fatigue

Good Morning, Asia. Here’s what’s making news in the markets:

Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top stories during U.S. hours and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of U.S. markets, see CoinDesk’s Crypto Daybook Americas.

Bitcoin is trading below $110,000, changing hands at $109.7K, as Asia continues its trading week.

The move challenges a prevailing market narrative of summer stagnation, coming on the heels of a note from QCP Capital that emphasized suppressed volatility and a lack of immediate catalysts.

A recent Telegram note from QCP pointed to one-year lows in implied volatility and a pattern of subdued price action, noting that BTC had been “stuck in a tight range” as summer approaches.

A clean break below $100K or above $110K, they wrote, would be needed to “reawaken broader market interest.”

Even so, QCP warned that recent macro developments had failed to spark directional conviction.

“Even as US equities rallied and gold sold off in the wake of Friday’s stronger-than-expected jobs report, BTC remained conspicuously unmoved, caught in the cross-currents without a clear macro anchor,” the note said. “Without a compelling narrative to spark the next leg higher, signs of fatigue are emerging. Perpetual open interest is softening, and spot BTC ETF inflows have started to taper.”

That context makes the current move all the more surprising.

Over the weekend, Bitcoin surged 3.26% from $105,393 to $108,801, with hourly volume spiking to 2.5x the 24-hour average, according to CoinDesk Research’s technical analysis model. BTC broke decisively above $106,500, establishing new support at $107,600, and continued upward into Monday’s session, reaching $110,169.

The breakout coincides with a tense macro backdrop: US-China trade talks in London and a $22 billion U.S. Treasury bond auction later this week have injected uncertainty into global markets. While these events could drive fresh volatility, QCP cautioned that recent headlines have mostly led to “knee-jerk reactions” that quickly fade.

The question now is whether BTC’s move above $110K has true staying power, or whether the rally is running ahead of the fundamentals.

A ‘Massive Shift’ in Institutional Staking May Drive ETH’s Next Rally

Ethereum’s critics have long highlighted centralization risks, but that narrative is fading as institutional adoption accelerates, infrastructure matures, and recent protocol upgrades directly address past limitations.

“Market participants will pay for decentralization because it’s in their economic interest from a security and principal protection standpoint,” Mara Schmiedt, CEO of institutional Ethereum staking platform Alluvial, told CoinDesk. “If you look at [decentralization metrics] all of these things have massively improved over the last couple of years.”

There’s currently $492 million worth of ETH staked by Liquid Collective – a protocol co-founded by Alluvial to facilitate institutional staking

While this figure may appear modest compared to Ethereum’s total staked volume of around $93 billion, what’s interesting is that it originates predominantly from institutional investors.

“We’re really on the cusp of a truly massive shift for Ethereum, driven by regulatory momentum and the ability to unlock the advantages of secure staking,” she noted.

Central to Ethereum’s institutional readiness is the recent Pectra upgrade, a significant development Schmiedt describes as both “massive” and “underappreciated.”

“I think Pectra has been a massive upgrade. I actually think it’s been underappreciated, just in terms of the tremendous amount of change it introduces into the staking mechanics,” Schmiedt said.

Additionally, Execution Layer triggerable withdrawals—a key component of Pectra—provide institutional participants, including ETF issuers, a crucial compatibility upgrade.

This feature enables partial validator exits directly from Ethereum’s execution layer, aligning with institutional operational requirements such as T+1 redemption timelines.

“EL triggerable withdrawals create a much more effective path to exit for large-scale market participants,” Schmiedt added.

Ultimately, Schmiedt said, “I think we’ll see that a lot more [ETH] in institutional portfolios going forward.”

News Roundup

Trump Media May Be the Cheapest Bitcoin Play Among Public Stocks, NYDIG Says

Trump Media (DJT) may be one of the cheapest ways to get bitcoin exposure in public markets, according to a new report from NYDIG, CoinDesk recently reported.

As a growing number of companies adopt MicroStrategy’s strategy of stacking BTC on their balance sheets, analysts are rethinking how to value these so-called bitcoin treasury firms.

While the commonly used modified net asset value (mNAV) metric suggests that investors are paying a premium for BTC exposure, NYDIG’s Greg Cipolaro argues mNAV alone is “woefully deficient.” Instead, he points to the equity premium to NAV, which factors in debt, cash, and enterprise value, as a more accurate gauge.

