Dogecoin carried the market on Tuesday morning in Asia. DOGE climbed more than 15% to sit just above 10 cents, the biggest advance among major tokens, according to CoinDesk data.
Bitcoin sat just above $85,600, unchanged over the past hour after gaining roughly 5% across 24 hours. That should not be read as a rush of new buyers, though. The bulk of the move came from traders who were forced to abandon bets against it.
According to CoinGlass, just over $1 billion in crypto positions were liquidated over the past day. Short sellers made up $844 million of that, or 82%, and roughly 135,000 traders were closed out.
How a short squeeze feeds itself
A short position makes money when a price drops. Traders who borrow to open one have to post collateral, and once the price climbs high enough that the collateral no longer covers the loss, the exchange steps in and buys the asset back on their behalf.
That buying pushes the price higher still, tipping the next layer of shorts past their threshold. This is why such moves tend to climb in steps rather than in a straight line.
Bitcoin made up roughly $608 million of the day’s total, with ether at $181 million. The single largest liquidation was a bitcoin position of nearly $21 million on Hyperliquid.
The rest of the board, minus one
XRP gained 7% to nearly $1.52 and SOL added 5% to just under $117. Ether moved up 3% to nearly $2,740, while BNB and TRX each rose between 1% and 2%.
ZEC stood out as the only large token in the red, sliding 4% to just above $1,450.
The forced buying has largely played out. Liquidations over the past hour totalled under $11 million, compared with more than $300 million an hour at the height of Monday’s move. The next leg therefore depends on buyers actually turning up rather than sellers being squeezed out, which is a materially weaker foundation than the headline percentages imply.
Stocks set the tone
Equities, meanwhile, held a firm tone throughout the Asian session.
MSCI’s Asia Pacific gauge climbed nearly 1% for a fifth consecutive day of gains, driven by chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which followed Monday’s rally in U.S. semiconductor stocks. South Korea’s Kospi rose 2% and Taiwan’s benchmark reached an intraday record.
Artificial intelligence is the engine behind it. The Wall Street rally came on the back of early signs of success for Meta Platforms’ new AI agent, and AMD is on track to cross $1 trillion in market value.
Meta’s agent is outpacing ChatGPT’s debut
Nearly two weeks ago, Meta Platforms launched Muse, an AI agent that operates across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It has since overtaken ChatGPT as the top free app on Apple’s U.S. App Store.
Data from app-tracker Apptopia shows the app has racked up nearly 3 million installs worldwide and almost 40% more iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada than ChatGPT achieved in its own first 12 days on mobile.
Every query an AI agent handles runs on a server. Chipmakers rallied on the expectation that a mainstream agent will mean a lot more of them.
AMD, for which Meta accounts for about 5% of revenue, climbed as much as 10% on Monday and briefly crossed $1 trillion in market value for the first time. Intel rose as much as 12% and Arm 14%, pushing the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up more than 4% in a fifth straight advance.
China joins the chip race
Separately, Alibaba announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out what it describes as China’s ‘most powerful AI chip,’ an accelerator designed to take on Nvidia. Its Hong Kong shares rose on the news, alongside Tencent, which unveiled a new image-generation model.
For crypto traders, the figure that matters isn’t DOGE’s 15%. It’s the hourly liquidation number now sitting under $11 million. With the shorts already flushed out, anyone who wants bitcoin above $85,600 from here will have to pay for it with real money.