Markets
47 of 49 Rose in September. The Two That Didn't Were Gold and a Memecoin
Across 49 large crypto assets, September 2026 was a near-clean sweep. The exceptions — tokenized gold and the TRUMP memecoin — say more about the month than the winners do.
By the close on September 30, 47 of the 49 large crypto assets we track had finished the month higher. The gains ran from Tron's 1.5% at the quiet end to NEAR Protocol's 178% at the loud one, with Arbitrum (+85.5%), Ethena (+77.2%), Uniswap (+69.8%) and Zcash (+69.6%) close behind. Bitcoin was one of the laggards, up 6.4% from $78,581 to $83,624 — a respectable month in isolation and a bottom-quintile one in this company.
The two that fell are worth more attention than another list of winners. PAX Gold, a token backed one-for-one by physical gold and so effectively a gold price, lost 6.4%, from $4,451 to $4,166, after touching $4,122 on September 28. The TRUMP memecoin lost 15.3%, from $2.43 to $2.05, and at its September 15 low of $1.85 it was about 40% below the $3.07 it had reached on August 29.
They fell for different reasons, which is the point. Gold is the closest thing in this list to a defensive asset, and a month in which investors poured into the most speculative corners of crypto was naturally a month in which the asset people hold for safety drifted lower. TRUMP is the opposite case: a highly speculative token that still went down while speculation was everywhere. Its late-August spike had run on attention, and when that attention moved on to other names, the price had little else holding it up.
Put together, the two exceptions describe the month's character more precisely than the winners do. Money was flowing toward risk, but selectively — toward coins with an active story such as NEAR, Ethena and Uniswap, and away from both the safe haven and a meme whose moment had passed. A rising tide, it turns out, does not lift every boat; it lifts the ones people are currently looking at.