We checked DeFiLlama's trading app rankings on the morning of October 21 (Lisbon time). The fomo Wallet listing showed $17.31 million in 30-day revenue, ahead of Axiom at $16.14 million and GMGN at $15.53 million. Counting all of FOMO's products, including its perps interface, the total was $18.70 million. The numbers move daily, which is why they sit a little below Crypto Briefing's figure.

The lead depends on how you measure it. Over the latest seven days Axiom earned more ($2.60 million against $1.99 million for fomo Wallet on the same DeFiLlama snapshot), and Axiom still collects far more in gross fees: $33.9 million over 30 days against $18.3 million for fomo Wallet. TokenPost explains the gap: Axiom's revenue figure deducts the referral and cashback payouts it makes to traders, while FOMO's only excludes referral fees. For September as a calendar month, TokenPost counted $31.53 million in revenue for fomo Wallet, $18.35 million for Axiom and $40.34 million for GMGN.

From 625,000 to 2.7 million users

FOMO said more than 625,000 people had joined when it announced a $75 million Series B in June, according to TokenPost. By October 1, co-founder Park Se-yong told Bloomingbit the app had 2.7 million users, about 17 months after its public launch in May 2025. The user base roughly quadrupled in about four months.

The company has raised $94 million in total. Crypto Briefing reports that Index Ventures led the Series B at a $550 million valuation.

Why traders moved

Price is the main reason Crypto Briefing gives. FOMO takes about 0.5% on each swap, while Axiom charges about 1%, according to the outlet. For someone trading meme coins many times a day, that cuts the fee on every trade in half. By late August, FOMO had about 46% of daily Solana trading terminal volume and Axiom's share was under 30%, Crypto Briefing reported.

FOMO's social features are the other draw. The app shows users what other traders are buying and selling in real time and lets them copy trades. After a trade, users can post why they bought and link articles or X posts. The app also pays Solana gas fees for its users and handles bridging across the seven networks it supports, which include Solana, Base, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain. Park told Bloomingbit that meme coins make up about half of trading on the app, and that FOMO plans to add tokenized stocks, RWAs and stablecoin yield products. It has no token and is aiming for an IPO instead.

Revenue has cooled since the summer

User growth has kept going while weekly revenue has fallen. Crypto Briefing tracked FOMO's weekly protocol revenue climbing from a then-record $1.57 million in the week ending July 27 to a peak of $9.59 million in September. By October 13 it had dropped for five straight weeks to $3.96 million, 59% below the peak, as onchain activity cooled across the market.

So FOMO reached the 30-day top spot while earning well below its summer pace. The next test is whether Axiom cuts its fee.

How fast it got here

Mercury counts annualized revenue as one month of revenue multiplied by 12, Akhund told Fortune last year. He doesn't use the SaaS-style ARR figure, since a bank earns money from deposits and card spend rather than long-term contracts.

On that measure the company was at $500 million at the end of 2024 and $650 million at the end of the third quarter of 2025. About a year after that it crossed $1 billion.

The customer count has moved quickly too. When Mercury announced its $200 million Series D at a $5.2 billion valuation in May 2026, led by TCV, it said more than 300,000 customers used it. Five months later Akhund puts the figure above 450,000.

Who is signing up

Mercury started as a bank account for tech startups and says one in three U.S. startups now uses it. Its customer list includes Supabase, ElevenLabs, Lovable and Linear. In the Series D post the company said more than 73% of new customers come from outside the AI and tech startup category, including ecommerce brands and professional services firms.

In the same post Akhund pointed to AI as a source of new founders. Mercury saw applications grow 2.5x in Q1 2026 compared with Q1 2025, while new U.S. business applications rose 18% over the same period, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures cited in the Series D post.

Payroll is next

Akhund told Newcomer that Mercury is launching a payroll service. The groundwork started in April, when Mercury acquired Central, an AI-native payroll and benefits startup backed by First Round Capital and Y Combinator. At the time Central had nearly 500 startup customers and had processed more than $175 million in payroll.

Akhund's case for the deal came down to spend. For Mercury customers that run payroll, it makes up roughly 20% of their total spend, according to the acquisition post.

