Bitcoin holds below $80,000 as January prediction contracts miss liquidation-driven slide: Asia Morning Briefing

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’s latest slide exposed a familiar pattern in crypto markets: probability gauges drifted lower while derivatives traders scrambled for protection. As options open interest in $75,000 puts surged and hundreds of millions in long bets were liquidated, prediction markets registered only a slow erosion of upside conviction.

Throughout January, Polymarket contracts tied to higher bitcoin price targets softened gradually through late January, yet they never implied the kind of abrupt volatility that ultimately erased hundreds of millions of dollars in leveraged long positions in a single day.

The miss is rooted more in structure than in oversight. Prediction markets are built around end states. A contract asking whether bitcoin will finish the month above a certain level does not reward traders for correctly anticipating a two-day leverage flush if they still believe a rebound is possible before expiry. The payoff depends on the final destination, not the speed or violence of the path. In that setup, short-term volatility can be rationally ignored.

Research from Galaxy Digital has argued that directional prediction markets inherently compress complex beliefs into binary outcomes, often overstating consensus and obscuring magnitude and tail risk.

Derivatives desks operate under the opposite incentives. Data from Deribit showed open interest in $75,000 put options swelling rapidly, as CoinDesk previously reported, nearly matching the once dominant $100,000 call strike within days.

That shift did not necessarily signal a long-term bearish turn. It reflected traders buying insurance as downside distributions widened and volatility expectations jumped. Options markets are forced to react early because capital is immediately exposed to tail risk.

Liquidation data explains why the divergence became visible so quickly. More than $500 Million in leveraged long positions were forcibly closed over 24 hours – a weekend when liquidity was thin, and TradFi traders weren’t at their desks – with the bulk of selling concentrated on perpetual futures venues where margin dynamics accelerate moves.

For a leveraged fund, that is an urgent event. For a month-end probability contract, it is decisive only if it changes the belief about the final outcome.

In its 2025 year-end review, research firm QCP has described crypto as operating at two speeds, where structural optimism coexists with sudden leverage-driven drawdowns.

Bitcoin didn’t crash below $75,000, but it didn’t recover to the levels prediction markets suggested were likely, either. The final outcome split the difference and in doing so, revealed how differently these markets measure the same underlying risk.

Market Movement

BTC: Bitcoin traded just under $80,000 after a week of sharp volatility that flushed leveraged long positions and pushed traders toward downside protection rather than fresh upside bets.

ETH: Ether hovered near $2,300, extending its multi-week slide as risk appetite stayed muted and traders showed little urgency to rotate back into large-cap altcoins.

Gold: Gold was trading around $4,750 per ounce, pulling back sharply after testing the $5,300 level earlier in the week.

Nikkei 225: Japan’s Nikkei 225 inched higher Monday as Asia Pacific markets traded mixed, with investors weighing private data showing China’s January factory activity expanding at its fastest pace since October, while South Korean and Hong Kong equities fell and gold extended its recent losses.

Elsewhere in Crypto

• Crypto exchanges sanctioned alongside Iranian officials in Trump administration’s Iran crackdown (The Block)
• Quantum threat gets real: Ethereum Foundation prioritizes security with leanVM and PQ signatures (CoinDesk)