Bitcoin at $81,975, Ether at $2,416: crypto prices today, October 18, 2026

Bitcoin traded at about $81,975 on Coinbase early Sunday, up 0.7% over 24 hours and 2.0% below its close a week ago. Ether was at $2,416, down 0.3% on the day and 4.7% on the week. U.S. stock markets are closed for the weekend, so crypto is the only major market trading, and the price action has been quiet: Bitcoin's 24-hour range on Coinbase ran from $80,700 to $82,184, a spread of 1.8%.

Prices at a glance

Coin	Price	24 hours	7 days
Bitcoin (BTC)	$81,975	+0.7%	-2.0%
Ether (ETH)	$2,416	-0.3%	-4.7%
Solana (SOL)	$104.04	+0.2%	-6.5%
XRP	$1.298	+0.3%	-7.9%
Dogecoin (DOGE)	$0.0794	-0.1%	-8.4%
Cardano (ADA)	$0.2204	-0.2%	-12.5%
Chainlink (LINK)	$12.02	-0.1%	-9.9%
Avalanche (AVAX)	$9.77	-1.1%	-10.9%

Coinbase Exchange prices at about 8:10 AM ET on October 18. The 24-hour change compares the latest trade with the price 24 hours earlier. The 7-day change compares it with the October 11 daily close (UTC).

Bitcoin held, the rest of the board did not

The seven-day column is the story. Bitcoin's daily closes on Coinbase over the past nine days sit in a narrow band between roughly $81,400 and $83,700, which is why its weekly loss is only 2%. The smaller coins have lost much more: Cardano is down 12.5% on the week, Avalanche 10.9%, Chainlink 9.9%. Ether, the second-largest coin, is down 4.7%. That pattern, with the largest coin steady and the rest weaker, is what a market looks like when traders are reducing risk away from the biggest name. We did not find a single news item in CoinDesk or Cointelegraph this morning that explains the altcoin weakness, so we are not offering a cause.

Chip-stock contracts flushed while Wall Street was shut

The most unusual market event of the weekend happened outside crypto proper. About $51.6 million in leveraged positions tied to chip stocks and semiconductor funds were force-closed between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC on Saturday, according to CoinGlass data cited by CoinDesk. About $38 million of that came from traders positioned for higher prices. The contracts are perpetual futures that track a stock's price and trade around the clock on crypto exchanges, so they keep moving when the shares do not. CoinDesk reported that the selling began on Binance and spread within seconds to Hyperliquid, with the largest single hit on contracts tied to SOXL, a fund that triples the daily moves in chip shares, at about $12.7 million.

Why it matters: with the underlying shares shut, those weekend prices are set by crypto traders alone. When U.S. markets reopen Monday, the actual share prices will show how far the weekend contracts drifted from them. We will not treat the weekend move as a signal about Monday's open.

Cysic halts its bridge after an unauthorized mint

Cysic said its cross-chain bridge was suspended after an attacker exploited a processing flaw to mint 10 million CYS tokens on BNB Smart Chain on Saturday at 12:31 UTC, Cointelegraph reported, citing the project's incident report on X. Cysic's preliminary findings point to unauthorized access to a database supporting the bridge. The project blacklisted the recipient address about 75 minutes later, and about 2.8 million CYS remained there with transfers restricted. Cysic said the mainnet and existing user wallets were not affected, and that the size of the mint does not establish the dollar loss, which is still under review. A security firm has been hired and a follow-up report is planned.

Stablecoin payments, with numbers

Two stablecoin items from Friday and Saturday are worth a business owner's attention. Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire told Reuters, on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, that the company is looking to enter about 40 developing markets, Cointelegraph reported. Separately, a third-quarter report from payments network Borderless.xyz found that sending $200 through stablecoin networks costs a median of $2, or 1%, against $12.72, or 6.36%, for conventional remittances, using World Bank data from the same period last year. Completion rates varied widely, from 98.6% in Mexico to 73% in Costa Rica. These are one network's figures and one company's stated plans, not an industry-wide measure.

What traders are watching

• Monday's U.S. open, and how far real chip-stock prices sit from the weekend contract levels.
• Bitcoin's range, with the Coinbase 24-hour low at $80,700 and the high at $82,184.
• The Fed's October 27-28 meeting. See Friday's report for where rate expectations stood after Chair Warsh's comments.
• Cysic's follow-up report on the size of the loss.

For yesterday's prices, see Saturday's report. For the week's biggest gainers, see crypto movers, live crypto prices and meme coins.

Sources: Coinbase Exchange price data; CoinDesk; CoinGlass via CoinDesk; Cointelegraph; Reuters via Cointelegraph; Borderless.xyz via Cointelegraph. Crypto assets are volatile. This is market information, not investment advice.