GM, frens! ☕️
Here’s what we’re getting into this week in 30 seconds:
🌪 Altseason is still missing, but the leverage has arrived
Altseason still looks narrow and uncertain on the charts, but traders are piling leverage into a small group of altcoins as if the long-promised rally has already begun [here]
🤖 Machines started to use crypto without us
AI agents made 138 million tiny payments through x402, showing why stablecoins make far more sense than cards when software needs to buy digital services by itself [here]
🎨 Ambire: cleaning up wallet experience
Ambire keeps smoothing out wallet UX with clearer signing, easier gas payments, batching, and a new amount slider, plus did someone say exclusive mobile access code? 👀 [here]
🖼 Blur won the NFT war… and still lost
Blur once controlled more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading, but rewards, zero fees and a collapsing market left its famous volume without a business behind it [here]
🤏 The Richard Heart show ends in Istanbul
Richard Heart’s reported arrest wiped $160 million from HEX and reopened the full story behind his “sacrifice” sales, billion-dollar projects, and carefully marketed wealth [here]
Plus:
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Altseason is still missing, but the leverage has arrived
Altseason has been “almost here” for so long that people talk about it like Santa. Every few weeks somebody spots two green candles, checks pair dominance, and announces that the presents are finally on the way.
The community drags its old bags back out, writes new price targets on them, and waits. Then a few coins pump, everything else does nothing, and altseason gets pushed back another month 🙄
This time, the charts still are not showing the pump people keep promising. Ethereum is not dragging the whole market upward, most sectors remain down and Bitcoin dominance has actually increased.
But traders are already placing leveraged bets as if altseason already came 👇
Altseason may not be visible in prices yet, but it’s starting to show up in open interest.
Open interest measures the value of futures positions that traders still have open. It does not tell us whether those traders are right or even whether they are betting up or down. It does show where people are borrowing money and taking larger risks.
According to CoinMarketCap’s Head of Research Alice Liu, total open interest across the market reached $403.6 billion after rising almost 15% in one week. BTC moved in the opposite direction, with its own open interest falling just over 6% 📉
The leverage went looking for something more exciting.
Some of the individual numbers are ridiculous. Open interest in NEAR grew 252% over 30 days. ICP gained 54% and Wormhole jumped 498%. Wormhole’s open positions reached almost 29% of the token’s entire market value 🪙
That last number should make people sit up, although perhaps not for the reason holders would like. When leveraged bets grow that large beside the actual asset, even a small price move can begin pushing traders into liquidations. Then those forced trades push the price further and the whole thing starts feeding itself.
There are currently tens of billions of dollars sitting in open positions outside BTC. People are clearly placing larger bets on the rest of the market even though the price charts still doesn’t look too good.
The community has noticed. Calls for altseason are getting more and more popular again.
CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season Index has reached 66 recently, its highest level in a year. A month ago it stood at 39. On the surface, that looks like the clearest sign yet that the market is finally getting what it has been begging for 🥲
The index measures how many large coins have beaten BTC over the past 90 days. Out of 26 tracked sectors, only six gained over the previous week. That means fewer than a quarter were rising even while the altseason reading reached its yearly high 👀
Bitcoin dominance also increased from 59.15% to 59.34% while Ethereum’s share fell from 11.33% to 11.01%. This is definitely not the old school altseason where ETH runs first and nearly every piece of garbage follows it upward.
The money is gathering around a much smaller group. NEAR and Internet Computer posted double digit gains while Zcash, Pump.fun, Ondo and a few others also moved. Most of the market watched from the bench 🪑
There is an optimistic way to read that. Leverage often moves quickly when traders think the market is about to turn. People may be positioning early instead of waiting for every chart to look obvious.
A large jump in open interest doesn’t create real demand. It creates positions that eventually have to close. If spot buyers arrive and prices keep rising, those bets can add fuel to the move. If the buyers never commit, the same leverage becomes a pile of forced selling waiting for the wrong candle 🕯
NEAR already shows the problem. Its open interest came close to 9% of its market value after climbing 252% in a month, while its spot buying was reportedly slightly negative during the latest move. Traders were pushing the price through derivatives while ordinary buyers were not matching them 💰
There was also a liquidation pool below the market estimated at four times the size of the nearest one above it. It means a drop could find plenty of positions ready to explode.
