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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.
The market has been wondering if bitcoin is losing against gold. Darius Sit, co-founder and managing partner of QCP Capital, says the debate often centers on price when liquidity realities are more important.
Singapore-based QCP is one of Asia’s largest trading desks, with annual volume of more than $60 billion.
“If you compare Bitcoin to gold, it’s not a comparable comparison… you’re talking almost like a comparison between a mouse and an elephant,” Sit told CoinDesk. “There are two different sets of idiosyncratic market forces that affect the market price in the short term, but in the long-term narrative, I think, [they] They are still quite similar.”
Gold’s dominance reflects sovereign demand, an entrenched market structure and its enormous scale. Bitcoin’s lag is due more to falling positions than to collapsing thesis. Gold’s market capitalization is so large that its daily swings can exceed bitcoin’s total valuation, turning short-term divergence into a physics problem rather than a narrative verdict.
However, “in the long run, the narrative looks the same,” Sit said.
In his view, a major turning point is not the bullion rally but the cryptocurrency deleveraging event on October 10 (now called 10/10). That episode drew a hard line between bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset complex, exposing how liquidity and credit mitigation diverge once leverage is broken.
“October 10 revealed that… there is a very clear line in terms of liquidity between cryptocurrencies, altcoins and bitcoin,” Sit said. The bottom line is not that cryptocurrencies have lost their appeal, but that much of the market discovered their true depth only after forced breakups cleared the book. What was left was a more muted picture in which prices move sharply in either direction.
One of the most important lessons from “10/10” was how crypto centers handle credit when things fail.
Sit marked a stark contrast to traditional markets, where layered structures of brokers and clearinghouses absorb shocks before losses reach end users.
By comparison, native cryptocurrency exchanges often operate as single points of failure, relying on shareholder capital, insurance funds, and, in extreme cases, socialized losses.
“The moment a socialized loss is triggered, your platform will lose trust,” Sit said, describing what he considers the industry’s true institutional ceiling. Volatility is not the impediment. The problem arises when traders cannot predict how settlements and counterparty risk will be managed in a stress event.
Socialized loss occurs when an exchange’s insurance fund cannot cover failing positions, forcing the platform to close profitable traders’ positions to cover the shortfall, effectively making winners pay for others’ losses. 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 blow.
That perception persists longer than the drop in prices themselves. Markets can rebuild leverage and volume, but confidence in settlement governance takes longer to recover.
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 collateral, while the broader universe of altcoins is more directly subject to venue governance and order book depth than to macro narratives alone.
“When something is low on liquidity, it can go down a lot or up a lot,” Sit said.
Market movement
BTC: Bitcoin swung wildly but is up around 5% in the past hour as extreme volatility followed a sell-off-driven drop towards $60,000, with the RSI near 17 indicating historically oversold conditions that often precede strong relief bounces even when the price hovers around the $58,000 to $60,000 support zone.
ETH: Ether traded around $1,895, recovering around 7% in the past hour after a sell-off driven sell-off, with volatility rising as deeply oversold momentum conditions triggered a short-term relief bounce despite double-digit losses in the past 24 hours.
Gold: Gold fell about 3.7% to about $4,740 per ounce on a broad retreat from risk assets and a wave of profit-taking, but analysts say the long-term bullish trend remains supported by persistent central bank buying, concerns about debt and currency sentiment, and forecasts that still see potential for prices to approach $7,000 later in 2026 despite near-term volatility.
Nikkei 225: The Nikkei 225 fell about 1% to extend a three-day losing streak as a Wall Street tech rout spread to Asia, dragging South Korea’s Kospi down as much as 5%, putting pressure on Hong Kong and Australian stocks, and reinforcing a broader tone of risk aversion that also hit silver and other volatile assets.
Elsewhere in Crypto
- US Treasury’s Bessent Denounces Crypto ‘Nihilists’ Resisting Market Structure Bill (CoinDesk)
- Tom Lee’s Bitmine Now $8 Billion Underwater as Ether Falls Below $2000 (CoinDesk)
