Happy Friday! Here are the 5 most interesting blockchain fundraises for the week ending 10/30/26. I’m traveling so this will be short and sweet! 1. Hyperbolic GPU cloud platform Hyperbolic raised $30M in a Series A led by Walden Catalyst with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, Vista Equity Partners, and others. Hyperbolic used to be focused on decentralized compute and was going to build their own chain but now there’s no mention of blockchain. Hmmmm… 2. Bullshot AI-powered meme token launchpad Bullshot raised $7.7M in a round led by P2 Ventures and Animoca with participation from Becker Ventures, Poolz Ventures, and many others. We’re still funding meme launchpads, huh? 3. Predicate Compliance platform for digital assets Predicate raised $8M in a Series A led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Paxos, 1kx, and Tribe Capital. What makes it interesting is that compliance follows the asset into secondary markets rather than stopping at an issuer’s app. The company reports more than $1 billion in screened volume and 6 million transactions evaluated. 4. Spicenet Brokerage network for onchain finance Spicenet raised $5M in a Series A led by dao5, with participation from Babylon and AccVentures. The funds will support the SPICE token launch and initial network liquidity. 5. Cancore Cross-chain trading platform for tokenized assets Cancore raised $7.2M in a Seed round from ArkStream Capital, MH Ventures, X Ventures, and others. Cancore connects Canton-native assets, including tokenized RWAs, with liquidity on public blockchains such as Ethereum-compatible networks. — Congrats to all the teams on their fundraises! Give me a follow @mikewchan for more crypto and fundraising content. Thanks for reading!

Nearly 90% of large company finance execs have deployed or piloted tokenized money. That's huge! The sample of the DBS-commissioned survey was 422 leaders at companies with revenue above $500M. Stablecoins were the instruments most adopted (63% of respondents), followed by tokenized deposits at 53% and tokenized money market funds at 52%. Faster payments were among the top benefits, as expected. Regulatory uncertainty, security risks, and integration difficulties were the hurdles cited. Wen 100% adoption?

Aaaaaand the AI circle jerk continues Meta is selling $95B of stock so it can buy more AI chips. And some of the buyers of that stock are the companies selling Meta the chips! Meta plans to sell ~$35B in common and mandatory convertible preferred now, then a $60B of non-voting Class C shares starting in Q1 2027. Nvidia, AMD,and Broadcom said they're interested in up to $5B of the common stock, with Nvidia saying it will invest $3B. Of course this is all legal but a supplier buying its customer's stock so the customer can keep buying from the supplier is the kind of circular crap we all have come to expect from the AI industry.

Apollo’s chief economist says that AI has delivered “zero financial payoff” to most of corporate America. His evidence is that profit margins and revenue per worker look flat across the S&P 493 (the S&P 500 minus the Mag 7). I think the “zero financial payoff” headline is pretty bombastic but I'm not all that surprised. Large corporations are always VERY slow to adopt new tech, even if the benefits are clear. And AI so significantly impacts business processes that even if corporations do adopt it early, it will take time to reap the benefits. Connecting data, rebuilding workflows, and determining who’s accountable for what can take many years for large corporations to figure out. Eventually, the time and resources saved with AI will lead to more and better products launched, more customers served, and improved revenue and margins. Let's see what these numbers look like in a couple of years https://t.co/CVBv70PYLB

Sometimes I scan startup marketing job postings just to get a gauge on what roles are out there and how the function has changed. I noticed an interesting bifurcation in how Head of Marketing roles at startups are described. It's pretty typical for a listing to say "This isn't a strategy role - you need to be hands-on, execute, build, yada yada yada". But recently I've found some listings that say quite the opposite, something like: "We are looking for someone who sets direction and strategy, not someone who runs campaigns...execution will increasingly be handled by AI agents". If you were a marketer, which role would you rather pursue?

During the week of Oct 18-24, 14 blockchain startups raised $1.8B in funding. A lot of this total was blockchain-adjacent - Tenstorrent's $1.5B Series E, Whop's $200M Series D, and Erebor's $30M round. We're seeing blockchain and crypto integrated into every industry now. Higher

a16z Crypto just renamed themselves a16z Frontier. A few thoughts: 1) Chris Dixon says it's an expansion and they'll keep investing in crypto. Probably true, but when the $2.2B fund was announced in May, they said it was "100% dedicated to investing in crypto entrepreneurs." A few months later, they changed course. 2) Dixon's argument is that Wall Street and fintechs launch products on blockchains all the time now, so the "crypto company" label means less. 3) Ali Yahya, who joined as the crypto team's first investor in 2017, has left the firm. I wonder what's next for him. 4) Will they revert to their original name when the bull market returns in full force? 😁 Probably nothing, but maybe something.

"It's an odd kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can't be in the conversation." Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to discuss a merger. The weird thing is that Elon can't be part of the conversation due to obvious conflicts of interest. Elon said a deal would be "a good idea" because "we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity." At today's valuations, the combined company would be worth about $3.5 trillion, the biggest merger ever. But the hurdle is pretty high - Tesla needs 50% of all outstanding shares to vote yes, counting every share whether or not it shows up to vote. Would we be surprised if all of Elon's companies merge into one?

WTF, Meta! Muse put the title of every shared chat into the web address, and those addresses ended up in public DNS records. Security company Claroc found more than 6,800 shared Muse conversations with basically one search. They opened hundreds of them without logging in and found a loan application, a marketing company's revenue numbers, a workplace calendar, and a bank fraud alert. The link had a random ID in it, so users assumed it was private. Then Muse stuck "my-loan-application" or whatever the chat was about right in the subdomain. Meta has paused sharing. I was willing to give Muse a shot because of its private VPN per user design. But now they went and F'd it up again. Turrible

Somewhere, a 68-year-old contractor who programs in COBOL is shook. OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol can now migrate COBOL programs into Java, Python, Rust and a few other languages with 86.6% accuracy. Banks, insurers and government agencies like the IRS still run huge chunks of their business on COBOL, and the only developers who understand it are retiring. It's a good thing that AI can move some companies and gov agencies into the 20th century!