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• $25M NFT Burn - Brian Armstrong bought and burned a $25M NFT to relaunch Up Only TV.

• Monad Airdrop Fallout - Monad’s airdrop sparked backlash over allocation fairness.

• Coinbase x Echo - Coinbase acquired Echo for $375M, its largest aquisition since 2021.

• Market Pulse - Q3 fundraising rose 47% to $8.2B, OpenSea announced $SEA token for 2026, and TRON hit record $1.2B quarterly revenue.

Brian Armstrong bought an NFT for $25 million and burned it to revive Up Only TV, the long-dormant crypto talk show hosted by Cobie and Ledger.
The NFT, one of the most expensive ever destroyed, an audacious move by Armstrong to “buy back meme culture”. The event united memes, money, and media into a new thesis: ownership and entertainment are converging into a social protocol.

Onchain data showed Up Only–tagged wallets up 11x and related NFT volumes spiking overnight. Creators split on the symbolism: traditionalists saw corporate cosplay and web3 natives called it “performance art funded by liquidity.” Regardless, it shows that symbolic acts can move markets as much as token launches.

Monad Labs rewarded 230K+ addresses with 30% of its token supply via anti-Sybil verification, but controversy quickly emerged around opaque formulas and influencer over-allocations. Just 5,500 active community members received rewards compared to 225,000 users from the broader crypto ecosystem.

$MON collapsed over 50% within two days, reigniting debates over fairness and decentralization. Despite retail exhaustion, analysts called it a technical success, citing its 30-month vesting and real effort to sustain ecosystem health. Yet the community mood said otherwise.

Coinbase’s $375 million acquisition of Echo marks its largest deal since Bison Trails (2021). Echo’s infrastructure enables compliant onchain capital formation, effectively giving Coinbase a turnkey pipeline for ventures. Analysts framed it as both an offensive and defensive move, locking in distribution while preempting rivals like Binance and Bitfinex.

The acquisition will likely fold Echo’s stack into Base ecosystem tooling, turning Coinbase into a single hub where builders can raise, deploy, and trade directly within regulated rails. A step toward Armstrong’s vision of “Finance as Code.”

• Crypto Fundraising Rebounds - Q3 fundraising jumped 47% to $8.21B as capital shifted from infra to consumer protocols. Gaming, DEXs, and Payments led inflows across 1,200 investors and 80 M&A deals.

  

• Largest Crypto Survival Game - Pandemic Lab’s “Addicted” Season 2 game will feature the largest prize for a crypto survival game ever. Its a 7-day $300k winner-takes-all prize, far surpassing the prize allocation of the infamous “Crypto the Game”.

• OpenSea’s SEA Token - OpenSea will launch its long-awaited $SEA token in 2026, allocating 50% to users and contributors. Are NFTs coming back?

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This week showed how crypto’s cultural, financial, and institutional layers continue to converge.