Crypto-adjacent stocks drop to start the week

Crypto-adjacent shares slid in early trading along with unprofitable tech company shares, as animal spirits ebbed to start the US trading week.

Goldman Sachs’ basket of bitcoin-sensitive stocks — heavily weighted toward Coinbase and treasury companies like MARA Holdings and Strategy — was down more than 3% early, reflecting another tumble in bitcoin overnight, though bitcoin prices stabilized a bit in early US trading. Robinhood Markets — shares of which have at times taken cues from the price of crypto, which is traded on the brokerage app — was also down.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)

It would take a talented druid and a flock’s worth of bird entrails to the divine precisely what’s driving the downdraft. But S&P’s recent assessment of the vulnerability of Tether’s stablecoin, USDT — the world’s largest of these supposedly safer forms of crypto — to the bitcoin sell-off might be playing a role.