Polymarket topped Q3's funding rounds with $1B at a $21B valuation, led by 1789 Capital. Jeeves followed with $110M, then Circle and Kraken's parent Payward raised $100M each.

Polymarket: $1B at a $21B valuation, led by 1789 Capital

Jeeves: $110M Series C led by CoinFund, with a16z, Coinbase Ventures and YC

Circle: $100M PIPE from Binance, tied to a 5-year USDC distribution deal

Payward: $100M from Nasdaq at a $21B valuation

RQD Clearing: $74M led by Bain Capital, with ABN AMRO and Nyca

HIFI: $37M Series A led by Left Lane Capital

Latitude: $35M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with NEA and Coinbase Ventures

Cari: $32.5M from seven US banks, including KeyBank, M&T and Huntington

OpenReserve: $25M seed led by a16z crypto, with Coinbase Ventures and Jump

Fin.com: $20M seed led by Expa

Limited: $18.5M seed led by Third Prime, with North Island Ventures and Collab+Currency

Hivemind Digital Group: $17M strategic round led by M&G Investments, with FalconX and ZA Bank

Stablecoins are the clear theme: Jeeves, HIFI, Latitude, Cari, OpenReserve, Fin.com and Limited all build banking or payment rails on stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier model for coding, enterprise work and cyber defense. It launches at $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens.

The output limit jumps to 1M tokens from 64K, so the model can work through long tasks in one go. Argon sets a new high of 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1 and ranks first on the Vals Index and Zapier's AutomationBench. Trusted defenders get a version without cyber guardrails, and Wiz already used it to find a critical flaw in hospital software.

Access starts with cyber defenders in Google's Fairwind Program, then paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers.

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By price, September belonged to small caps: STONK +1,070%, Rhea +863% and Quant +400%, the only multi-billion name in the top three. Rank by dollars added to FDV and the board flips to Bitcoin (+$121B), Ethereum (+$31.7B) and XRP (+$12.9B).

No coin made both lists this month. Bitway came closest, +248% in price and +$9.4B in FDV, just outside the top eight by percentage. Zcash added $9.8B on a +68% move.

Zcash coinholders approved $8.4M in Q3 retroactive grants, funding 17 of 37 proposals. About 2.18M ZEC ($3.1B) took part in the vote.

Most of the money went to security work after the critical Orchard bug, which could have allowed unlimited ZEC minting in a pool holding about 4.2M ZEC ($2.3B at the time). Taylor Hornby, who found it, gets $1.5M across two bounties. Ironwood upgrade work and audits get $2.8M, and ZODL gets $1.95M for core protocol development.

The next round opens for proposals on Oct 30, with coinholder voting set for Dec 17-29.

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DogeOS opened its public testnet, a zero-knowledge rollup that brings EVM smart contracts to Dogecoin, with DOGE used to pay gas fees.

DogeOS comes from the founders of the MyDoge wallet. Teams are already deploying on testnet across payments, DeFi, games and markets. Dogecoin Foundation director Timothy Stebbing said he hopes it becomes "the springboard for a wave of new utility engineering."

DogeOS says it has no token and warns users to avoid scams claiming otherwise.

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Rumors that Abstract is winding down spread after core dev Cygaar went quiet. He hasn't posted since June and on Sep 28 moved about 1.34M PENGU ($12.8K) off the chain.

Posts also claim founder Luca Netz removed Abstract's badge from his X name and that the chain lost out to Robinhood Chain. Neither is confirmed: Netz still lists Abstract in his X bio, and Abstract posted its weekly XP update on Sep 29.

The team has made no official statement, so the shutdown talk remains unconfirmed for now.

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Since 2016, Bitcoin has closed October in the red only twice: 2018 (-3.8%) and 2025 (-3.9%). The median October return is +12.9%, and the best one was +47.6% in 2017.

This year BTC enters the month still down 4.6% YTD, but right after a +42.6% Q3. History leans green, though past Octobers guarantee nothing for this one.

Ostium launched its OLP recovery plan after the July 15 attack drained $23.75M from its liquidity pool. 3,321 of 3,666 affected wallets (90.6%) can get their losses back in full.

Stage 1: wallets that lost up to $1K can claim the full amount in USDC until Dec 29. Holders with bigger losses can take $1K now and waive the rest, or join Stage 2 by Oct 30, and doing nothing enrolls them automatically. Stage 2 will be funded by recovered assets and a share of protocol revenue.

So far only about $650K has been recovered from the attacker, and remaining OLP assets are worth about 30% of pre-attack holdings.

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Twelve rounds, $1.57B combined. Polymarket alone took $1B of it, almost two thirds. Take Polymarket out and the quarter has one clear theme: 8 of the other 11 rounds went to stablecoin payments and banking rails. The rest went to tokenization, and a lot of the money came from traditional finance: Nasdaq, US banks, Bain Capital, M&G. With a link to each project.

1/ Polymarket (Prediction Markets), $1B

The onchain prediction market raised $1B at a $21B valuation, led by 1789 Capital, the firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. In April it was valued at about $15B, so the price went up 1.4x in five months. The round was reported by Bloomberg and the WSJ and confirmed by a 1789 Capital spokesperson, but Polymarket has not announced it itself.

