Token Airdrop Weekly Data Report — September 28 – October 4, 2026

The fifth week-over-week comparison. This week's tables cover: the Binance Alpha threshold series and its sharpest single-round drop; the NEAR price path through the exploit week; the 2Z unlock that landed in-week; XPL's post-unlock price path as a follow-up to last week's $158M event; the exchange reward layer, now including the renewed USD1 campaign's first stablecoin tranche; and the early-October unlock wave, where the trackers diverge by nearly $800 million. Only verifiable, source-attributed figures make it into the tables — where sources disagree, both values are printed.

1. Binance Alpha Threshold: 250 → 223

The Concrete round's 223-point open is 27 points below the CYS round's 250 — the largest single-round drop in the series this tracker has tabulated (prior declines were in the 5–6 point range). A careful reading: thresholds are opening bids in a timed auction, and the Concrete round also launched alongside a two-batch trading competition (258,000 CT per batch to the top 2,000 by buy volume), so the claim and the competition should be read as one incentive package, not two independent datapoints.

The series context matters for how the drop should be interpreted. Across the four prior tabulated rounds, the opening threshold moved in a narrow 235–250 band: 246 (Sep 10), 235 (Sep 17), 250 (Sep 23) and now 223 (Sep 30). Two structural factors separate the Concrete round from that band. First, the reward unit: 200 CT is a claim from a 1-billion fixed supply whose price had not yet been discovered at open, whereas the prior rounds' rewards (180 CYS, 5,000 APM) launched into tokens that were already trading. Second, the timing: a month-end TGE slot on September 30 competed directly with the closing days of the USD1 campaign and the opening of the Margex and Gate campaigns for the same point balances. A 223-point open against an unpriced reward in a crowded week is consistent with the operator lowering the entry price to secure distribution — not with a market-wide collapse in point values. One round does not make a trend; the next two or three openings will show whether 223 was an outlier or a reset.

2. NEAR Through the Exploit Week: Daily Closes

Week-over-week: the Oct 2 close of $5.0010 sits 7.0% below the prior week's Sep 27 close of $5.3800 (computed from the Investing.com/Binance closes). Intraday accounts of the October 1 drop differ by source — $5.1 → $4.79 (Protos), a fall to $4.92 / −8.6% (BeInCrypto via ThreatCluster), $5.5 → $4.7 (secondary commentary) — so the table uses exchange daily closes only. The price held well above the $3.33 trigger of the completed Drop 1 conversion all week; the below-trigger scenario remains untested. Sources: Investing.com (Binance NEAR/USD); CoinDCX (ETF launch); Cryptonomist (exploit).

The shape of the week is the data point. A −10.37% Monday (Sep 28) into an ETF-launch Tuesday (+1.51%), a +9.11% month-end rally (Sep 30), a −9.96% exploit-day reversal (Oct 1) and a +3.99% partial recovery (Oct 2) is a 20-point swing between daily closes inside five sessions — daily close-to-close moves that large, clustered around identifiable events, are what a news-driven market looks like in table form. Two measured observations: the Oct 2 close recovered roughly 44% of the Oct 1 drop in a single session, and the full week's range ($4.8090–$5.3410 on closes) never approached the $3.33 trigger — the buffer between the close and the trigger was at minimum $1.4790 (−27.7% would have been required from the Oct 1 close to breach it). For the price-gated airdrop design profiled two weeks ago, this was the first stress week since conversion, and the gate was nowhere near tested.

3. Unlocks: In-Week and Ahead

The wave-level disagreement: BeInCrypto's snapshot totals roughly $1.11 billion for October 5–11; a Tokenomist snapshot cited by Bittime recorded over $1.9 billion across 32 October releases above $10 million. The two snapshots cover different scopes and were taken at different times; we print both and decline to reconcile. The ENA row carries its own internal disagreement (171.88M vs ~1.41B tokens) for the same reason.

XPL follow-up (last week's largest event): CoinGecko event-window data shows XPL rising from ~$0.090 (Sep 23) to ~$0.1146 (Sep 25) with volume nearly doubling to ~$153.7M into the unlock; CoinMarketCap's analysis recorded a 3.75% fall to ~$0.113 by September 26 as post-unlock selling began. Unlock value estimates remain a three-way spread — ~$158M (PANews/Token Unlocks), $144–198M (Pluang), ~$160M on a 1.81B-token basis including the ecosystem batch (Coinliva). Circulating supply jumped from ~2.78B to ~4.67B tokens overnight, per Coinliva. The next XPL unlock follows the monthly schedule on October 25. Sources: WEEX (CoinGecko data); CoinMarketCap analysis; Pluang; Coinliva.

