Beam’s 149% Month, the Abstract Shutdown and Off The Grid’s Launch: JRPG Crypto Games Podcast

On this episode of the JRPG Crypto Games Podcast, we go through our October 2026 industry report with Nikolay and July from the JRPG team. Tournaments, airdrops and funding events added up to $192,000 in October, about double September’s $94,000, and we tracked 3,300 news stories, 18% more than the month before. Beam was the best token of the month by far, up 149% to a market cap of about $215 million, and the Abstract chain shut down.

We also check on the three games that promised an October release. Off The Grid shipped its 1.0 on November 2nd, Katana Inu put out a demo instead of the early access it had announced, and The Sandbox Studio went live early in the month without a single tweet.

Who’s on the show

• Colorado hosts the show
• July from the JRPG team, covered the Off The Grid 1.0 release
• Nikolay from the JRPG team, joined remotely and covered Katana Inu

October by the numbers

• $192,000 in tournaments, airdrops and funding events, up from $94,000 in September
• 3,300 news stories, 18% more than in September
• Beam +149%, the biggest gainer, now at a market cap of about $215 million
• 1 billion Beam tokens burned, less than 2% of the roughly 58 billion outstanding
• $5 million in funding back in June, from one $3 million deal and one $2 million deal

In this episode

• 00:00 Intro and October funding
• 01:46 Biggest gainer: Beam
• 03:23 The Abstract chain shuts down
• 04:43 Off The Grid goes 1.0
• 09:55 The Off The Grid token and its hidden blockchain
• 12:28 Katana Inu, the survivor
• 17:04 A demo instead of early access
• 21:30 The Sandbox Studio’s silent release
• 23:50 Wrap-up

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Full transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Speakers are Colorado, July and Nikolay from the JRPG team.

Intro and October funding (00:00)

Colorado: Okay, so welcome to the JRPG Crypto Games Podcast. We’ve got something special today. We’ve been publishing an industry report for the last couple of months, and we’re tracking what’s happening in 2026 in the crypto gaming industry.

Things are down really bad, 99% from the highs. But we believe… there’s 600 million people with crypto wallets, and the cost of making a game has just been dropping with AI technology this year, so something should happen sooner or later. So let’s take a look at what happened in the month of October.

So for October, we’ll start with the funding. We had a total of $192,000 in tournaments, airdrops and funding events, and that’s up sharply. Last month it was only $94,000. We’ve been watching this all year, and this has been the biggest month we’ve seen since June.

Now, in June we had $5 million in funding, but that funding actually came from two large fundings. There was a $3 million deal and a $2 million deal. And then there was maybe still around another $200,000 in tournaments. So this is the biggest month we’ve seen in the last couple of months.

As far as the news goes, there were 3,300 stories, and this is 18% bigger than the previous month. Now, some of this might have been driven by… in October we had a pretty good move. We had a good move up in Ethereum in general and in crypto in general, but then it sort of fell back down.

Biggest gainer: Beam (01:46)

Colorado: As far as the best-performing tokens, the clear winner by far this month was Beam. Beam went up 149% in the month of October and now has a market cap over $200 million. Today it’s something like a $215 million market cap.

This puts Beam up there with the biggest names in the industry. It’s actually a bigger market cap right now than Axie Infinity, and a bigger market cap than Decentraland. It’s really one of the highest-valued companies.

And we took a look at what they’ve got. They’ve got multiple games. One of them we talked about in the past was Ballies. I don’t know if this wasn’t their most popular one, but we wrote the article on it. It ranked really well on Google. When you searched for it on YouTube, it was right there, and nobody cared. The article was there, but people just weren’t searching for it. I think maybe we got three or four views on it.

Maybe one of the other games did it. If it is, we’re not sure. They really weren’t making news about it.

Also, they announced recently that they burned a billion tokens, which sounds like a lot, but they’ve got, I think, 58 billion outstanding. So this is less than 2% of the total outstanding amount. And yeah, burning some tokens, theoretically, if you get rid of 2% of your market cap, maybe your market cap should go up 2%. But it absolutely doesn’t explain the 150% move that it did.

The Abstract chain shuts down (03:23)

Colorado: Okay, so the biggest stories of the month were… the Abstract chain shut down. And a lot of companies had their tokens on Abstract. One of them… did you play SuperTripLand, July?

July: No, I haven’t. I think Chris made it.

Colorado: Okay. One of them was SuperTripLand, and they were still minting on Abstract. I don’t know if I’ve checked lately, but two days before Abstract shut down, they were actually still minting. They didn’t bridge.

But most of the other games that were active and doing their development figured out some way to burn the tokens, or get people out of Abstract and onto a new chain. And Abstract was one of the bigger chains out there.

