Dogecoin did the heavy lifting on Tuesday morning in Asia. DOGE rose more than 15% to just above 10 cents, the largest gain among major tokens, according to CoinDesk data.
Bitcoin held just above $85,600, flat over the past hour after adding roughly 5% over 24 hours. But don’t mistake that for a wave of fresh buyers. Most of the move came from traders being forced out of bets against it.
Just over $1 billion of crypto positions were liquidated over the past day, according to CoinGlass. Short sellers accounted for $844 million of that, or 82%. Roughly 135,000 traders were closed out.
How a short squeeze feeds itself
A short position profits when a price falls. Traders who borrow to take one must post collateral, and when the price rises far enough that the collateral no longer covers the loss, the exchange buys the asset back on their behalf.
That buying lifts the price again. And it pushes the next tier of shorts over their threshold, which is why these moves tend to run in stairs rather than a straight line.
Bitcoin accounted for about $608 million of the day’s total and ether $181 million. The largest single liquidation was a nearly $21 million bitcoin position on Hyperliquid.
The rest of the board, minus one
XRP added 7% to nearly $1.52 and SOL 5% to just under $117. Ether rose 3% to nearly $2,740, while BNB and TRX each picked up between 1% and 2%.
ZEC was the only large token to fall, down 4% to just above $1,450.
The forced buying has mostly run its course. Liquidations in the past hour came to under $11 million, down from more than $300 million an hour at the peak of Monday’s move. That leaves the next leg dependent on buyers showing up rather than sellers being forced out, a materially weaker foundation than the headline percentages suggest.
Stocks set the tone
Equities set a firm tone through the Asian session, meanwhile.
MSCI’s Asia Pacific gauge rose nearly 1% for a fifth straight day of gains, led by chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which tracked Monday’s rally in U.S. semiconductor stocks. South Korea’s Kospi advanced 2% and Taiwan’s benchmark hit an intraday record.
Artificial intelligence is doing the pulling. The Wall Street rally followed early signs of success for Meta Platforms’ new AI agent, and AMD is on course to pass $1 trillion in market value.
Meta’s agent is outpacing ChatGPT’s debut
Meta Platforms released Muse, an AI agent that works across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, nearly two weeks ago. It has since passed ChatGPT to become the top free app on Apple’s U.S. App Store.
The app has drawn nearly 3 million installs worldwide and almost 40% more iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada than ChatGPT managed in its own first 12 days on mobile, data from app-tracker Apptopia shows.
Every query an AI agent answers runs on a server. Chipmakers rallied on the assumption that a mainstream agent means a lot more of them.
AMD, which counts Meta for about 5% of its revenue, rose as much as 10% on Monday and briefly topped $1 trillion in market value for the first time. Intel gained as much as 12% and Arm 14%, lifting the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index more than 4% in a fifth straight advance.
China joins the chip race
Elsewhere, Alibaba said on Tuesday it was rolling out what it calls China’s ‘most powerful AI chip,’ an accelerator built to compete with Nvidia. The announcement sent its Hong Kong shares higher alongside Tencent, which released a new image-generation model.
For crypto traders, the number to watch isn’t DOGE’s 15%. It’s that hourly liquidation figure sitting under $11 million. With the shorts already flushed, whoever wants bitcoin above $85,600 from here has to pay for it with real money.
