Four companies sit behind almost everything still being built in Web3 gaming in 2026: Igloo Inc. with the Pudgy Penguins, Animoca Brands out of Hong Kong, Yuga Labs with the Bored Ape Yacht C
Four companies sit behind almost everything still being built in Web3 gaming in 2026: Igloo Inc. with the Pudgy Penguins, Animoca Brands out of Hong Kong, Yuga Labs with the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Sky Mavis with Axie Infinity. Three of them have switched something off or handed something over this year, and one has set a date that concerns you if you hold a balance on the Abstract chain: it ends there on December 15, 2026.
This article works through the four companies one by one. What is still running, what has been discontinued, which token hangs on what, and how much of it a holder in Europe can actually get at. To see what became of the games themselves, the review of Illuvium, Axie and Sandbox is in our Web3 Gaming in 2026 piece. This one is about the companies behind them.
Web3 gaming describes games whose items, currencies or plots of land sit on a blockchain as tokens, so that players can trade them outside the game. The sector has narrowed sharply since the boom of 2021. What is left is a handful of houses that run a brand, their own blockchain and a token all at once.
That triple role is expensive. A brand needs marketing, a blockchain needs operations and developers, a token needs liquidity. All four companies pulled back on at least one of the three in 2026. At Igloo it is the blockchain, at Yuga Labs the brands, at Animoca the route to the stock market, at Sky Mavis the rewards model.
Igloo Inc., the company behind the Pudgy Penguins, is closing its own blockchain. Abstract will be switched off on December 15, 2026. Chief executive Luca Netz announced the step on October 6, 2026, and the company confirmed it the following day. Once the network is off, balances still sitting on it will no longer be reachable, according to the team.
Abstract carries the only firm deadline in this entire text, and it is a hard one. If you hold tokens, NFTs or stablecoins on Abstract, you have a good two months to bridge them to Ethereum or another chain. Which wallet is up to that, and how custody types differ, is set out in our software wallet comparison.
A layer 2 is a network that bundles transactions away from the main chain and settles them on Ethereum in batches, so that fees and waiting times fall. Abstract was such a layer 2, built for consumer applications rather than financial ones: sign-up without a classic wallet, small amounts, games and collectibles.
Reported reach differs between trade outlets. The figures cited are roughly 400,000 users and somewhere between a good 300 and 325 million transactions over the chain's lifetime. Both numbers come from the coverage of the shutdown rather than from audited accounts, which is why we give them as a range.
The notable part of the announcement is what did not happen. Igloo never issued a token for Abstract and never ran a coin offering to raise fresh money. On Netz's account, which several trade outlets report consistently, the company funded the chain quietly for 18 months out of its own pocket and lost a double-digit million sum in the process.
The reasons given for the ending are high running costs, thin liquidity, a weak supply of financial applications and little appetite among institutional investors. For holders, the conclusion is the part that counts: a chain of your own is not a mark of quality but a cost base that somebody has to carry indefinitely.
When a layer 2 is switched off, the tokens do not disappear, access to them does: whatever is still on Abstract on December 15 stays there.
Abstract is not the first thing Igloo has discontinued this year. On June 12, 2026, the company announced it would stop developing the mobile game Pudgy Party. Built together with Mythical Games, it came out in August 2025 and was downloaded more than a million times, according to the coverage.
The reaction was blunt. Several trade outlets reported that the announcement named neither a refund nor a way to carry purchased items over into the remaining game. What is documented is the criticism, not a breach of law: whether buyers have a claim, and which, depends on the individual case and on the contract law of the country concerned.
What is left is Pudgy World, a free browser game Igloo has run since the spring of 2026 and on which the firm is now concentrating its resources. Add to that the part of the business that has little to do with blockchain: plush figures and collectibles, sold in US Walmart stores since a partnership struck in September 2023.
The token of the ecosystem is called PENGU, and it fell by around 7 percent after the Abstract announcement; sources date the drop to October 7 or 8, 2026. The point for holders: PENGU runs mainly on Solana and additionally on Ethereum and the BNB Chain, not on Abstract. The shutdown changes nothing there. How the price has moved since is in our PENGU price prediction.
Among the four, Animoca Brands is the odd one out: not a games company in the narrow sense but an investment house that has backed a very large number of projects in the sector while running products of its own, The Sandbox among them. The stock market listing was meant to be the big story of 2026. It became one, just not as planned.
On September 22, 2026, Animoca and the Nasdaq-listed Currenc Group said they were suspending their merger discussions. The statement says both sides concluded, after reviewing the expected closing timelines and the changed market environment, that the estimated interim period before completion did not fit their short- and medium-term strategic goals.
Animoca is sticking to the aim. In the same statement it says it remains fully committed to a listing on a major public exchange, and it points to its own timetable on the accounts: the audited annual report for 2023 was published on July 17, 2026, and the one for 2024 is in preparation. Co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu is quoted saying the company's agility has to take priority and that it will keep pursuing the best routes to a listing.
In a reverse merger, a company that is not listed merges with an already listed shell and reaches a quotation without a conventional stock market flotation. The plan announced in November 2025 provided for Animoca's shareholders to hold roughly 95 percent of the combined company. In a mandatory filing, Currenc recorded that the previously extended exclusivity period had expired without a definitive agreement.
For investors in Europe, this is above all a way of placing the business model: a firm that stands behind many projects as an investor cannot be mapped onto any single token. Buying into Animoca would have required the share, and the share is precisely what remains unavailable on a major exchange for now.
A week after the merger fell away, something else at Animoca got going. On September 29, 2026, the Moca Foundation and Moca Network announced that the Moca Chain mainnet is live. Mainnet means the network is running in real operation with real value, no longer as a test environment.
