IRYS, the token of the Irys datachain, rose about 277% in the 24 hours to 04:21 UTC on Saturday 24 October, to $0.0986, according to Coindaro’s market data, making it the biggest gainer among tracked coins. Nobody has said why. Irys published no announcement, no exchange listed the token that day, and every outlet that covered the move reports that the cause is unknown. The trading itself is easier to see: most of it took place on Binance’s blockchain, dove gli utenti scambiano token direttamente dal proprio wallet senza affidare la custodia dei fondi a una società.">swap perpetui) sono derivati che replicano pool di un market maker automatico divergono, rispetto a tenere semplicemente gli stessi token. Diventa definitiva al prelievo.">il prezzo di un'attività con leva ma senza scadenza. Un funding tra long e short, regolato ogni poche ore, tiene il contratto vicino al prezzo spot o all'indice.">perpetual futures and on Upbit, the Korean exchange, and short sellers took most of the liquidations.
TokenPost reported at 02:30 UTC that the spot price briefly went above $0.32 before falling back to about $0.10, while the perpetual contract touched $0.50 after a gain of about 780% in four hours. By 04:21 UTC the token was down 9.42% over the previous hour on Coindaro’s data, and up 590% over seven days.
Published IRYS gains run from 250% to 1,200%
Published gains range from about 250% to 1,200%, because outlets used different windows and snapshot times. A headline from The Defiant put the surge at 1,200%, past the token’s May peak, with a market value near $561 million in its subheading. No other outlet Coindaro read reproduces either number, and the body of that article could not be loaded.
| Source (time read or published) | Price | 24h change | 24h volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coindaro market data (24 Oct, 04:21 UTC) | $0.0986 | +277% | not given |
| CoinPaprika (24 Oct, about 05:00 UTC) | $0.0944 | +249% | $299.6M |
| CoinGecko (24 Oct, morning UTC) | $0.0972 | +270% | $0.63B to $1.78B (page shows both) |
| TokenPost (24 Oct, 02:30 UTC) | about $0.10, after a brief high above $0.32 | over 280% | not given |
| AMBCrypto via KuCoin (23 Oct) | about $0.144 | about +580% | not given |
CoinPaprika lists an all-time high of $0.2711 on 23 October and says the price at its reading was 64.74% below it. CoinGecko shows a high of $0.2959.
The volume figures are even less consistent. CoinPaprika gives the token a volume authenticity score of 20 out of 100, meaning it judges about 40% of the reported volume genuine. That does not prove wash trading, but volume can mislead, as with the Solana bot in our report on $1.4 billion of Raydium volume booked with about $12,000.
Binance futures and Upbit did most of the IRYS token trading
On CoinPaprika’s market list, the largest IRYS market by volume is Binance Futures, at $3.48 billion, followed by Upbit at $917 million and Bithumb at $181 million. CoinGecko, which counts spot venues only, puts Upbit first at about $902 million, ahead of OKX and KuCoin at about $125 million each.
In Korea, IRYS became the most traded coin of the day. TokenPost Korea’s morning market note, dated 07:30 KST on 24 October (22:30 UTC on 23 October), listed it at 121 won, up 338.4%, with 808.1 billion won traded on Upbit and Bithumb combined, the largest trading value of the coins it tracks. Upbit is run by Dunamu, which is exploring stablecoin payments with MoonPay.
The futures side shows who lost money. AMBCrypto, in a report republished by KuCoin on 23 October, cited CoinMarketCap data showing about $24.2 million of IRYS positions liquidated in 24 hours, of which about $21.4 million were shorts and about $2.8 million longs, with open futures positions near $1.22 billion. AMBCrypto wrote that the data does not show what started the surge. TokenPost said the move may have reflected short-squeeze pressure, which is a possibility it raised, not a finding. A liquidation on perpetual futures is a forced closing: when shorts are closed, the exchange buys the token back for them, which can push the price higher still.
Leverage on IRYS is not new. HTX opened an IRYS/USDT contract with leverage of up to 20 times in November 2025, and OKX added a perpetual in May 2026, according to TokenPost. On the morning of 24 October, CoinGecko showed about $991 million of open interest on IRYS perpetuals and an eight-hour funding rate of 0.1376%. A positive rate means traders holding long positions pay those holding shorts, which happens when more of the open bets are on a rise.
What moved the price, and what did not
Coindaro checked Irys’s own channels on the morning of 24 October. The newest post on the Irys blog, read at about 04:45 UTC, is dated 3 August 2026, an announcement about the activation of a network feature called Cascade; nothing on the blog is dated October. CoinMarketCap’s automated price analysis page also says it found no Irys-specific news such as partnerships or upgrades. Upbit’s notice board did not load its list for our reader, so we cannot confirm whether the exchange has flagged the token; searches found no Upbit warning on IRYS for October.
Some of what circulated is unconfirmed. A Korean roundup reported that some traders called the move suspicious, and a trader’s post on X cited unlock amounts and wallet holdings that Coindaro could not verify. We do not repeat those figures.
The run did not start on Friday. BingX reported a 73.62% rise on 22 October, with 24-hour volume at 3.8 times the market cap, and gave no cause either. TradingView lists the token’s all-time low at $0.0117 on 18 October. The 04:21 UTC price is about 8.4 times that level, reached in six days.
The May peak was an Upbit listing, not the token launch
The “May listing peak” in the Defiant’s headline refers to Upbit. The exchange listed IRYS on 15 May 2026 against the won, bitcoin and tether. That evening, Coinreaders reported the token at 129 won at 21:06 KST, up 25.24%, and tied the move to the listing, the DePIN theme and hopes around the CLARITY Act. TradingView puts the May high at $0.0900 on 15 May. The 23 October high is about three times that level.
The token itself launched on 25 November 2025, with an airdrop claim window that ran until 25 December. Irys, formerly Bundlr, describes itself as a datachain, a blockchain that stores data smart contracts can use.
The IRYS token pays storage and execution fees on the network and is staked by validators, according to CoinGecko’s project description. The project’s last product news, on 3 August, was Cascade, which lets users keep data for 30 days, for a year or permanently, at a price set by the term chosen.
Supply: about 20% of IRYS circulates, and the insiders’ lock may end in November
Irys’s tokenomics post of 19 November 2025 sets a total supply of 10 billion IRYS, with about 20% circulating at launch for the community, the ecosystem and liquidity, and team and investor tokens locked for the first year. CoinGecko and CoinPaprika both count about 2 billion tokens in circulation.
At about $0.097, CoinGecko puts the market cap near $199 million and the fully diluted valuation near $994 million, about five times higher. The float is small in money terms too: at the 04:21 UTC price, 1% of the circulating supply, 20 million tokens, was worth about $2 million.
If the one-year lock runs from the launch date, it ends around 25 November 2026, one month from now. That is Coindaro’s reading of the blog, not a date Irys has confirmed for the end of the lock. Trackers describe monthly vesting after that date but disagree on the split between team, investors and foundation. Coindaro has not verified any unlock amount.
What nobody has explained yet
No one has said who bought, or why on 22 and 23 October, and Irys has not commented on the price. It is also not known whether the short liquidations were the cause of the spike or only its effect.
Korean exchanges are the first place to watch: Upbit and Bithumb post their notices on IRYS, if any, on their own boards. Then comes 25 November, the date on which, by Coindaro’s reading, the insiders’ first year ends, and when the trackers’ vesting schedules can be checked against the tokens that actually move on chain.