So yes, something is changing. But few coins running while most sectors fall is not the full party. More like a group of people standing outside with alcohol and fireworks but no confirmation that the house is open yet 🤷♂
Machines have started using crypto without us
No longer theoretical - AI agents have already made more than 138 million payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on Base during the year ending in July 2026, according to research by Chainalysis 🤯
Most of those payments were tiny. More than 87% were worth between one hundredth of a cent and ten cents.
But that is not an embarrassing detail. It’s the whole reason this works 👇
An AI agent may need one piece of live market data, a single model request, access to an API or a quick code check. It does not want to open an account, choose a monthly subscription and type in somebody’s company card before spending three cents 🤖
Traditional payment systems were built for people purchasing products. The fees and paperwork make tiny machine payments pointless.
x402 lets software receive a payment request and settle it using stablecoins. The program gets what it needs, the service gets paid and nobody has to approve every purchase manually 🪙
Programs really enjoy using.. programmable finance. Who knew 😬
The agents are now paying for computing power, web data, search results, model inference, code reviews, games and financial information. Some are even paying other AI services, which means the robots between themselves have already developed outsourcing 😶
Chainalysis found signs that the activity is becoming more deliberate. Among wallets first funded in the third quarter of 2025, 70.6% received another payment within 30 days. For wallets first funded during the second quarter of 2026, that figure rose to 89.3%.
The median time between a wallet receiving money and making its first x402 payment also dropped from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes in the third quarter of 2026. The share spending within their first hour rose from 4% to 67% 🤓
Those wallets are no longer being created so somebody can test a demo and forget about it. Many are funded because a job is already waiting.
Also, x402 can be used by ordinary scripts as well as advanced AI agents.
Earlier research from TRM suggested that some of the activity may be automation, self dealing or programs making payments mainly to generate activity. And of course we all know the deal - crypto has never met a transaction counter it could not inflate 🙃
But even after removing the marketing fog, the use case remains 🤔
Machines have a real life working way to buy small digital services without asking a bank for permission. Stablecoins can settle those payments globally and cheaply, while smart accounts can limit how much an agent spends and where it spends it. Greet the future.
Ambire: cleaning up wallet experience
Wallet UX does not improve because somebody makes the buttons less square (yes that’s honest to god updates [certain wallets] could present after years of development 🤐 )
Real UX improvements were the main direction of the Ambire extension.
The interface was improved after testing showed the old version felt slightly off. Behind it, Ambire added transaction batching, balance changes shown before signing, plain language transaction details and the option to choose which token pays the fee. Users can also limit which accounts each app sees instead of exposing every account whenever they connect.
And it appears to be finding an audience. The extension grew from around 4,000 installs in October 2025 to more than 20,000 users by August 2026. During that time, Ambire also added support for Safe accounts and most major hardware wallets, so better UX does not require users to give up the setups they already trust.
The latest addition is much smaller, but that is exactly the point. Users can now pick amounts with a slider when swapping, bridging, sending or topping up the Gas Tank. Less typing decimals, less correcting amounts and fewer taps for something wallets should have made simple years ago 🤨
The same UX is also reaching Ambire Mobile.
We have another exclusive access code reserved for Web3 On Fire readers: web3onambire (warning: the code is limited so use it asap) 👀
Blur won the NFT war... and still lost
Some products die not because rivals beat them. They win the fight they were built for, change the whole market around themselves and then discover… the market is no longer worth winning. Yes, in our industry that’s not uncommon.
Blur is shutting down its website on November 12.
Its smart contracts will remain available on Ethereum and BLUR holders will keep control of the protocol’s fee switch. Blend, its NFT lending service, will stop matching new loans on the same day. Borrowers must repay before the deadline or let their loans default, with a separate withdrawal tool promised afterward 💸
That is a very small ending for something that terrified OpenSea in 2023.
Blur launched in October 2022 as a marketplace for professional NFT traders. If OpenSea was built more like a shop Blur looked like a trading terminal.
It offered fast listings, collection bids, bulk buying, portfolio tools, market aggregation and zero fees. People could sweep several NFTs from the floor or sell a pile of them without clicking through every cartoon individually 🖼
Then Blur added the part guaranteed to attract crypto traders: free tokens.
