Markets
Eight Up, 49 Down: The Coins That Ignored Monday's Sell-Off
Monday ended with a median loss of 4.7% across the 57 large coins we track. Five of them rose 7% or more, and they did it in two distinct bursts, four hours apart.
Monday's early sell-off didn't reverse. By the end of September 28 (UTC), 49 of the 57 large crypto assets we follow on Binance had closed lower, and the median coin was down 4.66%. Bitcoin lost 1.2% to $83,236; Ether finished flat. The heaviest losses again came from recent winners: The Graph fell 14.9%, Celestia 12.0%, Jupiter 11.9%, Ondo 11.5%, Arbitrum 10.7%, and NEAR and Lido 10.5% each.
Ondo's session deserves a second look. It traded as high as $0.609, its highest price of 2026, then fell to $0.502, a 17.5% drop from high to low within one day, and closed at $0.520.
Then there were the exceptions: Hedera +27.3%, Algorand +13.8%, Chainlink +10.2%, Stellar +7.7% and Curve +7.4%. The timing is what stands out. Hedera and Algorand took off in the same hour, from 08:00 UTC, with HBAR up 11.4% and ALGO 5.8%. Chainlink and Stellar moved together four hours later: in the 12:00 UTC hour LINK gained 4.8% and XLM 6.6%, each on its heaviest hourly volume of the day. Algorand's close of $0.136 was its highest since January 14.
Coins that start moving in the same hour usually share a cause, whether that's a piece of news, a sector narrative or a large buyer working through a basket of names. The price data doesn't tell us which it was. What it does show is how narrow Monday's gains were: when only eight coins rise, the ones that do are carrying their own story, not the market's.
Tuesday opened in much the same mood. By about 06:00 UTC only five of the 57 were higher on the day, led by Internet Computer (+4.6%), Curve (+3.5%) and Aave (+2.9%).