2/ Jeeves (Stablecoin Banking), $110M

A banking platform for companies that operate in several countries, now built around stablecoins. The round was led by CoinFund, with a16z, Coinbase Ventures and AllianceBernstein. The money goes to its own USDC/USDT wallet with payouts to 190 countries and to growing its card from 25 to 35 countries. Jeeves has raised more than $570M in equity and debt since 2019.

3/ Circle (Stablecoins), $100M

The USDC issuer sold $100M of its stock to Binance at $80.84 a share, below the market price. Binance cannot sell the shares for 2 years. The investment comes with a 5-year deal: Binance promotes and integrates USDC, and Circle pays it a monthly fee based on the USDC held through Circle's wallet infrastructure. The deal is disclosed in Circle's SEC filing from September 22.

4/ Payward (Exchange), $100M

Nasdaq invested $100M in the parent company of Kraken at a $21B valuation. The deal expands their tokenized stocks partnership: Kraken will distribute tokenized Nasdaq-listed shares with voting rights, with Nasdaq Equity Tokens due in Q2 2027. Kraken had 6.6M funded accounts in Q2, up 42% year on year. Reports say its IPO is now planned for Q2 2027 at the earliest.

5/ RQD Clearing (Clearing), $74M

A US clearing firm that clears about 2.4% of US listed-stock trading. Bain Capital led a $74M strategic investment, joined by ABN AMRO Clearing Bank and Nyca Partners. The money goes to digital asset custody, tokenization and expansion into Asia and the Middle East. In March RQD also partnered with Blue Ocean to build clearing for tokenized US stocks.

6/ HIFI (Payments), $37M

Stablecoin payment rails for businesses, with more than $7B in annual volume across 87 countries. Usage among existing customers grew more than 4x in six months. Left Lane Capital led the $37M Series A. HIFI took part in DTCC's tokenized asset trades alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs in July and now plans to add cards and tokenized capital markets.

7/ Latitude (Payments), $35M

One API that turns stablecoins into local payments over each country's own rails, such as Pix in Brazil, UPI in India and mobile money in Kenya, in more than 50 countries. Oak HC/FT led the $35M Series A, with NEA, Coinbase Ventures and Lightspeed Faction. The team is only 15 people, but it already holds 39 US money transmitter licenses.

8/ Cari (Tokenized Deposits), $32.5M

A network for tokenized deposits, built and funded by US banks. All $32.5M came from banks, including Huntington, KeyBank, M&T and First Horizon. More than 30 banks have joined and 40 more are in talks, together over $10T in combined assets. The founder is Gene Ludwig, a former US Comptroller of the Currency.

9/ OpenReserve (Crypto Bank), $25M

A new national bank that just got preliminary, conditional approval for a charter from the OCC, the US federal bank regulator. a16z crypto led the $25M seed, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump and Wintermute. It plans tokenized deposits, crypto custody, lending and its own stablecoin, rUSD, which still needs a separate OCC approval. Before it can open, the regulator requires at least $210M in capital.

10/ Fin.com (Payments), $20M

Money transfers that settle in USDC/USDT, mostly in under an hour, offered as an API or as a white-label app. It covers more than 30 countries and 40 currencies. The $20M seed was led by Expa, the fund of Uber co-founder Garrett Camp. Coinbase Ventures also joined. Fin came out of stealth with this round and says its annual recurring revenue grew more than 50x this year.

11/ Limited (Stablecoin Banking), $18.5M

Business accounts in the US, EU, UK, LatAm and Africa without opening a local company, with Visa cards and payouts on stablecoin rails. It expanded its seed round to $18.5M with Third Prime, North Island Ventures, ParaFi and DCG. The money goes to new payment routes in LatAm, Asia and the Middle East.

12/ Hivemind (Tokenization), $17M

An asset manager founded by Matt Zhang, Citi's former global head of structured products trading, with about $1B in client assets. M&G Investments led a $17M strategic round, and an M&G executive joins Hivemind's board. FalconX and ZA Bank also took part. The money goes to tokenization infrastructure and new institutional partnerships.

The pattern this quarter: the money moved to stablecoin plumbing. Eight of the twelve rounds fund the same thing in different forms: business bank accounts, payouts, deposits and a full bank, all running on stablecoins. The other theme is traditional finance buying in directly. Nasdaq bought into Kraken, US banks funded their own deposit network, and Bain Capital and M&G backed tokenization. Nothing here is financial advice, do your own research.

Which round surprised you the most?

Base launched its Cobalt network upgrade, its third this year. New Validity Transactions let traders submit swaps that wait until set price or block conditions are met and stay private until they land.

Cobalt also upgrades Base's B20 token standard for issuers: composite policies combine KYC allowlists with sanctions blocklists, multipliers can be scheduled for corporate actions like stock splits, and a new seizeWithMemo function lets authorized admins move frozen balances with an onchain note.

Next, Base plans 200ms blocks, down from 2 seconds, plus native smart accounts with gas sponsorship and transaction batching.

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