Crypto World

Nasdaq slip tests crypto’s decoupling story as BTC and ETH hold up

Published

2 hours ago

21 April 2026

Nasdaq and Talos expand institutional tokenization push

Nasdaq drops 1% and the S&P 500 0.6%, but Bitcoin near $75k and Ethereum around $2.3k show crypto holding up better than U.S. tech — at least intraday.

Summary

Nasdaq falls 1%, S&P 500 drops 0.6% and Dow slips 0.27% as U.S. stocks extend a choppy April
At 9 a.m. EST, Bitcoin trades near $75,325 and Ethereum around $2,318, both up from early‑morning lows despite equity weakness
Coinbase stock remains volatile after a steep year‑to‑date slide, underscoring how listed crypto proxies still trade like high‑beta tech

U.S. equities opened the week on the back foot, with Gate’s TradFi desk reporting that the Nasdaq fell roughly 1%, the S&P 500 dropped nearly 0.6% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slid about 0.27%, adding another red session to a bruising April for risk assets.

The move comes on top of a first‑quarter backdrop in which the Nasdaq was already down 7.1% year‑to‑date, the S&P 500 off 4.6% and the Dow lower by 3.6%, according to a recent Gate recap that blamed “geopolitical and energy‑driven headwinds” for the worst quarter in a year.

Yet by 9 a.m. EST on April 20, the two largest cryptocurrencies were showing more resilience than U.S. tech benchmarks, with Bitcoin changing hands at about $75,324.58 and Ethereum at $2,317.80, both modestly higher than their early‑morning prints despite the equity wobble.

Data compiled by Yahoo Finance shows Bitcoin opened Monday at $73,820.11, down 2.5% from Sunday’s $75,723.69, before rebounding above $75,240 by 7:35 a.m. EST, a swing that left BTC up roughly 1.9% off the lows even as futures pointed to a weaker Nasdaq open.

Ethereum followed a similar pattern, starting the day at $2,263.49 — 3.7% below its Sunday level — and then climbing back to about $2,307.37 by mid‑morning, putting spot ETH slightly above the $2,300 “line in the sand” highlighted in recent derivatives and liquidation analysis.

Fortune’s daily crypto dashboard puts the 9 a.m. Ethereum price at $2,317.80, roughly $730 higher than a year ago, underlining how the asset’s 40.3% year‑on‑year gain sits awkwardly next to a Nasdaq that is negative on the year.

That divergence has revived the debate over whether Bitcoin and Ethereum are finally decoupling from growth equities or simply lagging broader risk‑off moves.

In a prior crypto.news story on Ethereum liquidation risk, on‑chain and derivatives data suggested that a break below $2,040 could trigger up to $1.4 billion in long liquidations, a reminder that even if spot ETH looks steady against the S&P on some days, leverage still binds crypto tightly to macro shocks.

Listed crypto proxies, meanwhile, remain firmly in the equity bucket.

Coinbase stock closed at $206.33 on April 17, up 3.26% on the day but still nursing a 28.5% year‑to‑date drawdown to around $263.26 earlier this month as Barclays downgraded the shares on softer trading revenue, according to MEXC’s summary of the exchange’s latest earnings.

For traders watching both screens, Monday’s tape offered a neat snapshot.

The Nasdaq’s 1% slip and S&P 500’s 0.6% drop kept pressure on high‑beta tech, but Bitcoin above $75,000 and Ethereum near $2,300 showed that crypto can, at least intraday, shrug off modest equity weakness — even as history and recent crypto.news coverage of correlated sell‑offs suggest that a deeper stock‑market break would quickly test that independence.

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Crypto World

Coinbase’s x402 Launches Marketplace Platform for AI Agents

Published

2 minutes ago

21 April 2026

NewsAdmin

Coinbase’s x402 Launches Marketplace Platform for AI Agents

Coinbase-backed artificial intelligence payments standard x402 has launched a marketplace for apps and services to boost the usefulness of AI agents.

Coinbase product lead Nick Prince said in a video posted on X on Monday that the idea behind the platform, called Agentic.market, was to “give humans and their agents access to thousands of services, with zero API keys required.”

Prince, in a separate post, said the market was a “storefront for discovering, comparing, and using x402 services” and offers access to a wide variety of apps and websites that AI agents can use, such as CoinGecko, Google Flights and the social media site X.

He added that hundreds of thousands of AI agents have transacted hundreds of millions in volume, but AI agent users have “relied on fragmented sources and word-of-mouth” to find compatible services.

The x402 protocol, launched by Coinbase in May 2025, allows AI agents to make internet payments using stablecoins and has seen growing support as many companies believe AI technology will become more involved in commerce.

Introducing Agentic(dot)Market, the homepage of the agent economy.
– Monitor agentic commerce trends
– Discover services for your agent to buy
– Sell your services to agents
Thousands of services. Zero API keys. Powered by x402. https://t.co/dgrNV73MAJ pic.twitter.com/0QU9Bpb3kG
— nick.base.eth 🛡 (@Nick_Prince12) April 20, 2026
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Prince said the marketplace has a web interface “for humans to browse and evaluate services” and a programming layer that allows AI agents access to the platform to “search, filter, and integrate new capabilities autonomously at runtime without a human in the loop.”

The platform provides an AI agent with “skills,” or code on how to use a service, along with a wallet that gives it the ability to “buy services and also sell services,” Prince added.

The x402 protocol, named after the rarely used HTTP status code “402 Payment Required,” received support earlier this month from Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, which backed the creation of the x402 Foundation to govern the protocol.

American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Cloudflare, Shopify, Stripe, Circle, Base, Polygon Labs, the Solana Foundation, Thirdweb and KakaoPay also expressed their “initial intent and support” of the foundation.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said at the time that “there will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon,” echoing Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, who in January said that “literally billions of AI agents” will be transacting on blockchains in three to five years.

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