Markets
Q4's First Day Hit Q3's Biggest Winners Hardest
On October 1, NEAR, Ethena and Zcash — three of the third quarter's top performers — were the three worst large coins of the day, while bitcoin quietly gained 1.5%.
The fourth quarter opened on Wednesday with a split tape. Of the 56 large crypto assets we checked on Binance, 25 closed October 1 higher, 30 closed lower and Cardano finished essentially flat. Bitcoin rose 1.5% to $84,880 and ether 0.8% to $2,706 — modest gains that hid a much sharper sorting underneath.
The bottom of the list was unusually specific. NEAR Protocol fell 9.9%, from $5.34 to $4.809. Ethena fell 8.2% to $0.2432, after trading as high as $0.2783 earlier in the day. Zcash fell 7.2% to $1,335.56. Those three were also among the very best performers of the third quarter, which ended only a day earlier: Ethena gained about 266% from July to September, Zcash about 260%, and NEAR roughly tripled.
The most likely explanation is also the most ordinary. Quarterly results are tallied at the September 30 close, and the first session after that is a natural moment to lock in gains — and the coins with the largest unrealized profits are the obvious candidates. Zcash had already been sliding since its September 26 peak of $1,698; at Wednesday's low of $1,305 it was 23% below that high.
The day's leaders came from a different group. Aave rose 7.5%, and PEPE, The Sandbox and Immutable gained between 2% and 3.5%, mostly coins that had trailed in September. One session of that pattern isn't a rotation. Two weeks of it would be, and that is the thing worth watching as October gets going.