Clarity survives (barely), Strategy sells and the untold story of Mastercard's $1.8 billion deal: Crypto's week in 5 stories

The original blockchain also faced an entirely different kind of test.

A controversial fork tied to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, or BIP-110, mined just two blocks before stalling. The breakaway chain inherited Bitcoin’s mining difficulty while attracting only a tiny share of its computing power, resulting in blocks forming hours apart.

Then the technical dispute overflowed into governance. Longtime developer Luke Dashjr was removed as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor after controversy surrounding the proposal. Dashjr said he would take a sabbatical from his roles as chair and chief technology officer of mining pool Ocean.

The week also brought another security story, this time involving a state actor and the courts. Bybit sued North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau and the Lazarus Group over last year’s $1.5 billion hack and secured a preliminary U.S. court order freezing identified assets tied to the theft.

5. Business: The shakeout is happening at the same time as the land grab

Here is the contradiction tying much of the week together. Traditional finance wants more crypto, but many crypto projects may not survive long enough to benefit.

More than 100 projects have folded in 2026, according to CoinDesk’s examination of a dot-com-style shakeout sweeping through the industry. While it's hard to find in advance the “real” businesses that will survive this cycle, what is clear is that the environment has become less forgiving of businesses betting that "numbers go up."