Good morning, Asia. Here’s what’s making news in the markets:
Welcome to the Asia Morning Briefing, a daily overview of top stories in US hours and an overview of market movements and analysis. For a detailed overview of US markets, see CoinDesk’s Crypto Diary Americas.
The market has been asking if bitcoin is losing to gold. Darius Sit, co-founder and Managing Partner at QCP Capital, says the debate is often framed around price when liquidity realities matter more.
Singapore-based QCP is one of Asia’s largest trading desks, with over $60 billion in annual volume.
“If you compare Bitcoin to gold, it’s not a like-for-like comparison … you’re talking about almost like a mouse versus an elephant kind of comparison,” Sit told CoinDesk. “You have two different sets of idiosyncratic market forces that affect the market price in the short term, but on the long-term narrative, I think [they] remains pretty much the same.”
Gold’s dominance reflects strong demand, entrenched market structure and large scale. Bitcoin’s delay owes more to position liquidation than thesis collapse. Gold’s market value is so large that its daily fluctuations can exceed bitcoin’s entire valuation, making short-term divergences a problem of physics rather than a narrative judgment.
But “longer term, the narrative looks the same,” Sit said.
A bigger turning point, in his view, is not bullion’s rally, but crypto’s October 10 (now called 10/10) event of leverage. This episode drew a hard line between bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset complex, revealing how liquidity and credit reduction diverge as leverage falls.
“October 10 revealed that … there is a very clear line in terms of liquidity between crypto, altcoins and bitcoin,” Sit said. The takeaway is not that crypto lost its appeal, but that much of the market only discovered its true depth after forced liquidation cleared the books. What remained was a thinner landscape, where the price moves strongly in both directions.
One of the main lessons from “10/10” was how crypto sites handle credit when things break.
Sit drew a stark contrast to traditional markets, where layered brokerage and clearinghouse structures absorb shocks before losses reach end users.
Native crypto exchanges, by comparison, often operate as single points, relying on equity, insurance funds and, in extreme cases, socialized losses.
“The moment you trigger socialized loss, your platform will lose trust,” Sit said, describing what he considers the industry’s real institutional ceiling. Volatility is not a deterrent. The problem arises when traders cannot predict how liquidations and counterparty risk will be managed in a stress event.
Socialized loss occurs when an exchange’s insurance fund cannot cover bankrupt positions, forcing the platform to close out profitable traders’ positions to cover the shortfall, effectively making the winners pay for the losses of others. This happened on many major exchanges during the October 10 market crash.
He added that participants perceived the rules as inconsistent, with some products or counterparties appearing isolated while others absorbed the framework.
That perception lasts longer than the price reduction itself. Markets may be rebuilding leverage and volume, but confidence in liquidation management is returning more slowly.
The result is a divided landscape, where bitcoin retains credibility due to deeper liquidity and clearer use as collateral, while the broader altcoin complex trades at a structural discount tied less to macro direction than to venue design and counterparty trust.
In Sit’s view, bitcoin still behaves as a long-term inflation hedge and an increasingly legible form of security, whereas the broader altcoin universe is more directly governed by venue management and order book depth than by macro narratives alone.
“When something has bad liquidity, it can go down a lot. It can go up a lot,” Sit said.
Market movement
BTC: Bitcoin fluctuated wildly but rallied around 5% in the last hour as extreme volatility followed a liquidation-driven dive toward $60,000, with the RSI near 17 signaling historically oversold conditions that often precede sharp relief even as the price hovers near the $58,000 to $6000 support zone.
ETH: Ether was trading around $1,895, up about 7% in the past hour following a liquidation-driven selloff, with volatility rising as deeply oversold momentum conditions triggered a short-term relief bounce despite double-digit losses over the past 24 hours.
Gold: Gold fell about 3.7% to about $4,740 a barrel. ounce in a broad risk-asset pullback and profit-taking wave, but analysts say the longer-term uptrend remains underpinned by lingering concerns about central bank purchases, debt and currency confidence, and forecasts that still see potential for prices to push to $20206 later in the near term. volatility.
Nikkei 225: The Nikkei 225 fell about 1% to extend a three-day losing streak as a Wall Street tech rout spilled into Asia, pulling South Korea’s Kospi down as much as 5%, weighing on Hong Kong and Australian shares and reinforcing a broader risk-off tone that also weighed on silver and other volatile assets.
Elsewhere in Crypto
- US Treasury’s Bessent Calls Out Crypto ‘Nihilists’ Who Oppose Market Structure Bill (CoinDesk)
- Tom Lee’s Bitmine Now $8 Billion Underwater As Ether Drops Below $2,000 (CoinDesk)