This has pretty much been a trend for 2026. We’ve seen a lot of big names in the business either say we’re done, or… most of them, like YGG, didn’t say we’re done, but they said we’re going to pivot to AI. And Immutable, which was one of the biggest names, didn’t shut down their Web3 gaming stuff, but they also did a pivot to AI.

Off The Grid goes 1.0 (04:43)

Colorado: So we also had three big releases promised for this month, and we’re going to go over them one by one. The first big release didn’t have a date on it. It didn’t have a date on it… No, they did have a hard date on it, right?

July: Not a hard date. They said October, because it lines up with the two-year anniversary.

Colorado: Okay, so we’re talking about Off The Grid, right?

July: Off The Grid, yeah.

Colorado: So Off The Grid said they were going to ship in October, and July’s got the story on that one. So July, what happened with Off The Grid?

July: So Off The Grid had, let’s say, promised before. They mentioned that they’re going to release the 1.0, the full non-early-access release, in October this year, because it lines up nicely with their two-year anniversary.

And in October, we were kind of waiting. They did have one big announcement, which was their new anti-cheat, Castler or Castro, something like that. And they did a big wave of banning, mostly people with aim assists and macros, recoil scripts, stuff like that. They banned a bunch of people, but nothing on the release for October.

Colorado: They banned?

July: Yeah, so they have suspended… I think they didn’t go through all the numbers, but they have suspensions, and depending on how hard the crime was, the punishment sort of varies.

So they launched the anti-cheat feature, and they went through and cleaned up, supposedly, people who were hacking and cheating and stuff like that. But nothing on the release, at least not in October. Until November 3rd or November 2nd, when they posted on X and announced they’re releasing. And they made a big post on their website, or their blog or whatever it is, where they described all the things they included in the 1.0 release. I think some of these things were partially implemented beforehand and some of them are brand new.

So they made some major performance improvements, and they reworked the weapons. They added an attachment budget, which is when you modify your weapon, let’s say you add a new hilt or a muzzle or something. Before, you weren’t limited in how you could modify it, apart from what parts you have. Now you are limited, in a way that more rare parts cost more to add to your weapon. And not in terms of burning or costing GUN tokens or something. You have a budget of points, let’s say.

So you can either spend all your budget for that weapon on one or two epic or legendary enhancements, or a bunch of crappy ones. So you decide how you spend your budget.

They reworked the cyberlimb toughness. One of the big things in that game is that you can change out your hands and legs, stuff like that. And I believe the bigger rarities didn’t have that much of an impact, or that much of a difference from the lower rarities. So they rebalanced that whole thing.

They added a stay-in-squad function, which is when you finish a game, if you like the people you were matched with, you can all opt in to stay in the same squad. That way you don’t get matched with new random people who might suck when you just had a team that you like. They added proximity voice chat, and Grid Runner, which is a content pack of some sort. I’m not sure exactly what it is. I haven’t tried it.

I did try the game, and some things do look improved. I played it previously, earlier in the year, around February maybe. I played a bit. The things I noticed were that the weapons seem a bit more varied and interesting, and they do function. You can feel the difference between the weapons a bit more. I don’t know if that’s in my head, a bunch of time has passed since then, but they feel pretty good.

I noticed the stay-in-squad feature, so I know they implemented that. I think I heard someone yelling over voice chat, proximity voice, but it was mostly noise. Something that grabbed my attention is that I’m…

Colorado: So there were real players, not just bots there.

July: That’s what I was getting to. The one thing that grabbed my attention the most is that I think this time I had more actual players. Because I remember last time when I was playing, I was pretty sure it was mostly bots, because I’m not that good at FPS games. And I won all three rounds or whatever that I played, and there’s no way I do that on my own.

And everyone… I could have chalked it up to that time, and being in a lobby where everyone is new, but even then, I should be getting my ass handed to me most of the time.

This time, I think… not that they were that much better, but I was getting shot at a lot more and hit a lot more. And my teammates were actually pinging things that are relevant on the map. So either they improved their AI, or they actually got real players playing this time.

Colorado: Okay, it might be real players, because they…

July: It might be. They did just… I expected this to be…

Colorado: Did you play right after launch?

July: I played, yes, on the 3rd of November.

Colorado: So they did get a boost from… usually Steam gives it a boost when it’s…

July: Yeah.

Colorado: New.

July: I assume so. Yeah, they moved from early access to an actual 1.0 release.

The Off The Grid token and its hidden blockchain (09:55)

July: I looked at the token…

Colorado: Is it still free?

July: It’s still free to play, yeah, completely. You can play without spending a penny at any point.