In May, Mercury said it would launch Mercury Command, a tool for running financial tasks in plain language, later in 2026. Akhund and Eric Newcomer covered AI agents spending money and the state of fintech startups in the full episode.

Two rounds, 22 months apart

In December 2024, Tenstorrent closed more than $693 million in a Series D at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners. Bloomberg put the post-money figure at about $2.6 billion, the number TechCrunch uses as its comparison point. The new round raised more than twice as much money and lands at $6.2 billion post-money.

TechCrunch reports the raise comes five months after Intel and Qualcomm reportedly showed acquisition interest at valuations of up to $5 billion. Keller told Bloomberg, per TechCrunch, that the company chose to stay independent and raise more after showing its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models.

Who wrote the checks

Trace Capital, a firm Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi launched this year, led the round with Innovation X. The other participants named by Tenstorrent are Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.

For crypto readers, the name to spot is Tether Investments, the investment arm of the USDT stablecoin issuer. It sits on the same list as Fidelity, Morgan Stanley and T. Rowe Price.

Where the money goes

Tenstorrent says it will use the capital to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale (each one combines dozens of its AI chips, per Reuters), keep serving open-weight models for LLMs and video generation, and develop the AI and CPU designs it licenses to companies building their own chips. Its chips are based on RISC-V, an open-source architecture, and it licenses its TT-Ascalon CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers including Samsung and LG.

"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said in the announcement. Keller, Tenstorrent's CEO, was the architect behind Apple's A4 and A5, AMD's Zen and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip. The company has offices in Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore.

What's new

On October 16, Lido contributors unveiled Fallback Exits, the first headline feature of Lido Lend, a proposed lending market they first revealed on October 7.

Here's the problem it targets. In a normal lending pool, lenders deposit an asset and borrowers take it out against collateral. Want out? You withdraw whatever's sitting idle. But when utilization hits 100%, there's nothing idle to withdraw. You wait.

Fallback Exits add a second door. When the loan asset runs short during market stress, lenders can exit using borrower collateral instead of waiting for the pool to refill.

The trade-off: you leave holding collateral, not what you deposited. In a tightly correlated market like wstETH/wETH that gap may be small, but it's still a different position than the one you signed up for.

What Lido Lend is

• A modified fork of Morpho Blue, the minimalist lending design that launched in 2024.
• Isolated markets, so trouble in one pair stays in that pair.
• Focused on blue-chip and correlated assets. Examples in the proposal include wETH/wstETH, stETH/ETH and USD/Treasury RWAs.
• Deposit screening to keep hacked or tainted funds out.
• Built for two crowds: passive long-term lenders and professional borrowers, including leveraged loopers.

Lido says the product is "not designed as a general-purpose pooled lending solution" and should complement existing markets rather than replace them.

Why safety is the pitch

Lido built its name on liquid staking, with more than $25 billion staked as stETH and no major security incidents, according to the proposal. Lending has had a rougher year. Crypto Briefing points to the KelpDAO bridge exploit in April 2026 as one of several incidents that raised worries about liquidity crunches and collateral safety.

Not everyone is sold. One reply on Lido's research forum argues that modifying Morpho Blue, even by a few lines, means its audits, formal verification and track record "don't automatically carry over."

Not live yet

None of this is shipping today. Lido Lend needs Lido DAO approval, both to accept the protocol and to set launch parameters. Technical specs, market parameters and audit reports are promised in the coming weeks. The target is a Q4 2026 launch, but that depends on governance.

Why it matters

The biggest liquid staking protocol moving into lending is a big deal on its own. Leading with "how do lenders get out?" is the smarter story. If Fallback Exits work as described, they could become the feature other lending markets get asked about.

On October 15, Ripple announced that Ripple Prime, its prime brokerage arm, has launched support for real-world asset (RWA) perpetual swaps. Institutional clients can now take exposure to more than 100 reference markets across equities, equity indices, ETFs, metals, energy and FX, with trading and settlement running 24/7, weekends included.