Moca Chain is a layer 1, an independent blockchain with security of its own, and it is compatible with Ethereum's developer tooling. Its purpose is digital identity: companies can issue, verify, update and withdraw credentials, while the user decides which part of them to disclose. The MOCA token pays the network fees and serves staking as well as the verification processes.
What is striking is what is missing: the game. Animoca is shifting the focus away from playing and towards identity, credentials and applications for AI agents. Coverage of the launch names partners such as SK Planet, Lamborghini, OneFootball and Nansen; one trade service notes, however, that the statement does not distinguish which of these connections are already in production and which are pilots or plans. With ecosystem lists, that distinction is the single most important question.
The route to the Nasdaq via the Currenc Group has been suspended since September 22, 2026; Animoca says it is holding on to the goal of a listing.
Yuga Labs has the best-known brand in the sector and, at the same time, the clearest retrenchment behind it. In April 2026, long-serving product chief Michael Figge took over the leadership; co-founder Greg Solano, chief executive since February 2024, moved to the top of the board and said he would return to creative work.
Before that, the company had let go of two of its best-known acquisitions. The rights to CryptoPunks went to the non-profit Infinite Node Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving digital art, and the trademark rights to Moonbirds were also handed over. Yuga has concentrated on the Apes and on Otherside ever since.
Otherside is the metaverse part, open in the browser since November 12, 2025 and reachable with an email address or a wallet. A resource economy with 74 materials has been announced; no date is fixed for it. Yuga does not publish player numbers either, which makes the progress hard to place. Technically the whole thing runs on ApeChain, and the associated currency is ApeCoin, whose development is covered in our APE price prediction.
Governance has shifted along the way: the ApeCoin DAO, the voting community of token holders, was dissolved in 2025 and replaced by a company that Yuga controls. Anyone who understood APE as a say in decisions has been holding something else since then.
How far the sector has shrunk shows in its annual gathering. ApeFest 2026 takes place on October 17 at the Beeple Studios in Charleston, South Carolina, as a single evening. Why barely any of the German Ape community is making the trip, we wrote up in our piece on ApeFest 2026.
Sky Mavis, the studio behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin blockchain, rebuilt its rewards model in 2026. Since January 2026, a new so-called AppToken named bAXS has replaced the previous payouts in AXS; February brought an airdrop worth around $135,000 to bAXS holders. An airdrop is a free allocation of tokens to a defined group.
June 2026 saw the launch of Terrariums V1, an earnings system for owners of the Axie land plots. In July, Sky Mavis opened the third playtest for Atia's Legacy, the announced role-playing game in the Axie universe, this time with the emphasis on real-time combat. A release date is still not named, even though the game was held out for 2026 when it was announced in March 2025.
In parallel, the studio is handing responsibility over: further development of the original game Axie Classic passed to the player community in August 2026. On the blockchain side, Ronin distributes four- and five-figure dollar sums to developer studios at regular intervals through a programme called Proof of Distribution. How the main token is faring is in our AXS price prediction.
The metric DAUW, daily active unique wallets, turns up constantly in the sector's press releases. It counts how many addresses triggered at least one transaction with an application on a given day. What it does not count is people.
One person can run ten wallets, and many games reward exactly that. The other way round, a player who spends an hour in a game may trigger only a single transaction, while a script generates hundreds. A high wallet count therefore proves activity on the chain, but neither an audience nor revenue.
Abstract is the cleanest example of this from the past year. The chain reported hundreds of millions of transactions and six-figure user numbers and was discontinued all the same, because liquidity and earnings were missing. When a project shows you wallet numbers in future, the more useful question is: how much revenue stands behind them, and who pays for the operation?
We have laid the three tradable tokens of these four houses next to one another: PENGU for Pudgy Penguins, APE for Yuga Labs and AXS for Sky Mavis. Animoca has no main token of this kind, which is why there are three. The basis is the public price data of the market data service CoinGecko in euros, as of October 11, 2026, three verified values. This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on October 11, 2026.
Two things stand out. First, all three sit far below their peaks, two of them so far that practically nothing of the valuations of the time is left. Second, all three are nonetheless up over 30 days, AXS markedly so. The two fit together once the tokens are read as what they currently are: small, mobile markets whose direction on the day has more to do with the general state of the market than with the progress of the company in question.
The market value also tells you something about the risk. All three sit in the hundreds of millions. At that size, comparatively small buy or sell orders already move the price noticeably, and the gap between bid and ask is wider than it is for the large caps.
Since the EU's MiCA regulation took effect, crypto services in Germany may only be provided by licensed firms. In practical terms: whether you can buy PENGU, APE or AXS depends not on the project but on whether your trading venue lists the pair and is licensed here. Smaller ecosystem tokens appear less often in the range of regulated providers than at the large international exchanges. Which venues are licensed in Germany and which tokens they carry is in our crypto exchange comparison.
On custody, the Abstract deadline comes on top. If you hold NFTs or tokens on a chain that is being switched off, the best wallet in the world is no help while the value stays there. Check in your wallet which network a holding actually sits on. The display in the app usually names the network right next to the balance.
Tax treatment holds nothing special for these tokens: in Germany, gains from a sale within one year fall under private disposal transactions, and after a holding period of one year the holding rule applies. Moving from one chain to another over a bridge can count as a swap, depending on how it is structured. If you are moving larger holdings, record the transactions with date and value and take tax advice if in doubt.
Of all four cases, only one carries a date that asks something of you. Everything else is context.
(As of October 11, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
