gamma, Tensor, Sudoswap, Bitget Wallet NFT, Manifold, Ordinals Wallet and UniSat. Many of them changed shape to survive: OpenSea rebuilt itself as OS2 and now trades tokens too, Stargaze moved off its own chain onto the Cosmos Hub, and Sorare moved to Solana.

Part 6. What it means

NFT trading is a winner-takes-most market now. One general marketplace, OpenSea, still earns real fees. A handful of niche venues survive on art (SuperRare, objkt), sports (Sorare, NBA Top Shot), Bitcoin Ordinals (Ordinals Wallet, UniSat, Gamma) or tooling (Manifold, Sudoswap). There is no room for a second or third general marketplace at today's volume.

NFTs are merging into token trading. The survivors are not betting on NFTs alone. OpenSea's OS2 trades tokens, Zora turned posts into coins, and Rarible now runs on newer chains including Robinhood Chain. The standalone "NFT marketplace" is turning into a feature of broader trading apps and wallets.

What still trades has a reason to exist outside speculation. Tokenized physical collectibles (Courtyard), the oldest status asset (CryptoPunks) and brands with off-chain products (Pudgy Penguins) are where activity concentrates. Pure PFP speculation is mostly gone.

Blur's exit is the end of the incentive era. Blur grew on airdrop points and zero fees, and its volume left with the incentives. It generated $0 in protocol revenue over three years. The marketplaces that survived the longest are the ones that never depended on mercenary liquidity.

Methodology

Marketplaces. We built a roster of 59 notable NFT marketplaces launched in 2017-2023 and checked each against an official announcement or a reputable media report, plus a live check of every site on October 13, 2026. Three are excluded from the count of 56: Axie Marketplace and VeVe (operating, but launch dates could not be confirmed) and AtomicHub (sources conflict on its status). "Still trading" means a live marketplace with real activity in 2026. Lifespan figures use the 20 closures with month-level launch and close dates. The roster covers notable, high-volume marketplaces, not every NFT marketplace that ever existed.

Market data. Monthly and weekly sales: CryptoSlam (via Decrypt and crypto.news). Chain-level volume and marketplace fees: DefiLlama, pulled October 13, 2026. DefiLlama covers a limited set of chains (no Bitcoin or Base), so its totals are lower than CryptoSlam's. Collection floors: CoinGecko, October 13, 2026; one-year changes are in USD and include the move in ETH. Per-marketplace volume for 2026 is not publicly available, so marketplace activity is assessed by fees, site status and news.

Sources: official announcements from each marketplace, CryptoSlam, DefiLlama, CoinGecko, CoinDesk, Decrypt, Cointelegraph, The Block, crypto.news. Data may differ from live figures. Nothing here is financial advice.

DRW and Marex executed a swap onchain on Derivnex, the first OTC derivative tied to a fully tokenized index: S&P DJI's iBoxx USD Liquid Investment Grade Index on Canton.

Kaiko tokenized the index with access rules that keep S&P DJI's licensing controls, and supplies the official values used to price the position. Derivnex runs the trade as a Canton smart contract, so both firms share one synced record. The trade size was not disclosed.

Next, Derivnex plans to link swap positions with digital cash and collateral on Canton, so margin and payments run on the same rails.

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Korea's FIU blocked 27 exchanges operating without registration, including KuCoin, BitMart, MEXC and Phemex. Their sites will be cut off and they must stop serving Korean users.

Only 28 providers are registered with the FIU, and 44 unregistered operators were referred to investigators. In 2025, KuCoin, MEXC and 12 others were already pulled from Google Play and the App Store in Korea. KuCoin says user assets remain safe.

The FIU urged users to check whether their exchange is registered and to withdraw from unregistered ones now, as funds may be hard to recover later.

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