MarketRadar read: Mixed for crypto; five coins gained on dated 2026 catalysts while Bitcoin and Ethereum fell.
Bitcoin trades at $74,745 on November 9, down 14.7% since January 1 after touching $73,708, a two-month low, earlier in the session. Ethereum has fallen further, down 28.5% on the year to $2,123.02, as a selloff in United States technology stocks spilled into crypto. Five coins in the top 50 by market value refused to follow them down, and each one has a dated event behind its gain. Our earlier top 10 by market cap list showed the same split forming three days ago, and the Bitcoin slide to $73,708 today has only widened it.
Methodology in one line: rank the top 50 coins by market value on CoinGecko, measure the change from each coin's January 1, 2026 price to a snapshot around 12:42 UTC on November 9, and keep only coins with a dated, sourced 2026 reason. Stablecoins and gold-backed tokens are left out.
Key points
- Quant leads the year at +190.2% after two bank announcements on September 24 put its software inside United States and United Kingdom payment plans.
- Hyperliquid follows at +189.5%, with record fee revenue funding open-market buybacks and an October 29 deal with ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange.
- Zcash is up 138.2% after its NU7 upgrade cut block times from 75 seconds to 25 on November 5, while NEAR is up 135.4% after the first United States spot NEAR exchange-traded product began trading on September 29.
- Monero rounds out the five at +38.1%, riding privacy-sector flows after Zcash's upgrade, with no coin-specific announcement of its own.
- Bitcoin is down 14.7% on the year and Ethereum is down 28.5%. Of the 35 top-50 coins that float freely rather than track a dollar or an ounce of gold, 25 are lower.
| Rank | Coin | Price | Market cap | 24h | 7d | Year to date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quant (QNT) | $201.65 | $2.94B | +1.32% | +1.60% | +190.2% |
| 2 | Hyperliquid (HYPE) | $73.65 | $17.64B | -4.59% | -14.73% | +189.5% |
| 3 | Zcash (ZEC) | $1,217.53 | $20.73B | -3.84% | -3.12% | +138.2% |
| 4 | NEAR Protocol (NEAR) | $3.56 | $4.67B | -3.70% | -14.85% | +135.4% |
| 5 | Monero (XMR) | $598.62 | $11.27B | -0.30% | -1.92% | +38.1% |
1. Quant (QNT): +190.2%
Quant is a United Kingdom software company whose main product, Overledger, lets a bank connect to many blockchains through one set of standard requests. The year turned on a single day, September 24. The Clearing House, operator of the RTP and CHIPS payment systems, picked Quant to build the connective layer for its On-Chain Money Initiative. That network will clear and settle tokenized bank deposits, due to open to participating institutions in early 2027. The same day, seven of the largest banks in the United Kingdom completed the first live customer transactions in tokenized sterling deposits on Quant-built software. QNT traded near $60 in mid-September. It touched $372.18 on September 27, then fell back. It now sits at $201.65, still triple its January 1 price of $69.50.
The honest gap: neither announcement says participating banks must buy or hold QNT, and Quant's own FAQ says licence fees may be settled in dollars, per Kraken. The token's documented jobs are paying Overledger licence fees, covering gas on the Fusion Rollup, and staking by trusted-node operators. The Fusion Rollup went live on June 2, 2026 across 74 networks. Supply is fixed at 14,612,493 tokens.
Banks use the software to move tokenized deposits without replacing core systems that already clear more than $2 trillion a day. Holders use QNT to pay for access and to run trusted nodes.
2. Hyperliquid (HYPE): +189.5%
Hyperliquid is a layer-1 blockchain built around an on-chain order book for perpetual futures, contracts that never expire. Its 2026 case rests on cash flow. The protocol collected $429 million in revenue from January 1 to September 15, the highest of any crypto project in that window, and most of it flows into an Assistance Fund that buys HYPE. Cumulative buybacks passed $1.26 billion, per CoinDCX.
The October headline added a second leg. On October 29, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, and Trade[XYZ] signed a definitive agreement to bring Hyperliquid-based perpetual markets onshore in the United States, per CoinDesk. ICE will run the regulated venue exclusively and take a strategic stake in Trade[XYZ]. HYPE rose about 20% that day, and Stanley Druckenmiller used his first X post to back the venture. The venue still needs approval, with no launch date set. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission moved the same way on November 3, clearing stock perpetuals on registered exchanges.
Elysium, the network's first dedicated layer 2, launches on mainnet today with HYPE as its gas token, per CoinStats. HYPE trades at $73.65, down 14.73% over seven days and 24.8% below its September 23 high.
Traders use Hyperliquid for perpetual contracts with on-chain settlement, and the fee-funded buybacks give the token a revenue link most large-cap coins lack.
