BENQI (QI) nearly quadruples in a week, most of it overnight, as trading hits twice its market value

BENQI's QI token is up 276% over the past seven days, according to CoinGecko. As of this morning that makes it the biggest weekly gainer in our movers scan of the top 1,000 cryptocurrencies that we have not already covered. It traded around $0.0049 on Coinbase at 7:40 AM ET on Friday.

Almost none of that gain came before Thursday night. Until Thursday evening, QI traded in a narrow band near $0.0015 on Coinbase. In the hour starting 9 PM ET, it went from $0.00173 to as high as $0.00347, and it kept climbing overnight. By Friday morning, the gain over the last 24 hours alone was about 235%.

The numbers, all of them

Period	Change
24 hours	+234.6%
7 days	+276.2%
14 days	+287.7%
30 days	+259.7%
1 year	−42.0%
From its all-time high ($0.394, August 23, 2021)	−98.8%

Figures from CoinGecko at about 7:38 AM ET.

Read the table as a whole. CoinGecko records QI's all-time low of $0.00101 on July 25, 2026, two months ago. The token is now a little under five times that low. It is also still 42% below where it was a year ago, and a holder from the 2021 peak has lost almost all of the value.

More traded in a day than the token is worth

QI's market value is about $34.9 million on CoinGecko. Tracked venues traded about $70.9 million of it in the past 24 hours. That is a churn ratio of about 2.0: twice the value of every QI token in existence changed hands in one day.

In plain terms, traders are setting the price by passing the same tokens back and forth, not patient buyers absorbing supply. A price that rises this way can fall just as fast.

The Coinbase figures make the same point from another angle. On Thursday, from 2 AM to 8 PM ET, no single hour saw more than about 2.1 million QI trade on Coinbase. In the hour starting 9 PM, 263 million traded. Over the past 24 hours, Coinbase alone handled 1.52 billion QI. That is about 21% of the entire 7.2 billion supply on one exchange in one day.

Coinbase is not even the main venue. CoinGecko attributes about 35% of the day's volume to Binance, 31% to WEEX and 10% to Coinbase.

One thing this token does not have is a supply overhang. CoinGecko lists QI's circulating, total and maximum supply all at 7.2 billion. That means the market value above covers every token, and there is no locked supply waiting to be released.

The protocol did not change overnight. The token did.

BENQI runs a lending market and a liquid staking service on the Avalanche blockchain. QI is its governance token. If something fundamental had shifted at the protocol, deposits would be one place to see it. They did not move much.

DefiLlama puts BENQI's total value locked at about $265 million on Friday, compared with $260 million on Thursday. That is up about 2%, while the token more than tripled. The bigger change came earlier in the week: TVL rose from $194 million on September 17 to $294 million on September 21. That tracks the Avalanche token itself, which rose from $7.60 to $11.23 on Coinbase over the same days. DefiLlama puts about $243 million in BENQI's staked-AVAX product alone, so the dollar value of those deposits rises and falls with AVAX's price.

What we could not find

We looked for a cause and could not verify one. We checked:

• the CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt and The Block news feeds
• Binance's listing and news announcements
• Upbit's trading notices
• general news search for BENQI

None showed a new exchange listing, upgrade, partnership or funding round around Thursday night's move. What did turn up was price trackers and prediction posts, none naming a specific event.

We are not going to fill that gap with a guess. As of this morning, the accurate description is this: a very heavily traded overnight rise, starting near the token's lows, with no confirmed news behind it.

How to read a move like this

• Check the timing. When nearly a whole week's gain arrives in one overnight session, the weekly figure says little about a trend.
• Compare volume with market value. A churn ratio above 1 means the same tokens are changing hands again and again.

Live prices are on our crypto prices page, and the full list of this week's big movers is on /movers. The token tracker shows pool liquidity and buy-sell pressure for smaller tokens. Earlier this week we covered similar spikes in Neon and Aurora.

Sources: CoinGecko, the Coinbase Exchange public API and DefiLlama, pulled September 25, 2026 between about 7:38 and 7:42 AM ET. Crypto prices move constantly and these figures will have changed. This is market information, not investment advice, and The Company Chronicle holds no position in any token mentioned.