What's Driving Token Prices? September 23, 2026

BNB/CRCL (+7.7%/+14%) - Yesterday, crypto exchange giant Binance announced it purchased a $100M equity stake in stablecoin provider Circle. The equity was purchased through a private placement, with shares priced at $80.84 (versus the public price of $91.75), and includes a restriction on transfers, sales, and hedging for two years. As part of the investment, Binance and Circle’s commercial agreement for USDC will be expanded. The prior agreement saw Binance hold part of its treasury in USDC, but this new agreement deepens the relationship with greater integration of USDC across Binance’s savings and investment products. According to the companies, the goal is to “expand USDC’s global reach”. Circle recently restructured a similar deal with Coinbase in August, leading to outperformance in the COIN stock.
AVAX (+41%) - This past week, layer-1 blockchain Avalanche held its annual summit in New York, with a focus on traditional capital markets and real-world asset (RWA) growth. The highlight of the summit was a talk from Ava Labs’ President, Charley Cooper, in which he stated that the New York Stock Exchange and its parent company ICE have been exploring Avalanche as a potential venue for its planned 24/7 on-chain ATS and that the two have a “close working relationship”. Other key takeaways from the summit included a talk from Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, a successful cross-border payments pilot with Hyundai, and the launch of a specialized RWA lending market from Aave. The AVAX token rocketed 41% higher on the summit’s buzzy headlines, although it is still a far cry from its all-time high price of $130 in 2021.
GRASS (+46%) - On Monday, AI data collection project Grass released revenue data showing the project generating $14M in H1 2026. Grass pays its users in GRASS tokens for sharing idle internet bandwidth; it then uses this bandwidth to scrape data, which it sells to AI companies for model training. While Grass got off to a strong start, amassing a large base of users willing to sell their bandwidth, the team was less open about the customers purchasing this data on the backend. The recent revenue report provides an independent attestation as to Grass’s revenue, and it is much more impressive than the market gave it credit for. With its current revenue figures, Grass is trading at an 11x P/S. Since the report was released, the token is up +22%, and it is up 46% this week.
ZETA (+51%) - Over the weekend, the layer-1 blockchain project ZetaChain voted to shutter its chain and migrate its ZETA token to Solana. The project, which launched in 2024, initially aimed to create a single platform to connect all blockchains in one place. ZetaChain, however, is not shutting down entirely; instead, it plans to focus all of its efforts on Anuma, an AI app it launched earlier this year. Anuma is a private AI app with 300K users, according to the company, and the migration to Solana will allow it to access Solana’s full AI stack. The ZETA token can be locked in exchange for tokens to spend on AI and will continue to have this functionality once the migration happens.

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