3. Zcash (ZEC): +138.2%
Zcash is a privacy coin. Its shielded transactions hide the sender, the receiver and the amount using zero-knowledge proofs, while the 21 million coin cap stays fixed. Two upgrades carried its year. In late July, the network activated Ironwood, a formally verified shielded pool that replaced the older Orchard pool after a vulnerability was found there, plus a turnstile that makes the ZEC supply easier to audit. Then NU7 went live on mainnet on November 5 at block 3,543,405, cutting the target block time from 75 seconds to 25, with per-block rewards cut by the same factor so daily issuance does not change.
The price path ran ahead of the upgrades: ZEC traded near $478 in mid-August and climbed to just below $1,700 in late September, a rise of more than 250% in about six weeks, as shielded holdings hit their highest level in almost two years. ZEC now trades at $1,217.53, up 138.2% from $511.13 on January 1. One caution: ZEC jumped 10.7% on November 6, the day NU7 activated, and AltcoinBuzz, which checked the flow data, found no confirmed cause for that single-day move. The upgrade went live and the price moved; the link between the two has not been shown.
People use Zcash when a payment needs to stay private without leaving the public chain.
4. NEAR Protocol (NEAR): +135.4%
NEAR is a sharded layer-1 blockchain that has spent 2026 pitching itself as settlement rails for artificial-intelligence agents, with a cross-chain swap layer called NEAR Intents at the center. The defining date is September 29, when the Bitwise NEAR ETF began trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR, the first United States spot NEAR product. It carries a 0.75% management fee, with Bitwise staking the NEAR it holds in-house at a network reward rate near 5%. Bitwise reported $35.5 million in first-day net inflows. NEAR had fallen to $0.86 on February 6, then rose 179% in September and peaked at $5.96 on October 12, its best since January 2025.
The usage numbers sit underneath the ETF story. NEAR Intents has processed more than $32 billion in cumulative volume, up from under $1 billion a year earlier, per Bitwise, and third-quarter volume ran to about $10.4 billion across roughly 68 million transactions, per Cryptensive. Part of the Intents revenue has funded NEAR buybacks since February, and the network cut its maximum annual inflation from 5% to 2.5% in a late-2025 halving upgrade. A July upgrade added post-quantum signatures and automatic resharding. On October 15, the network announced four items in 48 hours: a 17-operator computation network, Brave's Leo assistant running private AI inference on NEAR's cloud, a Sunrise listing with Intents bridging to Solana, and the Helius chief executive joining the NEAR Foundation Council.
NEAR Intents lets a user state an outcome, such as swapping bitcoin for solana, and solvers compete to complete it across 35 blockchains. Developers build AI agents that hold their own wallets and settle through the same layer.
5. Monero (XMR): +38.1%
Monero is the oldest privacy coin still in the top 50. Its transactions hide who sent them, who received them and how much moved, by default, through ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential transactions. Its 2026 gain has no single announcement behind it. CoinMarketCap's analysis of the November 6 move put it plainly: capital rotated inside the privacy niche after Zcash's NU7 upgrade, lifting XMR 1.83% to $621.10 while Bitcoin dipped. The same analysis recorded XMR down 0.56% to $597.09 on November 9 as the wider market fell; it trades at $598.62 now.
XMR now trades above its May 2021 high of about $517, the first time it has held above that level. Several major exchanges have delisted it in some jurisdictions under anti-money-laundering pressure, which narrows where new buyers can reach it, while Kraken kept XMR listed and dropped its withdrawal questionnaires. The coin is up 38.1% from $433.38 on January 1, the smallest gain on this list by a wide margin, and it arrived with the weakest evidence: sector flows, not a product launch.
Monero's use is private, fungible money: every coin is indistinguishable from every other, so one XMR carries no history a recipient can object to, the property its holders pay for and regulators cite when they restrict it.
What ties the five together
Three threads run through the list. The first is institutional plumbing: Quant's bank software, Hyperliquid's onshore venue with ICE and NEAR's exchange-traded product all put crypto inside regulated financial rails. The second is privacy: Zcash and Monero, the two privacy coins in the top 50, both gained while transparent chains fell, and Zcash's upgrade supplied the dated event that pulled flows into the niche. The third is revenue: Hyperliquid's fee-funded buybacks and NEAR's Intents fees give two of the five a cash-flow link that most tokens lack. The same list shows how fast gains reverse. Quant lost about 48% in a day in late September, from $373 to $195.35, per Kraken. Hyperliquid is down 14.73% in seven days, NEAR is down about 40% from its October 12 peak, and Zcash sits about 28% below its September high. What to watch: The Clearing House network opens to banks in early 2027, ICE still needs approval for its venue, and the next Zcash ETF flow prints and NEAR Intents volume figures will show whether demand behind these gains is holding or fading. Bitcoin at $74,745 sets the backdrop: if the largest coin keeps sliding, the five gainers will have to defend their gains without it.