How it works

The plumbing is the interesting part. Clients don't connect to a DeFi venue themselves. They trade with Ripple Prime, which acts as principal on every swap. The price of each swap references perpetual futures listed by Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid, the decentralized derivatives exchange.

So the institution gets one familiar counterparty and a prime broker's risk management. The price discovery comes from an onchain venue that never shuts.

Two more features stand out:

• Cross-margining. RWA swap positions can be margined against the other asset classes Ripple Prime supports, so clients run one consolidated margin pool instead of several.
• RLUSD as collateral. Clients can post Ripple USD, Ripple's dollar stablecoin, as collateral (availability depends on jurisdiction).

Who's in

Market maker Virtu is already trading the product. "Virtu is ramping up across emerging liquidity pools, and Ripple Prime's 24/7 cross-margining across asset classes helps us expand our presence more efficiently as markets move toward round-the-clock access," said Scotte Moegling, Virtu's head of business development for digital assets.

Michael Higgins, International CEO of Ripple Prime, put it simply: "RWA swaps are where traditional and digital markets meet."

The fine print

The offering runs out of Ripple Prime's CIV BVI license for now. Ripple says it intends to offer it from more regions "in the near future" but gave no dates or named markets. The announcement also didn't disclose trading volumes or the size of Virtu's positions.

Why it matters

Perpetual futures on traditional assets have been one of the breakout trends in crypto this year. Ripple says trading volumes in RWA-linked perps have grown exponentially year-to-date. Until now, most of that flow came from crypto-native traders.

This launch is a bridge. A regulated prime broker is wrapping DeFi-priced markets in a format big trading firms already understand. If more prime brokers follow, onchain venues like Hyperliquid stop being an alternative to Wall Street hours and start setting prices for it.

That's the RWA story to watch: not just assets coming onchain, but onchain markets becoming the reference for the off-chain world.

The headline number

According to Chainalysis' latest Geography of Crypto report on North America, autonomous agents have made more than 138 million payments through x402, the Coinbase-incubated protocol that lets software pay for online services automatically. The activity runs on Base, Coinbase's layer-2.

The growth curve is steep. Cumulative x402 payments on Base went from roughly 1,500 in mid-2025 to over 138 million by Q3 2026, per Decrypt's read of the report.

What are agents buying? Compute, live web data, coding tools and access to AI models, paid for on the fly.

Tiny tickets

More than 87% of the payments analyzed fell between one-hundredth of a cent and 10 cents. That's the whole point. Card networks can't process payments that small economically. Stablecoins can.

The total value is still modest. CoinDesk notes that in July, x402 processed roughly 75 million payments worth just $24 million over 30 days.

The U.S. dominates inference spend

U.S.-linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of geographically identified payments for AI model inference. Chinese-linked wallets: 0.1%.

Chainalysis head of research Eric Jardine offered one explanation to CoinDesk: Chinese developers may lean on open-weight models like DeepSeek and Qwen, so they buy less metered inference. China flipped the script elsewhere, though. Chinese-linked wallets made up roughly 90% of identified payments for security and code-analysis services, much of it going to AgentLisa, an AI smart-contract auditing platform.

Wallets are sticking around

Two stats suggest real habits forming:

• Of wallets first funded in Q2 2026, 89.3% were topped up again within 30 days, versus 70.6% for wallets first funded in Q3 2025.
• The average gap between a wallet getting funded and making its first x402 payment fell from 73 days in late 2025 to 18 minutes in Q3 2026.

The caveat

Transaction counts aren't the same as demand. Decrypt points to earlier research from TRM suggesting much apparent agent activity on these rails may be scripts or self-dealing rather than genuine autonomous agents. And the data only covers identifiable x402 activity, not the whole market.

Why it matters

The rails are being built fast. Visa, Mastercard and Stripe have all moved to support agent payments, and Coinbase now lets business customers accept them. BlackRock's head of digital assets research, Will Su, told Chainalysis the firm is watching closely, "with AI agents potentially creating meaningful demand for frequent, low-value payments around the clock."

Even with the caveats, the direction is clear. Micropayments were always the use case stablecoins were made for. AI agents might be the customer that finally shows up for it.