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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Polymarket launched Protocol V2, replacing the contracts it has run on since launch. A few canary markets already trade on V2, and new markets are set to move over on November 2.

Polymarket was built on Gnosis’ 2019 Conditional Tokens Framework, and each new market type added another contract on top. V2 collapses that into one ERC-1155 positions contract, pUSD as the only collateral, one exchange and one router. It launches with four market types and an oracle aggregator for UMA and Chainlink.

Six firms audited the code, Certora formally verified it, and the bug bounty pays up to $5M. Users only need to accept new approvals. Old positions won’t be converted.

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ether.fi launched ether.fi USD, its own dollar stablecoin built on Ethena’s whitelabel service. The $300M+ in stablecoins already on ether.fi becomes native to every product it ships.

Ethena runs issuance, backing, custody, reserves and liquidity in the background, while ether.fi keeps the brand and shares in the revenue. Jupiter’s jupUSD and MegaETH’s USDm launched the same way. The backing mix, USDe or the GENIUS-compliant USDtb, hasn’t been disclosed.

ether.fi has been moving from liquid staking toward neobank products, and last week said it will fully exit EigenLayer this quarter.

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OKX raised new funding at a $25B valuation from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures and London quant fund QRT, Bloomberg reports. OKX didn’t say how much it raised.

The price hasn’t moved since March, when ICE, the NYSE owner, put about $200M into OKX at the same $25B. The new money “focuses on strengthening OKX’s long-term market infrastructure,” said Haider Rafique, OKX’s global managing partner.

The round lands as OKXICE, OKX’s joint venture with ICE, seeks approval to list tokenized stock in 63 US companies, from Nvidia to Coca-Cola.

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IMD started as Fren Pet on Base in 2023 and is now a community-owned AI swarm on Ethereum: 2,000 NFT seats, each running an agent that takes job. 582 agents are online, with 8,168 jobs done.

The token is up 226% since September 14 to about $11, helped by an Ansem shoutout and a fair launch with no VC. 29% of supply is already burned, yet Virtuals ($566M) is still about 7x bigger.

Spiko raised a $90M Series B led by NEA, bringing its total funding to $120M. The Paris startup puts money market funds onchain, mostly backed by euro and US Treasury bills.

Spiko’s funds hold $2.7B, up more than 5x in 12 months, for 10,000+ businesses and individuals in 25+ countries, in euros, dollars, pounds and Swiss francs. Withdrawals are already instant. Next comes real-time interest and treasury rules run by API or AI agents.

Index Ventures, Bpifrance, Speedinvest, White Star Capital and Wintermute Ventures also joined, plus former Bundesbank president Axel Weber. The money goes to new products, markets and hires.

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