Crypto
iExec's RLC Doubled on Monday, Then Added Another 20% in One Hour
RLC rose 99.7% on October 5 on about 93 times its usual volume, its highest close since January. Early on Tuesday a single hour pushed it to $0.92, a level last seen in November 2025.
iExec is one of the older infrastructure projects in crypto: a marketplace where applications can rent computing power, with a focus on 'confidential computing', which keeps data encrypted even while it is being processed. Its RLC token had spent most of 2026 drifting lower. It set a yearly low of $0.243 on July 29 and was trading around $0.36 at the start of October on about $340,000 of average daily Binance volume.
On Monday, October 5, it doubled. The first eight hours were calm, with RLC near $0.38. Then buying started in the 09:00 UTC hour (+12%), continued in the 10:00 UTC hour to $0.5059, and in the 12:00 UTC hour produced a spike to $0.673 that faded to $0.5526 within the same hour — a long upper wick that might have marked the top on another day. It didn't. A second wave in the evening took RLC to $0.73 in the 18:00 UTC hour, the busiest of the day with nearly $5 million traded, and to a high of $0.7766 at 22:00 UTC. RLC closed at $0.7276, up 99.67%, on $31.3 million of volume — about 93 times its 30-day average and the most since August 2025. It was the highest close since January 6.
Tuesday morning brought a third leg. After dipping to $0.6759 in the 02:00 UTC hour, RLC jumped 20% in the 05:00 UTC hour to $0.92, its highest price since November 9, 2025. Shortly after, it was trading around $0.87. Measured from the July low, the token has now more than tripled; from the September 15 close of $0.2747, it is up more than 200%. We searched for a specific announcement behind the move and didn't find one we could confirm, so we're treating this as a price-and-volume story rather than a news story.
iExec wasn't the only older infrastructure token to wake up. Radworks' RAD, the token of a peer-to-peer code-collaboration project, rose 31.3% the same day on about 19 times its usual volume, and Filecoin gained 11.8%. That fits a pattern seen several times in recent weeks — Moonriver, Gitcoin, Quant and The Sandbox all had sudden multi-day runs in forgotten tokens. Most of those were followed by sharp pullbacks of 25% to 50%. For context, RLC traded above $4.70 in 2024, so even after this week it remains about 80% below that level. Traders looking at it now are looking at a token whose price has been set, in a few hours, by buyers who weren't there a week ago.