Abstract, Blast, and Blur reportedly shut down or scaled back operations within a single week as funding became scarce. The three crypto projects highlight how tighter capital conditions are pressuring teams to cut costs and rethink roadmaps. The closures mark one of the week's most notable multi-project pullbacks in the digital asset sector.

At 1.42 AM today, the USDC Treasury burned about 135 million USDC on Ethereum, and the transaction was confirmed. Earlier at 12.49 AM, Circle minted roughly 168 million new USDC on Ethereum. The two moves left a net increase of about 33 million USDC.

Solana core developer Anza said the Alpenglow upgrade activates on mainnet beta October 21 near 14:50 UTC. It swaps TowerBFT for Votor, cutting transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Validators will exchange votes directly instead of sending them as onchain transactions, which may reduce reported transaction totals. It ran on testnet September 24 and devnet September 25.

NEAR led the AI token subsector as crypto markets sold off, Wintermute said. Of the 66 largest projects, only 11 gained. Bitcoin fell 3.2% to $83,000 while Ethereum dropped 7.0%. Liquidations hit $1.19 billion, with $1.06 billion in longs. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $679 million in weekly outflows. NEAR drew support from post-quantum signature upgrades and a short squeeze.

Blockchain data shows 22,624 ETH valued at $56,639,421 moved from Coinbase Institutional to a previously unknown wallet. The transfer was flagged by onchain tracking, drawing attention to large exchange outflows and new wallet activity. The destination remains unidentified.

According to on-chain analyst Aunt Ai (@ai_9684xtpa), the address of Huang Licheng, known as "Majie Dage", has lost $11.27 million over the past seven days. Today it cut positions twice, realizing losses of $1.01 million and $12,000, respectively. It still holds a 7,150 ETH long position (about $17.86 million) at 25x leverage, with a liquidation price of $2,472.78. The current price is just $26.52 away from liquidation. On October 5, its profit was as high as $5.46 million; the account now has only $562,000 left. (Source: BlockBeats)

Blur has announced it will deprecate its frontend on November 12, following Blast's shutdown plans by the same founder. The Blur marketplace will remain operational from a backend perspective. The BLUR token price fell sharply on the news.

Blur will deprecate its website frontend on November 12, 2026, though the onchain marketplace protocol keeps running through its smart contracts. Blend, Blur's NFT lending arm, stops matching new loans the same day, so borrowers must repay or face default. BLUR traded at $0.0134 after a 28.8% daily drop and a 52% year to date decline, and still governs the protocol fee switch.