By that measure, Trump Media and Semler Scientific (SMLR) rank as the most undervalued of eight companies analyzed, trading at equity premiums of -16% and -10% respectively, despite both showing mNAVs above 1.1. In other words, their shares are worth less than the value of the bitcoin they hold.

That’s in stark contrast to MicroStrategy (MSTR), which rose nearly 5% Monday as bitcoin crossed $110,000, while DJT and SMLR remained mostly flat—making them potentially overlooked vehicles for BTC exposure.

Circle Stock Nearly Quadruples Post-IPO as Bitwise and ProShares File Competing ETFs
Two major ETF issuers, Bitwise and ProShares, filed proposals on June 6 to launch exchange-traded funds tied to Circle (CRCL), whose stock has nearly quadrupled since its IPO late last week, CoinDesk previously reported.
ProShares is aiming for a leveraged product that delivers 2x the daily performance of CRCL. At the same time, Bitwise plans a covered call fund that generates income by selling options against held shares, two very different ways to capitalize on the stock’s explosive rise.
CRCL surged another 9% Monday in volatile trading, continuing to draw interest from both traditional finance and crypto investors. The proposed ETFs have an effective date of August 20, pending SEC approval. If approved, they would further blur the lines between crypto and conventional finance, giving investors new tools to play one of the hottest post-IPO names of the year.

Market Movements:

BTC: Bitcoin is trading at $109,795 after a 3.26% breakout fueled by institutional buying, elevated volume, and macro uncertainty from US-China trade talks and an upcoming $22B Treasury auction.
ETH: Ethereum rebounded 4.46% from a low of $2,480 to close at $2,581, with strong buying volume confirming support at $2,580 and setting up a potential breakout above $2,590.
Gold: Gold is trading at $3,314.45, edging up 0.08% as investors watch US-China trade talks in London and a subdued dollar keeps prices attractive.
Nikkei 225: Asia-Pacific markets rose Tuesday, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 up 0.51%, as investors awaited updates from ongoing U.S.-China trade talks.
S&P 500: The S&P 500 closed slightly higher Monday, boosted by Amazon and Alphabet, as investors monitored U.S.-China trade talks.

Elsewhere in Crypto

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If you’re anything like me, a Gen Z caffeine addict with the attention span of a fruit fly, ancient classics like Pong and Breakout don’t do much for you. ‘How am I supposed to play this without roguelite elements and heaps of stacking upgrades?’ I cry, and if the lesson is that sometimes less is more, an hour with Ball X Pit has made sure I may never learn it. Sometimes more is more, and it rules.

Devolver dedicated its Summer Game Fest show to Ball X Pit, a brick-breaker turbocharged with new twists, and I was able to try a demo of it before the reveal.

Skeleton soldiers in the form of blocks and rectangles march down a vertical column trying to shoot you and reach the bottom, while you run around automatically firing balls which bounce around and deal damage. If you catch the balls mid-flight, they immediately shoot out wherever you’re aiming. There’s already some depth there: you can aim wide to take down a whole group with ricochets, or get up in an enemy’s face and rapidly bat the ball back at them to focus one down.

The fun really starts, though, when you start leveling up and racking up special balls. Between a broodmother ball that “births” more balls as it flies around, a burn ball that lights enemies ablaze, and a midnight oil ball that turns burning enemies into living bombs, and all sorts of colorful alternatives, Ball X Pit goes from stark simple to nigh-unreadable chaos in a matter of minutes.

Each special ball gets added to your arsenal and comes with its own suite of upgrades and potential fusions with other special balls; before long, you’re making split-second decisions in a sea of automatic laser fire and screen-coating explosions. Boss enemies will DPS check your build as the skeleton hordes get tougher and more numerous, and I was constantly itching to level up just one more time, get a little bit stronger, so I could live a few dozen seconds longer.

In-between runs, you hurry back to New Ballbylon (yes, really) and spend whatever cash you earned on the meta progression stuff. New buildings, new playable characters, new potential builds for future runs, and so on. The structure is nothing unusual, but I still walked away from the demo pretty taken with what I played—which speaks to the sheer, twitchy fun this game finds in its ball-bouncing brick breaking.

Frankly, I thought I was getting tired of the roguelike formula, and Ball X Pit packs in a lot of concepts you have seen before. But the action in its demo is so breakneck, such a potent distillation of that power-scaling madness I love in games like Risk of Rain, I came crawling back to the play button after seeing what the demo had to offer.

If you’re keen to check out Ball X Pit, you can wishlist it or play the demo on Steam.