August accounted for more than half of the quarter’s market-cap recovery, following a US Treasury announcement and continued BTC ETF inflows.
The total crypto market cap increased by $840 billion, or 39.6%, to close the third quarter at $3 trillion, per data from CoinGecko, ending three straight quarters of declines.
It was the largest quarterly rise since the fourth quarter of 2024, but prices outpaced participation with trading volumes still falling.
August Delivered More Than Half the Quarter’s Gain
Market cap peaked near $3 trillion on September 21 before closing the quarter at $2.96 trillion, which is still 4% lower year to date.
August did the heavy lifting, with a 21.8% jump worth $490 billion that followed a US Treasury announcement to at least double its planned buybacks of long-dated bonds, plus steady net inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs. A Senate procedural vote on the CLARITY Act failed on September 15 and barely slowed the climb.
Ethereum, meanwhile, gained 71% to $2,684, beating Bitcoin and every other major coin, helped by net inflows of $3.1 billion into US spot ETH funds that erased all the outflows from the first half of the year.
However, its trading volume still fell 23.2% to $11.5 billion, and Glamsterdam, the network upgrade already delayed in the second quarter, missed mainnet again and is still reaching test networks, with Sepolia activated on October 6.
Average daily volume fell 8.6% from Q2 to $73.3 billion, a third consecutive quarterly decline, while spot volume at the top ten centralized exchanges slid 14.2% to $1.65 trillion. But leverage came back faster than buyers did, since open interest on perpetual futures, which counts the value of contracts still open, rose 40.6% and closed above $100 billion for the first time since the third quarter of 2025.
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Binance Gains Share While Newer Platforms Draw Traders
Binance extended its spot share to 42.7% from 38.7% in the second quarter, and it was the only exchange in double digits. It also added $12.7 billion to open interest, while KuCoin and Deribit lost 41.2% and 18.9%, a split CoinGecko called uneven rather than broad-based.
Bitget, for its part, fell to #11 after a hack in September, having already dropped from $37.8 billion in monthly volume in June to $15.7 billion in July.
CoinGecko also tracked Robinhood Chain, which launched July 1, and recorded more than $88.9 billion in trading volume during the quarter. Although the network was built with tokenized stocks and real-world assets in mind, meme coin traders took over, becoming a major source of activity that saw transactions per day hit an average of 9.5 million in Q3, even though most newly deployed tokens failed to gain traction.
The market has since then given back some ground, with BTC falling to a monthly low of $80,200 on October 15 amid pressure from Asian stock markets and September inflation data that came in slightly above forecasts.