Altcoins to watch in November 2026

October was hard on altcoins. Bitcoin fell about 7.3%, its weakest October since 2014, as hackers stole about $6.3 billion from a major centralised exchange on October 29. It’s billed as the largest crypto theft on record. The FBI has attributed the attack to North Korea's TraderTraitor group; more than $1.5 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in the first 24 hours.

The prices are one thing; the calendars still tell of altcoins worth watching in November. Zcash and Stellar both have upgrades scheduled this month, Chainlink has just landed one of Wall Street's biggest institutions and the hack has handed decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap a fresh argument.

1. Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink ended October near $11.73, down about 18% over 30 days after touching $10.60. The slide came in the same week as some of its biggest news of the year.

On October 28, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which settles most US securities trades, launched its tokenisation service. The next day, DTCC CEO Frank La Salla joined Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov on stage at Link:NYC and said Chainlink could "unlock billions of dollars in trapped liquidity." 

Chainlink also launched a service that publishes prices for tokenised stocks, commodities and other real-world assets around the clock, which Aave's institutional lending platform has already adopted.

The Chainlink Reserve, which uses protocol revenue to buy LINK on the open market, added 427,577 LINK in October, taking its holdings to about 6.48 million. 

The question for November is whether institutional adoption starts showing up in demand for the token itself.

2. Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash gave back some of its huge 2026 run in October, sliding from about $1,436 at the end of September to $1,250, a drop of roughly 13% and well below its late-September high near $1,690. Even so, it held up better than most of the market in the final week, as investors waited for its next upgrade.

NU7 is set to activate at block 3,543,405, expected around November 5. It cuts block times from 75 seconds to 25, so payments confirm about three times faster, while lowering the reward per block so daily supply stays the same.

On October 26, co-founder Sean Bowe proposed ending the 8% share of block rewards that goes to the Zcash Community Grants program, arguing that its treasury, at more than $125 million, far exceeds its spending of about $6 million a year. 

The community has produced four competing plans, none final. Grayscale took the other side the same day, arguing in a research note that Zcash's 20% developer allocation has kept privacy upgrades coming through a decade of weak markets. US Zcash funds hold about $757 million, or roughly 3.4% of all ZEC.

3. Sui (SUI)

Sui swung hard in both directions. After rising about 60% in September to close at $1.16, it fell to about $0.90 by the end of October, a loss of roughly 22%.

SUI has tended to move further than Bitcoin when the market turns, so a recovery in BTC could lift it faster than larger tokens. The same applies on the way down.

On October 6, Mysten Labs, Sui's main developer, announced it is co-developing a system with Google Cloud called the Verifiable Agent Arbiter, which lets companies prove their AI agents stayed within the authority they were given. Activity records stay private in a customer's Google Cloud storage, while cryptographic proofs are kept on Sui and its storage network, Walrus. "AI agents are starting to make decisions with financial and legal consequences," Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng said. No launch date has been given.

Sui also announced a collaboration with Samsung in October to bring USDC on Sui into Samsung Wallet on 82 million US Galaxy devices, as well as Hashi, a network for using Bitcoin as collateral, went live with more than $500 million in committed capital.

Supply is the drag. Sui's monthly unlock for early contributors landed at the start of November, with trackers putting it between about 13 million and 23 million SUI, worth roughly $12 million to $22 million.

4. Stellar (XLM)

Stellar lost about 24% in October, ending near $0.17 and roughly 80% below its 2018 high of $0.88. 

That came despite a busy month for the network. MetaMask made Stellar a default network in its mobile app and browser extension, giving every MetaMask account a Stellar address.

Spiko's tokenised money market fund became the largest of its kind at $2.38 billion, with $1.65 billion of it managed on Stellar. 

Securitize, the tokenisation firm that works with BlackRock, also said it plans to add Stellar as a supported network, though it gave no launch date.

November brings two votes on Bell, also known as Protocol 30. Validators vote on the testnet upgrade on November 3 and on mainnet on November 23. Bell makes three changes:

1. A single smart contract can serve many customers through new addresses that carry a customer ID, which suits exchanges and payment firms. 
2. Smart contracts can verify ML-DSA signatures, a post-quantum standard approved by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. 
3. Ledgers will record closing times in milliseconds instead of seconds, which clears the way for faster ledgers later.

Bell doesn't make Stellar fully quantum-safe. Regular transaction signatures still use the existing scheme and a post-quantum option for standard accounts is planned for a later upgrade.

5. Uniswap (UNI)

Uniswap fell from about $8.88 at the end of September to around $7 by October 31, a drop of roughly 21%. The hack hit it as hard as the rest of the market at first: UNI fell 10.4% to $6.48 during the sell-off.

Despite that, Standard Chartered's Geoffrey Kendrick argued that the theft could speed up the move from centralised exchanges to decentralised ones, where users keep control of their own funds. "I would encourage investors to re-engage with Uniswap," he said, keeping his $100 UNI target for 2030 and adding that the hack was "another reason why that forecast may end up being too low."

Decentralised exchanges are already gaining ground. The top 10 handled spot volume equal to 23.5% of their centralised rivals' in the second quarter, up 2.1 percentage points from the first, according to CoinGecko research cited in the same report.

On October 22, Uniswap Labs launched aggregator hooks, which let Uniswap v4 route trades through outside sources of liquidity as if they were its own pools. Uniswap Labs says those sources cover "more than 90% of DEX activity" on the supported networks and trades routed through them pay protocol fees that go toward burning UNI.

Kendrick himself cautioned that a new floor for prices may only form "after assets are unfrozen and more detail of the hack emerges."

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