Crypto
Gitcoin Has Now Had Two 50% Days in Four Sessions — and a 28% Drop in Two Hours
GTC jumped 52.6% on October 4, its second such day this month, and early on October 5 touched $0.2449, its highest price in about a year. Then it fell back almost as fast.
Gitcoin is best known for Gitcoin Grants, a long-running program that crowdfunds open-source software and other 'public goods' in the Ethereum ecosystem. Its GTC governance token spent most of 2026 forgotten: it hit a yearly low of $0.064 on June 30 and was still trading near $0.086 at the end of September, often on less than $200,000 of daily Binance volume.
That changed abruptly. GTC rose 53.4% on October 1, touched $0.184 on October 2 and then gave a large part of it back, closing October 3 at $0.1148. On Sunday, October 4, it went again. A quiet morning turned into a surge in the 16:00 UTC hour, when price went from $0.1215 to as high as $0.1647 on $1.9 million of volume. The buying kept coming into the evening, with a second push to $0.18397 in the 22:00 UTC hour. GTC closed the day at $0.17524, up 52.6%, on $11.6 million of volume — about eight times its 30-day average — and its highest close since May 11. Over seven days it was up 92%.
Monday's Asian session took it further and then reversed it. In the 00:00 and 01:00 UTC hours GTC climbed to $0.2429 on more than $7 million of combined volume, and in the 02:00 UTC hour it printed $0.2449, the highest price since mid-October 2025 and above this year's previous high of $0.215 from May. It didn't hold. By the end of that same hour GTC was at $0.1945, and in the 03:00 UTC hour it reached $0.175, 28.5% below the peak. Early on October 5 it was trading near $0.183.
Moves like this rarely come from nowhere, but the price data alone doesn't explain this one, and we haven't tied it to a specific announcement. What the chart does show is a token that has now doubled in a week on volumes many times its norm, with each leg followed by a sharp pullback. For anyone looking at GTC now, the useful reference points are clear: Sunday's close near $0.175, which Monday's drop tested almost to the cent, and the $0.2449 spike high. Traders sometimes call this kind of pattern a 'staircase with trapdoors' — the trend is up, but every step has been followed by a fall of 25% or more.