Sleepless night for altcoins. Ether fell below $2,400 the minute bitcoin broke $81,000, around 4:40 a.m. this Thursday, October 15. It is trading at $2,379 at 7 a.m. (Paris time) and lost 5.3% over 24 hours. Zcash, star of the latest altcoins point, returns 11.5% to $1,112. Solana, XRP and BNB limit the breakage to between -3 and -4%.
The seven-day picture is even heavier. Solana lost 10%, Litecoin 11%, Cardano and Avalanche almost 12%, while bitcoin only lost 1.4%. Altcoins amplify the decline, as with every leverage push.
Key Points
Ether touched $2,332 overnight, with nearly $300 million in positions liquidated on ETH.
Zcash is trading at $1,112 compared to $1,264 the day before and $1,698 at its peak at the end of September.
Solana activates Alpenglow on October 21 at 3 p.m. UTC, while a listed SOL hoard sells 70% of its coins.
Ether below $2,400: the second capitalization collects more than the first
Ether opened Wednesday above $2,520. It slipped to $2,332 at the overnight low, or 7.5% up and down, before regaining some air at $2,379. Over the week, the loss reached 7%, compared to 1.4% for bitcoin. Capitalization falls to $291 billion.
The reason is the lever. Between $294 and $333 million in positions on ETH were liquidated in 24 hours, an amount sometimes higher than that of bitcoin depending on the platform. Long positions on ether paid most of the bill, as on bitcoin. The ETH/BTC ratio declines mechanically, to 0.0292.
Zcash loses 12%: the privacy coin gives back part of its rocket
Zcash was at $1,264 on Wednesday morning. It is trading at $1,112 this Thursday at 7 a.m., after a low of $1,093, or -11.5% over 24 hours and -13.8% over seven days. The decline overnight is the most violent in the top 20, far ahead of Avalanche (-6.4%) and Chainlink (-6.1%).
Context matters. ZEC started its rise from $481, hit $1,698 at the end of September, then returned to $1,390 at the beginning of October. An asset that has tripled in three months attracts leverage, and the leverage is purged first when bitcoin folds. The $1,233 support cited in our October 2 update has given way; the next level is below $1,100, where the price rebounded overnight. Zcash's capitalization remains at $18.9 billion, in the top 15.
Solana: Alpenglow in six days, SkyAI sells its SOLs
Solana trades at $103.6, down 3.7% over 24 hours and 10% over the week. The technical calendar is not moving. According to CoinDesk, the Solana Foundation has set the activation of Alpenglow for October 21 around 3 p.m. UTC, at epoch 1064. The TowerBFT voting system, in place since 2020, leaves room for a direct exchange of votes between validators, outside the blocks, for a targeted finality of 150 milliseconds compared to 12.8 seconds today. Validators must upgrade to Agave 4.3.0, and the number of transactions displayed will drop on the day without real activity dropping, since votes will no longer be counted.
On the holder side, the news is less encouraging. SkyAI, a listed Solana treasury company, now only holds around 600,000 SOL compared to more than 2 million in mid-September, according to The Block. Its shareholder Bastion Trading, nearly 10% of the capital, demands details of each sale and an increase in the share buyback offer from 3 to 3.50 dollars. Some 1.4 million SOLs sold in one month, that’s around $145 million at current prices, poured into an already fragile market.
XRP and BNB bend without breaking, Litecoin stalls
XRP is trading at $1.32, down 3.9% over 24 hours and 6.7% over the week, after losing the $1.50 zone held in early October. Ripple has nevertheless made progress in the field: Privy, a subsidiary of Stripe, now provides XRP Ledger wallets that can be integrated into payment applications, and the XRPL AI Hub dashboard lists 14.3 million payments from AI agents. For a few thousand XRP and RLUSD in total, which tells the real size of these transactions.
BNB is holding up the best of the large caps, at $722 (-2.9% over 24 hours, -6% over the week). Litecoin is down 5.4% to $58.5 and is -10.7% over seven days. Dogecoin drops 5.2% and Hyperliquid 2.8% to $79.8. Tron is the exception, stable at $0.33.