I looked at the token. I thought maybe since there’s an influx of new players, the token would react in some way, but from what I can tell, it’s been a steady decline from June to today.

Colorado: Well…

July: A steady, slight decline over time. Before that, they were quite a bit higher, and they had ups and downs. At the start of the year, they went up in January. They went down again before June, I think. And since then, it’s been a very steady decline.

Colorado: Yeah, I think the thing with all the new players from Steam is that a lot of people from Steam are playing the game, and they don’t actually realize it’s a crypto game. They sort of have the blockchain as this hidden layer of the backend. If you really research things, you could find out about it, but they’re not pushing you at all to buy NFTs or do anything.

People are actually buying and trading NFTs and minting NFTs in the game, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it. It’s just sort of a backend. It’s how they’re doing their backend service.

July: It’s supposed to be non-intrusive, I think.

Colorado: Yeah. At one point in January, they were the number one game as far as number of NFTs traded on OpenSea. They had millions of NFTs traded or something. But with these NFTs, it was not actually people actively trading. It was all happening automatically, for people who didn’t realize a blockchain transaction was happening.

July: Yeah, I was trying to figure out what happened in January to give them that initial boost at the start of the year, and I’m not really sure. They were improving things a bunch throughout the year.

One thing I can say pretty much for sure is that the drop of the token lines up with the scandal they had around that time, when a bunch of devs weren’t getting paid and they were doing overtime, and I think a bunch quit.

Colorado: Oh, that was… [inaudible]. I remember that story.

July: I think so.

Colorado: Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay, did you get a chance to research any news articles, or anybody else covering GUNZ, covering the release, or…

July: No.

Colorado: User comments?

July: Not really. I didn’t find anything all that interesting.

Colorado: Okay. All right, so if we find something interesting on it, we’ll publish it on the site and do another article.

July: For sure.

Katana Inu, the survivor (12:28)

Colorado: All right, so the other big story this month was Katana Inu. Now, this is one that has… these guys got a lot of money back in the time when everybody was getting funded, in like 2022 or 2021. And they had a really big, ambitious goal for a game.

And, you know, the market busted and a bunch of guys went under, whatever. And all of a sudden, go five years into the future, and these guys are still around. They actually had a launch date set for this month.

So Nikolay has got the full story on Katana Inu. Nikolay is joining us remotely today. So Nikolay, tell us about Katana Inu and what you learned from playing the game.

Nikolay: Yeah. So Katana Inu, it’s really a survivor story, kind of, as you mentioned. They were really big in 2021, when it was the crypto boom, but they’re still around.

What it is, is a PvP third-person action game in an anime-inspired samurai world, where you play as these Shiba Inu samurai. And it’s got really interesting movement mechanics, double jumps, grappling hooks, all that sort of stuff.

Something I found really interesting about it is how they handle Web3 and Web2. If you play through Steam, you’re probably playing the Web2 version. It’s 100% no wallet needed, 100% playable without NFTs, without crypto.

Colorado: Is it still on the blockchain? No.

Nikolay: And if you want to play the Web3 version, you’ve got to use their launcher. They have a launcher. It’s separate, and you’re playing that version. And that one has NFTs. It has a KATA integration, which is their token. Yeah, all that stuff is separate.

So they’ve really adapted to this new way the market seems to be going, with these games where they keep the Web3 and the backend almost optional.

And an interesting thing about them as well. They got a PlayStation 5 deal for the full launch, which is really big.

And as far as the launch, they launched on October 22nd. They said they were going to launch in early access, but instead they launched a demo, which is kind of weird. But I did get to play it. It’s a demo where you can play the tutorial. You can also go into matchmaking to play multiplayer, but I wasn’t able to find any games. I waited for a while.

As far as the game goes, I can’t really say it’s my cup of tea. Honestly, it’s kind of buggy. We can chalk that up to it being a demo, but to me it just seems… At first it was very laggy. I’m not on a bad computer, and it was choppy the whole time.

A GTX 1080. I think it’s Ti. I don’t know if they do Ti. Yeah. It should be able to handle it well enough. It was choppy the whole time.

During the tutorial, I noticed some tutorial prompts were misspelled. They completely skipped words in the prompts themselves. There are definitely some issues with the game. But I do like the fact that they survived through the turbulent market and are still going through it all. They managed to release.

July: The fact that they have misspelled things in menus goes to show that they’re probably not using AI. For people who are against AI in games, that’s plus one for Katana.

Colorado: Yeah, definitely.

Nikolay: I didn’t see a single [inaudible]. So…

A demo instead of early access (17:04)

Colorado: So tell me again about this. Did they announce that they were going to go into early access on October 22nd? What was the communication with the public, and what actually happened?

