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.

As Asia begins its Thursday business day, ETH is trading at $2,770.

ETH is up almost 11% this month, according to CoinDesk market data, outperforming BTC, which rose 5%.

Part of this could be because of institutional trading demand, and the fact that it’s overtaken BTC in derivatives markets as sophisticated investors increasingly bet on ETH’s structural growth and role as a gateway between decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi), OKX Chief Commercial Officer Lennix Lai told CoinDesk in an interview.

«Ethereum is overshadowing BTC on our perpetual futures market, with ETH accounting for 45.2% of trading volume over the past week. BTC, by comparison, sits at 38.1%,» Lai said.

This is a similar finding to what’s occurring on Derebit, CoinDesk recently reported.

That’s not to say that institutions have taken a disinterest in BTC. Far from it.

A recent report from Glassnode shows that despite BTC’s recent volatility, institutions are happily buying up the dips.

Long-term holders (LTHs) realized over $930 million in profits per day during recent rallies, Glassnode wrote, rivaling distribution levels seen at previous cycle peaks. Yet, instead of triggering a cascade of selling, the LTH supply actually grew.

“This dynamic highlights that maturation and accumulation pressures are outweighing distribution behavior,” Glassnode analysts wrote, noting that this is “highly atypical for late-stage bull markets.”

Neither, however, are immune to geopolitical risk or black swan events like the Trump-Musk blowout.

These episodes serve as reminders that sentiment can shift quickly, even in structurally strong markets. But beneath the surface-level volatility, institutional conviction remains intact. ETH is emerging as the vehicle of choice for accessing regulated DeFi, while BTC continues to benefit from long-term accumulation by institutions via ETFs.

«Macro uncertainties remain, but $3,000 ETH looks increasingly likely,” Lai concluded.

Tron Continues to Win Stablecoin Inflow

The stablecoin market just hit an all-time high of $228 billion, up 17% year-to-date, according to a new CryptoQuant report.

That surge in dollar-pegged liquidity, driven by renewed investor confidence showcased by the blockbuster Circle IPO, rising DeFi yields, and improving U.S. regulatory clarity, is quietly redrawing the map of where capital lives on-chain.

«The amount of stablecoins on centralized exchanges has also reached record high levels, supporting crypto trading liquidity,» CryptoQuant reported.

CryptoQuant noted that the total value of ERC20 stablecoins on centralized exchanges has climbed to a record $50 billion.

Most of this growth in exchange stablecoin reserves has been a result of the increase in USDC reserves on exchanges, per their data, which have grown by 1.6x so far in 2025 to $8 billion.

As far as protocols that have been a net beneficiary of all of this, Tron leads the pack. Tron’s blend of fast finality and deep integrations with stablecoin issuers like Tether is credited with making it a liquidity magnet

Presto Research, which recently released a similarly themed report, wrote that it notched over $6 billion in net stablecoin inflows in May, topping all other chains and posting the second-highest number of daily active users behind Solana and was the top performer in native total value locked (TVL) growth.

By contrast, Ethereum and Solana bled capital, Presto’s data said.

Both chains experienced significant stablecoin outflows and bridge volume losses, indicating a lack of new yield opportunities or major protocol upgrades. Presto’s data confirms a broader trend: institutional and retail capital alike are rotating toward Base, Solana, and Tron.

The commonality? These chains offer faster execution, more dynamic ecosystems, and in some cases, bigger incentive programs

Agent Economies Are Coming, but They Need Crypto Rails to Work

The next generation of AI won’t just talk to us, it’ll talk to itself. As autonomous agents grow more capable, they’ll increasingly handle tasks end-to-end: booking flights, sourcing data, even commissioning other bots to complete subtasks. But there’s a problem: right now, these AI agents are trapped in silos and they need crypto to get them out.

In a recent a16z Crypto essay, Scott Duke Kominers, a Research Partner at a16z Crypto and a Faculty Affiliate at Harvard, argues that today’s agent-to-agent interactions are mostly hardcoded API calls or internal features within closed ecosystems.

There’s no shared infrastructure for agents to find each other, collaborate, or transact across systems. That’s where crypto comes in. Blockchains, with their open, composable architectures, offer a “forwards-compatible” way to build interoperable agent economies, a neutral substrate that can evolve alongside AI itself.

Early projects like Halliday are building protocol-level standards for cross-agent workflows, while firms like Catena and Skyfire are using crypto to enable autonomous agents to pay each other without a human being needed.

Coinbase has even stepped in to support infrastructure efforts here. If these rails take hold, blockchains won’t just be financial infrastructure; they’ll be the back-end of an open AI economy, where agents transact, coordinate, and enforce user intent transparently.

The message is clear: if AI agents are the future of productivity, crypto is the infrastructure that makes them play nice.

Web3 Gaming Needs Better Games to Grow

Gaming maintains its lead as the dominant category in the distributed app (dAPP) ecosystem, even as its market share continues to slip, according to a new report from DappRadar.

The latest data from DappRadar shows gaming’s dominance fell for the second consecutive month, from 21% in April to 19.4% in May.

Daily user activity remains relatively stable, hovering around 4.9 million unique active wallets, yet the sharp decline in investment paints a more troubling picture: venture funding for gaming projects plummeted to just $9 million in May, down sharply from over $220 million monthly at the end of 2024.

«2025 so far, has been a reality check for the gaming market. Various projects that raised millions in the previous years, have now closed shop. Among them, the hero shooter Nyan Heroes, the fantasy MMORPG Ember Sword, and social deduction game The Mystery Society,» DappRadar analysts wrote in their report.

