Bitcoin drifts lower as $81.3k emerges as the market’s key fault line: Asia Morning Briefing

• Bitcoin's True Market Mean at $81.3k is a critical level, with potential market-wide implications if breached.
• Large-cap crypto assets remain closely correlated with bitcoin, reinforcing its role as the market's anchor.
• Gold prices have surged to record highs, driven by central bank buying and geopolitical risks, with forecasts suggesting further increases.

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.

Since October’s flash crash, crypto has been trading around a single fault line.

Glassnode identifies bitcoin’s True Market Mean near $81.3k as the level separating time-driven drawdowns from more aggressive loss realization. In the post-October regime, that level has taken on added weight.

The correlation data helps explain why that level matters beyond bitcoin itself. Over the last 90 days, and especially since the October 10 flash crash, large-cap crypto assets have remained tightly correlated with bitcoin, reinforcing its role as the market’s anchor.

As a result, a sustained break below the True Market Mean would not just deepen losses in already weak tokens.

Glassnode data shows that when bitcoin trades below this level for extended periods, selling pressure has historically spread more broadly across the market.

With large-cap assets still moving closely with bitcoin while high-beta tokens have already sold off, a move below $81.3k would risk pulling that weakness back into the market’s core.

Taken together, the picture is less about calling a breakdown and more about identifying where the market’s balance lies. As long as bitcoin holds above the True Market Mean, losses can remain uneven.

But if $81.3k gives way and fails to recover, Glassnode’s historical data suggests that selling pressure would be more likely to spread beyond the long tail. In a post-October market defined by thin liquidity and tight large-cap correlations, that would mark a shift from a slow, frustrating drawdown toward a more synchronized reset.

Market Movement

BTC: Bitcoin was little changed near $86,400, down about 1% on the day and roughly 6.5% over the past week as the recent pullback extended.

ETH: Ether traded around $2,830, down about 3.6% over the past 24 hours and roughly 15% on the week, underperforming bitcoin as the broader market weakened.

Gold: Gold has surged to record highs in 2025, with prices doubling over two years to above $4,300 an ounce, as central bank buying, geopolitical risk, U.S. fiscal concerns, and a widening investor base prompt major banks to forecast prices rising toward $5,000 in 2026.

Elsewhere in Crypto

• California's Newsom pokes Trump, flagging convicted crypto allies CZ, Ross Ulbricht (CoinDesk)
• Indian MP Pushes Tokenization Bill to Democratize Investment Access for the Middle Class (Decrypt)

• As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
• GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
• Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.

• KindlyMD (NAKA), the bitcoin treasury company put together this year, has been authorized by its board for share purchases.
• NAKA's price has crashed more than 95% from its highs of a few months ago.
• Shares are higher by 9.5% in early trading on Thursday.

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