Good Morning, Asia. Here’s the latest news making waves in the markets:
Welcome to the Asia Morning Briefing, your daily roundup of key stories during U.S. hours, along with an analysis of market movements. For an in-depth look at U.S. markets, check out CoinDesk’s Crypto Daybook Americas.
Hashed indicates that the crypto market is transitioning from mere storytelling to structured developments, predicting that by 2026, digital assets will function more like an economy instead of a speculative area—thanks to stablecoins becoming global settlement systems and AI agents evolving as independent economic actors, which will redefine the landscape of real investable value.
In its Protocol Economy 2026 report, serving as its investment thesis for the upcoming year, the Korea-based VC firm asserts that Asia is at the forefront of this evolution, with regulated stablecoin pilots, early AI agent integrations, and growing RWA and treasury workflows creating the foundation for on-chain enterprise systems.
According to Hashed, the investment landscape is now grounded in these structural frameworks, where payments, credit, and settlements are managed on programmable platforms, and applications are evolving into adaptive economic systems powered by stable liquidity and verifiable demand. The firm is channeling investments toward teams with genuine user engagement and increasing on-chain activity, rather than merely backing projects based on momentum narratives.
Hashed characterizes this transition as a correction following two years marked by excess liquidity and speculative inflows, which disguised the segments of the stack that were facilitating actual usage.
The firm’s analysis now clearly directs attention toward stablecoins, on-chain credit, and automation infrastructure as the segments experiencing sustained rather than sporadic activity. This trend is particularly pronounced in Asia, where regulators in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are developing frameworks that enable stablecoin settlements, tokenized deposits, and RWA issuance to integrate seamlessly with existing financial systems.
Hashed contends that AI will expedite this transition by facilitating the routing of payments, managing liquidity, and executing transactions programmatically, thus generating demand for transparent infrastructures.
This forthcoming phase of growth will favor innovators working at the intersection of real liquidity and automation, allowing digital assets to function as economic systems instead of being viewed as speculative tools—this is where Hashed plans to invest.
Market Updates
BTC: Bitcoin is hovering around $92,000 after a failed attempt to maintain a rise towards $94,000, reinforcing some analysts’ beliefs that it is settling into a low-liquidity range between $85,000 and $95,000.
ETH: Ether remains above $3,100, outperforming Bitcoin, with a slight dip of less than 1% as the broader market remains stable.
Gold: Gold is fluctuating around $4,200 in a narrow consolidation phase, supported by a weaker US dollar, while higher Treasury yields and a solid risk appetite are limiting upward movement, leaving the metal more biased to climb yet still confined to a range before important U.S. data.
Nikkei 225: Asia-Pacific markets opened lower on Friday, with Japan’s Nikkei down 1.36% and the Topix off 1.12% after a subdued Wall Street session.
