Bitcoin was trading near $84,600 on Oct. 3 as Quant and Midnight led the biggest crypto gainers of the week.
Quant jumped 158.3% over seven days, while Midnight gained 96.5%. Bitway rose 66.7% and Pump.fun increased 19.5%.
On the losing side, Lighter dropped 28.7%, followed by MemeCore with a 16.7% decline, Ethena down 14.7% and Zcash down 14.4%.
According to CoinGecko data, Bitcoin was up around 0.6% over the past week, while the broader crypto market was down about 0.3%.
Quant’s strong rally came after The Clearing House announced on Sept. 24 that it had selected Quant to help power its On-Chain Money Initiative.
The project is designed to support the clearing and settlement of tokenized commercial-bank deposits. It is expected to connect with existing U.S. payment systems, including RTP and CHIPS, with availability for participating financial institutions planned for the first half of 2027.
The sharp move in QNT also attracted bullish comments from some market observers. Gold analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs posted that buying QNT carried significant downside risk but could potentially offer much larger upside. His comments were a speculative view and were not a short-term price prediction.
Midnight was the second-biggest gainer, nearly doubling to around $0.04988. Its trading volume was around $124.9 million.
The project recently expanded access to smart contract deployment on its mainnet. Developers can now deploy contracts without going through a mandatory security review on the Preprod testing network.
Midnight has also added wallet features, including support for shielded balances and sponsored transaction fees.
Crypto commentator David Gokhshtein said he believed NIGHT could eventually follow the type of rally seen in Zcash. His comparison was based on their focus on privacy, although Midnight is built around private smart contracts and applications while Zcash focuses mainly on private payments.
Bitway gained 66.7% to reach around $1.44 during the final week of Binance Wallet’s Booster Season 5 campaign.
The campaign ended on Oct. 2 and provided incentives to eligible users staking through Binance Wallet. Bitrue also listed a scheduled release of around 101.62 million BTW, equal to about 1.02% of the total supply.
Pump.fun gained 19.5% to around $0.00546 as the platform continued its token buyback and burn program.
Pump.fun’s dashboard shows completed buybacks and tokens permanently removed from supply. Recent purchases included about $1.02 million on Sept. 29 and $1.21 million the previous day.
However, the platform says past buybacks do not guarantee that the same level of purchases will continue in the future.
Lighter was the biggest loser among the listed tokens, falling 28.7% to around $3.49.
The decline came as Robinhood moved forward with plans to expand its U.S. crypto derivatives business using Bitstamp’s infrastructure. Bitstamp has announced a multi-asset perpetual futures service as part of the broader derivatives expansion.
MemeCore also fell 16.7% to around $1.03. The decline came during a week that included a scheduled release of 56.11 million M tokens, representing about 2.46% of its circulating supply.
Ethena dropped 14.7% to around $0.232 as investors prepared for changes to its token vesting schedule.
The Ethena Foundation and major investors agreed to release the remaining original investor tokens from Oct. 5, ending the previous monthly investor unlock schedule. Team tokens will continue following their existing schedule.
Research firm Unlocks estimated that the accelerated investor release could involve around 1.41 billion ENA. It also noted that some locked investor tokens had previously been purchased by the foundation.
Zcash fell 14.4% to around $1,313.
The decline has also brought attention to ZEC’s valuation. One trader argued that higher ZEC prices would require much larger market capitalizations because the amount of Zcash in circulation is now much higher than during its early years.
For example, the trader estimated that a $2,000 ZEC price would imply a market capitalization of around $34 billion, while a $5,000 price would require roughly $85 billion.
Those figures were valuation scenarios rather than predictions about where Zcash will trade.
Overall, the week’s market showed a wide gap between individual crypto assets. Quant and Midnight posted very large gains following major project developments, while Lighter, MemeCore, Ethena and Zcash faced double-digit declines linked to derivatives competition, token unlocks and valuation concerns.
