Many smaller cryptocurrencies ended up nursing double-digit losses in a brutal month for the markets — but some altcoins came up smelling of roses.
By and large, September was a harsh month for altcoins — a sentence that could have been written anytime in the past four years.
It was a month with a lot of FUD and unsettling news, most notably China’s decision to ban trading on cryptocurrencies altogether. Then there was Evergrande, the giant Chinese property firm that began sliding into a debt crisis that destabilized the whole market. El Salvador’s glitched launch of Bitcoin as a recognized state currency was touted as Bitcoin Day, with traders hoping to push BTC up; it went the other way. Then there were signs that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and others would be coming down hard on crypto.
Ether certainly had a bad time, starting the month at $3,430 and ending it at $3,001 — down about 12.5% — even including a roughly 5% gain on September 30. Ethereum Classic was down 26.5%.
Not that Bitcoin had it easy either, starting the month at $47,100 and ending it at $41,550 — down about 11.5%. (Of course it gained all that back, and more, in the first week of October, but that’s another story.)
Huobi Token got hammered especially hard, falling from about $15.69 to close the month at $8.13 — a drop of nearly 48%.
Litecoin also ended down 18% — and there was no shortage of misery in the world of DeFi. The value of Maker's MKR governance token plunged 35%, while the native token for the lending platform Aave dropped to $276, down almost 30%.
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Rollercoaster Ride
Bitcoin Cash had a wild ride that ended up being fairly representative of what happened to many altcoins. It went up nearly 26% in the first week of September before dropping 22% below its starting point. Everyone’s favorite memecoin Dogecoin proved to be something of a dog, starting at $0.278 and closing at $0.204, down 26.6%.
Compound started the month on a high note, rising nearly 10% on Sept. 1 to $480 and continuing to climb for much of the first week. Then it fell off a cliff, closing out the month just under $319, down about a third. Neo was up 28% then ended down 25% on the month, while EOS climbed 24% before dropping 22%.
Ethereum killers were decidedly mixed — Cardano closed out September with a 24% hit, but Polkadot lost just 9.1%. Solana, on the other hand, had a great month, starting at $107.44 and ending at $141.07 — up more than 31%. And that was despite a high-profile blockchain outage.
Not everything was bleak. OMG Network started the month at $6.33 and closed at $12.47 — nearly double — while Algorand was up roughly 45% and Cosmos up more than one third.
