Crypto
Ethereum's Layer-2 Tokens Rallied While Ether Barely Moved: Starknet +32%, ZKsync +24%
Starknet's STRK rose 31.6% on October 9 to its highest close since January, ZKsync's ZK gained 23.8% and Optimism 11.3%. Ether itself rose just 0.5%.
Layer-2 networks are built on top of Ethereum to make transactions faster and cheaper: they process activity on their own and post a summary back to the main chain. Their tokens have been among crypto's worst performers over the past two years. On Friday, October 9, several of them had their best day in months.
Starknet led. STRK, which had already risen 13% on Thursday, gained another 31.55% to $0.0731 on $58.6 million of volume, about seven times its 30-day average. It was the token's highest close since January 22, after an intraday high of $0.07716, and the two-day gain was about 49%. The biggest push came early: +4.4% in the 07:00 UTC hour and +6.7% in the 08:00 UTC hour, to above $0.076. It reached $0.07769 early on Saturday before easing back to around $0.072.
ZKsync's ZK rose 23.79% to $0.0141, its highest close since June 1, reaching $0.01463 in the 16:00 UTC hour. Optimism's OP added 11.34% and Immutable's IMX 9.39%. The two largest layer-2 tokens moved less: Arbitrum's ARB rose 5.79% on below-average volume and Polygon's POL 2.69%. Ether, the asset all of these networks depend on, gained just 0.52% to $2,487.70.
We didn't find a single announcement that explained the group move, and the pattern — smaller tokens moving most, the largest ones lagging — looks more like a rotation into a beaten-down theme than a change in fundamentals. Rotations like that can run for several days, as Solana exchange tokens did earlier this week, but they also tend to end abruptly. Starknet's two-day run is the strongest piece of evidence so far: it held a 13% gain through Thursday's broad crypto selloff and then extended it.