On April 21, Apple announced on Monday that John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as CEO on September 1, with Cook transitioning to the role of Executive Chairman. Ternus, who is currently the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, will join Apple's board of directors after becoming CEO. Art Levinson, Apple's non-executive chairman, will become the lead independent director on the same day. In a press release, Apple stated, 'Cook will continue to serve as CEO throughout the summer, working closely with Ternus to ensure a smooth transition.' This marks the first CEO transition at Apple since Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011. Cook succeeded shortly before Jobs' passing. Under Cook's leadership, Apple's market value has increased approximately 24 times, reaching $4 trillion at the close on Monday.

On April 21, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Federal Reserve Chair nominee Kevin Warsh at 10 AM ET (10 PM Beijing time) on Tuesday. According to an opening statement obtained in advance by Politico, Warsh stated that interest rate decisions must be strictly independent of political considerations, and monetary policy should not be used as a tool for short-term political objectives. He emphasized that the credibility of the Federal Reserve comes from institutional constraints and policy discipline. Warsh highlighted that price stability is the Fed's safeguard and committed to taking full responsibility for it, stating, "No excuses, no evasion." He also warned against the expanding boundaries of the Fed's functions in the post-crisis era, advocating that it should not extend its reach into areas of fiscal or social policy where it lacks statutory authority.

On April 21, according to monitoring by Onchain Lens, the whale '0x8Ad' withdrew 18,300 ETH (worth $42.18 million) from Binance. Of this amount, 12,000 ETH has been sold to repay a loan on Aave. The whale still holds 6,315 ETH (worth $14.62 million), which is likely to be sold soon.

On April 21, according to DefiLlama data, the Total Value Locked (TVL) in the Ethereum-based lending protocol Spark has increased by $668 million following the Aave incident, now totaling $4.395 billion. Notably, 26% of this increase comes from Justin Sun, who has publicly deposited assets worth $174 million into Spark.

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, the new generation flagship Kimi K2.6 from Dark Side of the Moon has been launched simultaneously on Kimi.com, the Kimi App, the open platform API, and the self-developed programming tool Kimi Code. K2.6 was previously available for beta users under the code-preview name within Kimi Code for a month, and today marks the first time the complete model has been open-sourced and the API made available to the public. In the official benchmark table, K2.6 has surpassed the current strongest closed-source flagship in several programming and proxy tasks: SWE-Bench Pro 58.6 (GPT-5.4 xhigh 57.7, Claude Opus 4.6 max effort 53.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro 54.2); HLE full collection with tools 54.0, all three closed-source models fall below this number; DeepSearchQA f1 92.5, while GPT-5.4 only achieves 78.6 in the same task. Terminal-Bench 2.0 scored 66.7, losing only to Gemini 3.1 Pro's 68.5; SWE-Bench Verified 80.2, which is comparable to Opus 4.6's 80.8 and Gemini 3.1 Pro's 80.6. The open-source camp has previously had almost no options that could match the cutting-edge closed-source flagships at this level of programming benchmarks. The official blog also provided two sets of long-term execution performance data. One involved K2.6 rewriting Qwen3.5-0.8B inference locally on a Mac using Zig (a niche system-level programming language), with over 4,000 tool calls, 12 hours of continuous operation, and 14 iterations, resulting in throughput increasing from approximately 15 tokens/sec to 193 tokens/sec, making it about 20% faster than LM Studio. The second task involved taking over an 8-year-old open-source matching engine, exchange-core, completing 13 hours of operation, over a thousand tool calls, modifying more than 4,000 lines of code, and reconfiguring the core thread topology (from 4ME+2RE to 2ME+1RE), resulting in a 185% increase in throughput. These two figures are based on official self-testing, with no independent replication reported yet. The simultaneously upgraded Agent Swarm can run 300 sub-agents at once, with a maximum of 4,000 steps, compared to the previous K2.5's limits of 100 agents and 1,500 steps. The in-house RL infrastructure team at Dark Side of the Moon has already run a 5-day autonomous operations agent using K2.6, and the official has released excerpts from this work log.

On April 21, Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf stated on the X platform, "Trump, through the implementation of blockades and violations of ceasefire agreements, attempts to turn this negotiation table into a table of surrender or find excuses to reignite war. We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats; over the past two weeks, we have prepared to reveal new strategies on the battlefield."

On April 21, the Seoul Composite Index in South Korea increased by 2.2%, reaching a record high.

On April 21, Trump will participate in a CNBC finance program at 8:30 PM Beijing time.

On April 21, former President Trump reiterated multiple times that the ceasefire agreement will expire at 11 PM Washington time on Wednesday, and it is 'extremely unlikely' that the ceasefire will be extended. At the same time, Trump stated that Vance will travel to Pakistan later on Monday, and 'the Strait of Hormuz will not be opened before the agreement is signed.' On the other hand, Iran maintained a firm stance during U.S. trading hours, stating that 'the decision not to participate in negotiations has not changed.' However, U.S. media reported that 'the Iranian delegation will arrive on Tuesday morning, close to the arrival time of the U.S. delegation.' Due to Iran's tough stance, the S&P 500 index fell 0.24% on Monday, the Nasdaq dropped 0.26%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average remained basically flat. Crude oil prices saw a slight increase, with Brent crude rising by 2.51% to $90.39. Bitcoin, on the other hand, showed relative strength, possibly boosted by significant purchases from Strategy. According to HTX, Bitcoin once again surpassed $76,000 this morning, currently priced at $75,853.42, with a 24-hour increase of 0.19%. Investors are highly focused on whether the U.S.-Iran situation will escalate again. In the next couple of days, whether the Iranian delegation can arrive in Islamabad on time and whether peace talks can be resumed are the main points of market attention.

On April 21, Glassnode released a report indicating that while buying interest remains strong, providing some buffer for prices, market sentiment is turning cautious. Data shows that the cumulative volume delta (CVD) for spot trading has shifted from positive to negative, indicating rising selling pressure and the emergence of bearish sentiment. Meanwhile, centralized exchanges are active, maintaining high market participation. In the futures market, an increase in open interest suggests a rising risk appetite, but the funding rates for long positions have significantly decreased, and the CVD for perpetual contracts has sharply declined, indicating that traders are more willing to pay a premium to short, with reduced buying enthusiasm and increasing bearish sentiment. In the options market, a decrease in demand for downside protection may ease bearish sentiment, but a contraction in open interest could imply profit-taking, affecting future volatility. The narrowing of volatility spreads suggests a shift in market sentiment from risk pricing to neutrality. The ETF sector stands out, with the MVRV ratio and net inflows of U.S. spot ETFs rising, indicating enhanced profitability and investor interest, along with a significant increase in trading activity, reflecting growing enthusiasm for participating in Bitcoin through regulated channels, leading to cautiously optimistic market sentiment. In terms of liquidity, a decrease in hot money share and a narrowing of realized market cap changes indicate dominance by long-term holders and alleviated net outflows. The supply ratio between short-term and long-term holders remains stable, with long-term holders showing solid confidence.