Good morning, Asia. This is what is making news in the markets:
Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top news during US time and an overview of market movements and analysis. For a detailed overview of the US markets, see CoinDesk’s Crypto Daybook Americas.
Hashed says the cryptocurrency market is finally moving from narrative to structure and that 2026 will be the year digital assets begin to behave like an economy rather than a speculative category as stablecoins become global settlement avenues and artificial intelligence agents emerge as autonomous economic participants, reshaping where real investment value lies.
In its Protocol Economy 2026 report, which acts as its investment thesis for the year, the Korea-based venture capital firm argues that it is in Asia where this transition is becoming visible, with pilots of regulated stablecoins, early deployments of AI agents, and expanding treasury and RWA workflows forming the first on-chain enterprise systems.
Hashed says the investment frontier is now anchored in these structural layers, where payments, credit and settlements move on programmable rails, and applications evolve into adaptive economic systems driven by stable liquidity and verifiable demand. The company is focusing capital on teams with real users and aggravating chain activity rather than projects tied to push narratives.
Hashed frames this shift as a correction from the past two years, when excess liquidity and speculative flows obscured which parts of the stack were generating real use.
The firm says the data now clearly points to stablecoins, on-chain credit and automation infrastructure as the categories where activity is aggravating rather than increasing. That trend is especially evident in Asia, where regulators in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are creating frameworks that allow stablecoin settlement, tokenized deposits and RWA issuance to plug into existing financial systems.
Hashed maintains that AI will accelerate this transition because agents can route payments, manage liquidity, and execute transactions programmatically, thus creating demand for transparent rails.
This next phase of growth will favor builders working at the intersection of real liquidity and automation, where digital assets operate as economic systems rather than speculative instruments, and that is where Hashed will invest.
Market movement
BTC: Bitcoin is hovering around $92,000 after failing to sustain an overnight move towards $94,000, reinforcing some analysts’ view that it is settling into a low-liquidity range between $85,000 and $95,000.
ETH: Ether remains above $3,100 and outperforms bitcoin on the day, falling less than 1% as the broader market trades sideways.
Gold: Gold hovers around $4,200 in tight consolidation as a weaker US dollar offers support, while higher Treasury yields and firm risk appetite limit follow-through, leaving the metal biased higher but still stuck in a range ahead of key US data.
Nikkei 225: Asia-Pacific markets opened lower on Friday, with Japan’s Nikkei down 1.36% and the Topix down 1.12% after a quiet session on Wall Street.
Elsewhere in Crypto
- Stablecoin adoption could stifle central bank control, warns IMF (Decrypt)
- Canton Network Creator Secures Strategic Investment from Wall Street Giants (CoinDesk)
- Solana ETFs See Record Outflow as 21Shares’ TSOL Loses $42 Million (Decrypt)