DappRadar analysts point to a fundamental flaw driving this exodus: a lack of engaging gameplay.

Projects frequently prioritized tokenomics, speculative NFT launches, and marketing blitzes, often sidelining critical gameplay testing and development.

Without fun and replayable mechanics at their core, even heavily funded Web3 games have struggled to maintain player interest, suggesting that the industry’s biggest challenge might simply be learning how to build great games.

And this narrative is nothing new: surveys have been saying this since 2022.

Market Movements:

• BTC: Bitcoin slid 2% after failing to hold the $110K level, with price testing key support at $108.5K amid rising geopolitical tensions and mixed sentiment, though strong institutional inflows via spot ETFs suggest underlying demand remains intact.
• ETH: ETH jumped 5% to break past $2,800 as $815M in institutional inflows poured into ETH ETFs, driven by bullish technicals, record staking levels, and fresh SEC guidance clarifying staking and wallet software fall outside securities laws
• Gold: Gold rose 0.97% to $3,363 after U.S. inflation data showed cooling prices, boosting expectations that the Fed could resume rate cuts in September.
• Nikkei 225: Tokyo stocks opened mixed Thursday, as a stronger yen weighed on exporters while optimism over a potential U.S.-Japan trade deal supported buying, with the Nikkei down 0.22% in early trading.
• S&P 500: Tokyo stocks opened mixed Thursday, as a stronger yen weighed on exporters while optimism over a potential U.S.-Japan trade deal supported buying, with the Nikkei down 0.22% in early trading.

GameStop (GME), the embattled video game retailer turned meme stock, announced Wednesday a $1.75 billion convertible senior note offering.

Proceeds will be used at least in part for «making investments in a manner consistent with GameStop’s Investment Policy,» per a company press release. Said investment policy is to add bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, according to a March release from the company.

Today’s offering, only open to qualified institutional buyers, includes an option for purchasers to buy an additional $250 million in notes within two weeks of the initial issuance,. The notes carry no regular interest and will mature in June 2032 unless they are converted or repurchased earlier.

Following the March announcement of the bitcoin treasury strategy, GameStop raised $1.3 billion through another convertible note offering. The company subsequently purchased 4,710 bitcoin for roughly $500 million during May.

GME shares were lower by 10% in after hours trading.

Safe, the popular multiparty crypto wallet previously called Gnosis Safe, has launched a new development unit, Safe Labs, in a move aimed at consolidating its operations and sharpening its product roadmap after it was targeted in February’s $1.4 billion ByBit hack — the largest crypto heist to date.

The new entity will serve as the core development arm of Safe, which until now had outsourced technical work to a separate development firm, a structure commonly used across the crypto industry, Safe Labs Chief Executive Rahul Rumalla said on Wednesday. Safe Labs will operate directly under the umbrella of the Safe Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Rumalla said the transition reflects a broader strategy shift toward building products that can meet both the ideological standards of cypherpunk culture and the practical demands of enterprise clients.

“This framework that we are forced to operate in — it actually forces you to compromise one over the other: If you want more security, you have to compromise on convenience, and if you want more convenience, you compromise on security,” Rumalla said.

“We at Safe Labs, we step back and we reject this framework. We don’t want to operate in this model where we have to compromise one over the other.”

Post-Hack Pivot

According to Rumalla, the ByBit hack was a “catalyst” for the creation of Safe Labs.

While Safe’s core smart contracts remained uncompromised, its user-facing web application was infiltrated with malicious code by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. That attack enabled the hackers to trick ByBit’s CEO into signing off on a transaction that rerouted funds into their control.

“What we saw with an attack like this is that our core values were used against us,” Rumalla said. “Anonymity, privacy, self-custody, transparency, open source — these were used against us.”

Despite the breach, Rumalla said user confidence in the Safe platform remained strong. The application saw “practically no churn” in the aftermath and continues to process 10% of all transaction volume across Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.

“We’re not defending against cyberattacks,” Rumalla said. “We are defending cyber warfare, and that requires a mindset shift — not just at the project level, not at the company level, but as Ethereum or even crypto as a whole.”

From Ideals to Infrastructure

The move to formalize internal development echoes similar shifts by other major protocols, including Morpho and Polygon, which have both recently made moves to streamline decision-making and improve accountability with more traditional organizational structures.

In parallel, Safe Labs is also refocusing on product design. The team is currently working on a “V2” version of its wallet, which Rumalla described as more “opinionated” — meaning bolder product direction, particularly for institutional users.

“What we’re going to be launching and testing in the future is a subscription plan, essentially, that’s called Safe Pro — or Safe for enterprises, Safe for institutions — very much around that realm,” he said. “We’re going to basically package this opinionated product that’s more for the user segments that have higher security needs and more customization appetite.”

“We need to operate at startup speed,” Rumalla added. «That in itself is the premise of why we need to operate as a separate, independent entity. We need to align where we need to align, which is on the mission, but we need to be a bit more independent in terms of how we execute.»

With more than $60 billion in total value locked and over $1 trillion in historical transaction volume, according to Rumalla, Safe remains one of crypto’s most battle-tested self-custody platforms. The team, now roughly 40 strong and based in Berlin, is betting that its next chapter — one that embraces opinionated product design without sacrificing its open-source ethos — will help define how wallets look in a world heading toward a trillion-dollar on-chain economy.

«Our mission is simple: making self custody easy and secure,» Rumalla said. «That’s a win for everybody.»