Quant led this week's altcoin gainers, rising 158.3% after a U.S. payments operator selected it for a tokenized-deposit network, while Lighter dropped 28.7% as traders unwound expectations around a new Robinhood derivatives rollout. Midnight nearly doubled as mainnet access expanded, and Ethena and Zcash posted double-digit declines.
Bitcoin traded near $84,600 on Oct. 3 as Quant and Midnight led the week's top gainers among major altcoins, rising 158.3% and 96.5% respectively. Lighter fell 28.7%, the steepest decline on CoinGecko's seven-day rankings, while Ethena and Zcash also posted double-digit losses.
Quant rallies on U.S. payments deal
Quant's rally followed The Clearing House's Sep. 24 selection of the company to power its On-Chain Money Initiative, a network for clearing and settling tokenized commercial-bank deposits. The payments operator said the network would connect with existing U.S. infrastructure, including RTP and CHIPS, with availability for participating institutions expected in the first half of 2027.
Gold analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs posted on X that buying one QNT carried the risk of losing $120 against the potential to earn $10,000, though his post set no date for that outcome.
Midnight nearly doubles as mainnet access expands
Midnight rose 96.5% to $0.04988, with about $124.9 million in displayed trading volume. The network's latest development update confirmed that permissionless smart contract deployment had gone live on mainnet, letting developers deploy without a mandatory security review on its Preprod testing network.
Crypto commentator David Gokhshtein said he believed NIGHT could follow Zcash's rally, citing the different uses of privacy between the two networks: "I keep saying I believe $NIGHT is going to pull a $ZEC." His post specified no price target or deadline.
Lighter and Ethena lead the losses
Lighter traded at $3.49 after the largest weekly decline among the tracked assets, following Robinhood's announcement of a U.S. perpetual futures rollout involving Bitstamp. Bitstamp separately announced its own multi-asset perpetual-futures offering as Robinhood expanded its derivatives plans.
Ethena dropped 14.7% to $0.232 ahead of a change to its investor vesting schedule: the Ethena Foundation and lead investors agreed to release all remaining original investor tokens starting Oct. 5, ending monthly investor unlocks. Zcash fell 14.4% to $1,313.37, with about $726.7 million in displayed trading volume in CoinGecko's weekly rankings.
Source: crypto.news
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