Its first major airdrop distributed 360 million BLUR in February 2023. More than 112,000 wallets claimed tokens then worth over $400 million. Further rewards encouraged users to list NFTs, place bids and keep activity on Blur 💰
The strategy worked almost immediately. By March 2023, Blur controlled more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading volume and processed roughly $1.43 billion during the month. OpenSea had gone from comfortable market leader to a company changing its fees and royalty rules because a new rival had appeared with a token printer 🖨
The numbers looked incredible. The people creating them were not necessarily there because they loved NFTs.
Blur attracted traders who treated collections as pools of interchangeable assets. They were bidding, sweeping and selling to earn points and improve their next token allocation. The JPEG was often just the object being passed around while everyone fought over the airdrop 🐒
CryptoSlam flagged at least $577 million in Blur connected trades as possible wash activity following the February 2023 airdrop. Blur tried to design its rewards without directly paying for raw volume, but traders are very creative when free money is placed on the other side of a leaderboard 💵
This is where the NFT community split.
Some active traders loved Blur. It was fast, efficient and gave OpenSea its first serious beating. It made bulk trading easier, improved price discovery and forced the old leader to stop behaving like it owned the entire market 🔒
Creators saw something else.
Blur enforced only a small minimum royalty on many collections, and OpenSea weakened its own rules to compete. Effective creator royalties fell from an average of 2.5% in 2022 to around 0.6% by July 2023. The companies fought for traders by cutting the people who had made the things being traded out of the payment 👊
Collectors also blamed Blur’s reward farmers for grinding down floor prices. Large holders could dump several NFTs into standing bids, while farmers constantly changed positions to maximize points. Collections that were once treated as art, membership or internet identity became inventory inside a very strange warehouse 🤷♂
Blur founder Tieshun Roquerre, better known as Pacman, rejected claims that the marketplace caused the NFT crash. He had a point. NFT prices were already wildly inflated and the market was falling apart. Blur did not invent sellers.
It did make selling easier though - reward the people doing it and place more leverage underneath assets that were already hard to value.
Blend arrived in May 2023 and allowed people to borrow against NFTs or buy them with loans. The service used perpetual loans without fixed expiration dates. That added liquidity when prices were rising and liquidation fuel when they were not.
The community spent much of that year arguing over whether Blur had modernized NFT trading or turned every collection into a badly managed shitcoin with pictures 🤪
Both descriptions contained some truth 👇
Blur processed more than $7.4 billion in lifetime trading volume. It also charged no marketplace fees and recorded no protocol revenue from those trades over the last three years. Rewards bought enormous activity, but the activity did not create much of a business.
By March 2026, monthly volume had fallen below $7 million. That was a decline of more than 99.5% from its peak. The BLUR token dumped more than 20% when the platform announced it was closing.
The decision to shut down also came ten days after Blast, another project created by Pacman and the Blur team, announced that it was closing. Blast attracted more than $2.3 billion at its peak, helped by rewards and points. About $32 million remained when the team admitted the chain cost more to run than it produced 🫠
Blur says its protocol will survive after the website closes. Technically, that is true. Smart contracts do not need office rent or morale.
Some NFT collectors are celebrating because they believe Blur helped strip the culture out of the market and replaced it with leverage, farming and collapsing floors. Others remember that it gave traders better tools and forced OpenSea to improve 😐
Blur deserves both reactions. It was one of the sharpest products of the NFT era and one of the purest examples of everything that era got wrong.
It won the volume war, rewrote the rules and taught the whole market to chase traders who only stayed while the rewards were worth collecting. Once the free money and expensive JPEGs disappeared, the victory had nobody left to impress 😴
The Richard Heart show ends in Istanbul
Finance is full of people who dress greed up as confidence. Crypto made the trick easier than it ever was, mostly because the dressing part could be replaced with watches, supercars as well as other trash and a camera pointed at whoever could shout the biggest number in the most confident way 👑
Richard Heart turned that into his entire personality.
