Fifteen new projects opened waitlists over the past two weeks. We put them all in our Waitlists Radar, with sign-up links, backers and risk notes.

Most of this round is about trading: AI desks and terminals (Arlo, Meridian, SmartX Terminal), funded and prop perps (Bungee, Northbook) and new prediction markets (functionSPACE, Omnibook). Outside trading, there is a post-quantum L1, a ZK compute network and a fantasy game built on real traders.

All of them are very early, and none has a token yet. Joining now usually means priority access at launch. Check each project’s verified or caution badge before you sign up.

Google launched Nano Banana 2.1, its new image model, at about half the API price of Nano Banana 2: $0.034 per standard image instead of $0.067, and $0.076 for 4K.

What’s new: sharper mask-based editing, steadier characters across repeated edits and better visual design. It takes up to 14 reference images, tracks up to 4 characters and 10 objects, and can ground images in Google Search. On Google’s own tests it scores 1,050 Elo, vs 990 for Nano Banana 2 and 935 for Nano Banana Pro.

The model is live in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, AI Studio and the API. The benchmarks come from Google only, independent tests aren’t out yet.

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Cross-border payments firm Conduit sued Tether in New York federal court, saying the issuer froze its $2.76M USDT treasury wallet in September 2025 without cause.

The freeze traces to a Brazilian Federal Police probe into Onix, a former Conduit client. Conduit says the wallet was opened after Onix left and never held its funds, and police never flagged it. A police filing shows Tether’s own T3 unit picked which wallets to freeze.

Conduit wants the funds back plus damages, including the yield Tether earned on Treasuries backing the frozen tokens. The freeze forced layoffs and office closures.

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Coinbase completed its Deribit integration, launching Coinbase Global Exchange and linking US and global crypto derivatives into one regulated liquidity pool.

CFTC guidance from May lets Coinbase Financial Markets connect US clients to global markets, so US institutions can reach options and perps that used to require offshore venues. Deribit, bought for about $2.9B in 2025, holds $30B+ in bitcoin options open interest and handled $1T+ in volume last year.

International traders and Coinbase Prime clients get options in the coming weeks, US retail later in 2026. Coinbase Pro returns by year-end as a separate pro platform.

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Mistral launched Large 4, its new flagship with 1 trillion parameters, of which 49 billion fire per answer. Fans already call it “Le Chonk” after a June meme, and Mistral made the nickname official.

It costs $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output, about a third of Claude Opus 5.5 on input and a fifth on output. On Finance Agent v2 it scores 54.7, ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 53.5 but behind Opus 5.5 at 58.6. Mistral mostly benchmarks it against Chinese open models like DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K3.

Weights are due by the end of October. It is the first model funded by Mistral’s €3B Series D at a €21B+ valuation, led by Samsung.

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Abstract announced it is winding down its Ethereum L2 after almost three years. Users must bridge assets out by December 15, after which funds left on the chain will be inaccessible.

The consumer chain drew 144+ apps, 400K+ users and brands like Red Bull Racing and Disney, and its Abstract Global Wallet became a widely used smart wallet. But growth stalled: a thin DeFi ecosystem, low liquidity, little institutional crossover and a smaller budget than rivals. A year of searching for product-market fit didn’t fix it.

Exits run through the Migration Hub or the native bridge, which has a 3-hour delay. It is the second L2 shutdown in a week, after Blast.

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Big names kept backing crypto rails: OKX held its $25B valuation with Circle, Ripple and StanChart joining, Spiko raised $90M and ether.fi launched its own stablecoin. The CFTC opened rulemaking for crypto venues, and Blast shut down its L2.

Five that actually mattered:

— Circle, Ripple and StanChart back OKX at $25B

— CFTC opens rulemaking on crypto venues

— Blast shuts down its L2

— Solana launches DvP with J.P. Morgan input

— Polymarket moves to Protocol V2

Aptos unveiled MonoMove, a new execution engine it calls the biggest scalability upgrade in network history. Aptos Labs rebuilt the Move VM and the stack around it for onchain markets.

On replayed mainnet trades from the Decibel exchange, collateral withdrawals ran up to 55x faster, vault requests 40x, perp market requests 38x and order placement 22x. End-to-end throughput was up to 11x higher in internal tests, before Block-STM and other optimizations. The bottleneck has now moved to storage.

MonoMove keeps Move’s asset rules and adds runtime checks against VM bugs. Feature completeness is due by end-2026, with mainnet planned for 2027 pending a governance vote.

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Treasure launched Higgsmart on Solana, a launchpad where creators turn memes made on the Higgsfield AI app into tokens. Creators who link their X account get a badge as the verified original, so copycats can’t pass off their work.

Tokens launch on Meteora’s bonding curve with no presale or team allocation, and graduate to a locked Meteora pool at 85 SOL. The 1% trading fee pays creators 0.40%, above pump.fun’s 0.30%. Only Higgsfield links are accepted, one token per generation.

Treasure, the gaming studio behind MAGIC, pitches it as protection from scammers who “vamp” viral memes.

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Yukon launched HashSmash with Zcash, Shielded Labs and Project Eleven: an open contest where humans and AI agents try to break SHA-256, SHA3-256, BLAKE3 and Poseidon.

Anyone can point an agent at the contest and use any method, from SAT solvers to formal methods. Each attack must show how many rounds it breaks and at what time and memory cost. All submissions are public so others can build on them, and each one is checked first by an LLM verifier, then by a panel of cryptographers.

"Strengthen cryptography with AI before AI breaks cryptography," Yukon wrote. SHA-256 already has 35 submissions, all still in review.

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