The XPL follow-up is worth keeping in the file because it is the cleanest absorption test September produced. A ~68% one-day jump in circulating supply (~2.78B → ~4.67B tokens) met a price that had risen ~27% into the event and gave back only 3.75% in the two sessions after it — on this sample, pre-unlock demand absorbed the majority of the new float, and the "unlock equals dump" default did not print. The 2Z event in this week's table (Oct 2, ~1.66 billion tokens, ≈ $113–114M) is the October entry in the same test series; its absorption read requires price and volume data we do not snapshot in launch week, so it is tabulated as an event, not an outcome. The forward rows (ENA Oct 5, HYPE Oct 6, APT Oct 11) are published schedules — predictions in the literal sense — and the wave-level totals that aggregate them disagree by scope, not by arithmetic.

4. Deadline Ratio: 2 of 6, Unchanged

Two of six rows carry printed end dates — unchanged from last week. The composition note from last month still applies: Midnight's Glacier Drop left the tracked set earlier, and the two dated rows are now Sonic and Grass. Source: CryptoTicker Week 40; Kraken notice.

The ratio is unchanged, but the rows underneath it are not standing still. Sonic's October 15 burn is now ten days out, and it is the harder of the two dated events to model: a contract-executed burn of 32.69M unclaimed S removes supply deterministically — there is no claim-window behavior to measure, only the before/after supply arithmetic. Grass's January 22, 2027 close is the long tail of the set, and its stage-2 USDC denomination (no new GRASS minted) remains the only tracked row where the payout asset is not the protocol's own token. The Kraken row moved states this week — from "live claim" to "liquidating" — which is the tracked set's first transition into involuntary disposal; the two printed windows for it are kept because the exchange's schedule and the third-party snapshot disagree, and the difference (Oct 2–9 vs Sep 28 – Oct 2) spans this reporting week itself.

5. The Exchange Reward Layer

Exchange pools remain the only part of this market where the headline number is a published fact rather than an estimate. The renewed USD1 campaign extends the weekly-payout model through October 30 and adds the program's first stablecoin tranche.

Three observations from the table's structure. First, concentration: the two Binance USD1 rows are the same program in consecutive rounds, and together they dwarf every other pool in the layer — the exchange reward market this tracker covers is, in practice, one campaign with a renewal cadence plus satellites. Second, denomination is diverging: WLFI (the issuer's token) in the USD1 campaign, XRP in the RLUSD campaign, ETH in Margex's, LAPTOP (a Base memecoin) in Gate's, and now USD1 itself in the Stage 2 tranche — five different payout assets across six rows, which makes cross-campaign value comparison impossible without prices and is part of why the per-distribution measurement gap in section 6 matters. Third, the windows overlap heavily: six campaigns share the October 2–16 stretch, with October 16 alone closing two of them (Margex and the USD1 Stage 2 terms). Point and attention budgets, not eligibility, are the binding constraint in a week like this.

6. What We Still Cannot Measure

• The WLFI value gap is now 4 of 4. No per-distribution WLFI token value was published for the Sep 11, Sep 18, Sep 25 or Oct 2 payouts in sources accessible to us. The new campaign's terms say weekly effective APRs will be updated in the announcement after each distribution — that is the mechanism to watch.
• Concrete's market price at writing: trackers including CoinCarp had no CT price data at the time of the launch-week coverage; day-one price discovery happened on Alpha, OKX and HTX order books we do not snapshot.
• City Protocol's TGE execution: scheduled September 28 per trackers; no accessible confirmation it occurred. Its official docs call the token $CIT (10B fixed supply; 17.9% unlocked at TGE; 1% airdrop fully unlocked).
• Unlock-wave totals: $1.11B (BeInCrypto, Oct 5–11) vs over $1.9B (Tokenomist, October) — different scopes, both printed.

Methodology

Sources

FAQ

Related Reading

• Token Airdrop Weekly News Review — September 28 – October 4, 2026
• Token Airdrop Weekly Data Report — September 21 – 27, 2026
• NEAR's $3.8M Week: An ETF Debut, an Exploit, and a Full Recovery
• Airdrop Market Report — September 2026