The founder of HEX, PulseChain and PulseX was reportedly arrested with his wife in Istanbul on Wednesday during an operation involving Turkish police and the country’s intelligence service 🪢
Turkish media said officers seized around $4 million in cash, 64 luxury watches, phones, computers, firearms, drones and jewelry from the property. Police have not publicly confirmed every reported figure, so the final count may change ⌚
The operation followed an Interpol Red Notice requested by Finland in 2024. Finnish authorities want Heart, whose legal name is Richard Schueler, over suspected gross tax fraud and assault 🔨
A Red Notice is a request for police around the world to locate and provisionally detain somebody. Finnish police say the suspected tax activity ran from June 2020 until April 2024. Investigators estimated that Heart failed to pay several hundred million euros and said his reported income did not match the tax authority’s calculations. A separate assault allegation relates to February 2021 😲
The market responded exactly as people would expect from an ecosystem built around one man’s personality 👇
HEX fell almost 30% and briefly reached about $0.0006. Its market value dropped from more than $500 million to around $340 million, erasing roughly $160 million. PulseChain and PulseX also fell heavily 📉
Heart’s defenders will say none of this proves the old accusations against his projects. But it also does not wipe away the mountain of crap that brought him here.
HEX launched in 2019 and presented itself as a blockchain version of a certificate of deposit. Holders could lock tokens and receive more tokens, with Heart promoting returns as high as 38% and calling HEX the highest appreciating asset in human history 🥴
Heart also built one of the most aggressive communities in crypto. Critics were dismissed as jealous, uninformed or angry that they had missed the gains. Supporters repeated his claims and treated every price increase as proof that the entire structure was legitimate.
Then came PulseChain and PulseX.
Heart asked people to “sacrifice” their assets rather than invest them. Participants sent valuable coins into addresses connected to the launches and received PLS or PLSX allocations later. Calling the money a sacrifice was meant to separate it from ordinary fundraising and the expectations attached to an investment.
It was also one of the most insulting bits of legal wordplay this industry has produced. People did not hand over more than a billion dollars because they had suddenly developed a religious interest in destroying money. They obviously expected Heart’s new tokens to make them richer 🤦♂
The SEC case issue
The SEC sued Heart and his projects in 2023, alleging that the offerings raised more than $1 billion and that at least $12 million in PulseChain funds had been used for luxury purchases 💎
The regulator claimed he bought McLaren and Ferrari sports cars, four Rolex watches worth more than $3 million and a 555 carat black diamond called The Enigma for roughly $4.3 million. It also alleged that funds were cycled during the HEX launch to make demand appear greater while Heart maintained control over much of the supply 🤔
Heart denied the allegations.
The SEC case fell apart in 2025. His supporters treated the dismissal as proof that every accusation had been exposed as a lie. But that’s not what happened.
The judge dismissed the case because the SEC failed to show enough connection between Heart’s activity and the United States. In this case, obviously SEC wouldn’t be able to charge him with vacuuming money all over the world, each individual government would have to do that 😶
SEC was allowed to amend its complaint, chose not to waste time on it and walked away. There was no trial testing whether the luxury spending claims were true.
Richard called it a complete victory for crypto, open source software and free speech in general.. Of course.
Many people still hold a different opinion of him. HEX supporters point out that its smart contracts ran, staking rewards were paid and early buyers made good returns. They argue that he attracted attention through deliberate outrage and that critics never understood the system 🥸
It’s actually way less complicated than that.
The guy promised impossible sounding appreciation, built products whose value depended heavily on his promotion and trained his community to treat concern as an attack. He called fundraising a “sacrifice”, displayed absurd wealth as proof of success.. does that sound familiar?
And now the Istanbul arrest adds new allegations rather than resolving the old ones. Courts still have to decide what is true, his ecosystem has already received another answer.
A project that claims to remove trust should not lose $160 million in value because its founder gets arrested. If it does, the decentralization was decoration and the founder was always the product 🤥
Other worthy reads
“The State of Crypto Inference Providers” - Blockworks Advisory:
“Crypto’s Next Chapter: External Problems” - Professor Jo:
“Conference Notes: TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026” - DWF Labs:
MEMES
That’s it for this week, frens.
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That’s us for this week. Ignore at least one thing the internet tells you is urgent and we’ll see you next Friday. Happy weekend.
Yours, The 🔥 Team
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