Irys's IRYS token surged to a record high on October 23, then gave back nearly three-quarters of its value within hours.

During the 19:00 UTC hour on October 23, the token peaked at 0.32757 USDT on Bitget. By 05:49 UTC on October 24, it was changing hands at 0.08631 USDT, approximately 74% below the top. The same hourly candle closed at 0.11138 USDT, and the following hour printed a low of 0.06106 USDT, roughly 81% under the peak.

CoinGecko registered an all-time high of $0.296 at 19:24 UTC and priced IRYS at $0.0863 on Saturday morning. At the high, the 2 billion tokens in circulation were worth roughly $592 million. The market cap stood near $174 million, with 20% of the 10 billion total supply in circulation — a low-float structure in which only a fifth of all tokens can trade while the rest stays off the market.

Upbit's won market traced the same arc

The won pair on Upbit moved from a 52-week low of 16.3 won on October 18 to a 52-week high of 450 won on October23. Early Saturday, it traded at 116 won with about 954 billion won in 24-hour turnover. Upbit's won market topped trading volume for IRYS — the Korean venue carried the largest share of the token's turnover.

A 1,208% daily climb before the reversal

IRYS opened on Bitget on October 23 at 0.02058 USDT and crept up through the morning before leaping from roughly 0.044 to 0.14 between 15:00 and 17:00 UTC. At 3:21 p.m. ET, the token was up about 1,208% in 24 hours at $0.2806, with a seven-day gain of approximately 2,083%, a price that implied a circulating value of around $561 million.

The run carried IRYS well above its May listing high of 0.08985 USDT on Bitget. Upbit opened trading for IRYS against the won, bitcoin and USDT on May 15.

Irys melds blockchain data storage with smart contract execution, a design that places it in the decentralized storage side of the industry. IRYS is staked to validate the network and pays for storage and execution fees.

Even after the slide, IRYS was still up about 212% on Bitget's rolling 24-hour window early Saturday, during which the IRYS/USDT pair traded roughly 57.9 million USDT.

Short sellers lost about $21.4 million on the way up

Liquidations over 24 hours totaled approximately $24.2 million, with roughly $21.4 million from shorts and $2.8 million from longs. Open futures positions on IRYS stood near $1.22 billion, a figure amplified by the higher price — open interest measures the value of contracts still standing rather than tokens that changed hands. A forced short exit means buying the token back, which can push the price higher.

No source has said what drove the run or the collapse. Irys's tokenomics lock team and investor tokens for the first year, and the project puts about 20% of its supply into circulation at launch — making the end of that first-year lock a fixed calendar point that will change the circulating supply when it arrives.

The swift reversal was not the only abrupt token episode of the week. On October 22, a Pump.fun token pushed by trader Clayton Kim's Kimchi account rocketed to a market cap of roughly $15 million in minutes before losing more than 98% of its value after the post was erased about 30 minutes later, according to Cryptopolitan.

Korean traders have also sought out leverage offshore, where products linked to the Kospi index offer up to 150 times exposure, Cryptopolitan reported on October 2.

Source: Cryptopolitan