Nikolay: Well, they had announced previously that they would go into early access. But instead of early access, they went into just a demo. They didn’t actually release in early access.

Another interesting thing about them is they’re doing what they call a 10-game slate, which, as far as I can tell, means they’re planning to release 10 games in some way related to Katana Inu. The first one they announced was Samurai Task Force, and that is a completely different type of game. It’s an auto battler. But they still haven’t released that one.

Granted, they said on October… let me check my notes… last week, so October 27th or 28th, they said it would release sometime next week. It still hasn’t released, but there’s still some time until the end of the week. So we’ll keep monitoring that and see if they actually release anything. But after that announcement, they haven’t said anything about it.

Colorado: 10 games. That’s a big promise.

July: Yeah.

Colorado: 10 games. Okay. And I guess it’s an extra big promise from a studio that promised to release in early access and then kind of gave us a bait and switch with the game. Well, not really a bait and switch, but instead of early access, they gave a demo, which is better than no launch or nothing at all.

But I think there should have been some communication, like, you know, hey, we are working on these issues. Gamers are very forgiving, and they’re used to studios having delays on their projects. But they’re very forgiving when the studio is communicating with them and saying, hey, we need to polish this one more thing, give us a tiny bit more time and we’re going to be ready.

And I think it’s a really bad thing to do to your community to just not be clear about what’s delaying the release of a particular game.

July: Just like in the crypto experience, it’s very key. If they’re transparent about it, it’s probably going to be okay.

Nikolay: And for new players, I will say that an early access badge or an early access release for a game feels completely different from seeing a demo on a page. At least for me, if I see that a game is in early access, I’m more willing to give it a shot, because it feels more alive. It feels like it’s going to get more constant updates, etc. Whereas a demo is just this one packaged thing that I’m going to see. And it doesn’t really fit multiplayer games, honestly.

July: Yeah. And with demos, when I see a demo, I think this is a finished slice of the game. Whereas with early access, you have the grace of, oh, this isn’t finished yet, whatever I’m playing.

Nikolay: Yes, definitely. There’s more leeway with early access.

Colorado: I remember when we were running a studio, even in my biggest fuck-ups, things that just absolutely pissed off my community, all I had to do was get out and say, I fucked up. This is what went wrong. This is what I’m going to do. And the community would forgive me. It was just communication and transparency. It’s something we’d really appreciate seeing more of. But at least they did something.

Now, Off The Grid also… we didn’t even think they were going to do it, because they said they were going to do it in October. And we’ll forgive them. I mean, November, what is it, the 2nd? They released yesterday?

July: Yes.

Colorado: Okay. So November 2nd is almost October. And I guess they should have made an announcement, but it’s really close. I’m not going to nitpick that they came in a day late.

The Sandbox Studio’s silent release (21:30)

Colorado: So the last big release that was promised for this month was The Sandbox Studio. We had done a show on it earlier, and some of the guys from the team made some games with it, and we put the games on the website and explained everything. So Sandbox was also supposed to release in October. They said they were going to release in October. [inaudible]

They were just… I don’t even know if their software said beta or something. It was just no announcement, no tweet, no nothing. One day we went to the website and the link was there. It was there before, but you clicked on it and it said apply for the beta or something. You couldn’t actually get it. And then we just clicked and it just worked. And it was early in the month. So they delivered on their release for October.

Again, from all of these companies, I’m not really singling out one of them. It would be great if we got more communication. Because I expect, you know, when I’m waiting for Devil May Cry 18 to come out or whatever, right, the studio will come out and say, on November 23rd at 4 o’clock PM UTC, we’re going to release this thing. And if there’s going to be a delay, they’re going to explain why and do something.

Or if there’s a movie or a show or anything else that I anticipate as a user and as a fan, usually there’s a hard date. And if they miss that date, there’s an explanation. And if they’re on that date, they’re going to say something. They’re going to deliver some kind of fanfare.

July: Yeah, it’s almost weirder to shadow release without saying anything. Because you can be late and not have things finished, and yeah, it would be great to mention it on time, to say we’re going to be late, or move the date back, whatever. But releasing and not saying a single word… No one even knows that it’s really… well, people find out, but not letting the people who are waiting for it know is just confusing to me.

Wrap-up (23:50)

Colorado: The report is published on our website under Industry Report. We publish a full report of everything that happened every single month. And for those who can’t wait, we have weekly reports for the interim, with all the fundings, the biggest movers and the biggest stories.

And if you just want a quick five-minute read of everything that’s happening in crypto games, you can go to our website. You can get any of those reports and download them there for free. They’re not behind any registration or anything else. So go check that out if you’re interested. Thank you for listening, and that’s everything for today.

July: Thank you. All right.

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