Preview: "High net worth investors in Asia are piling into crypto, adding to a market long dominated by retail users across India, Indonesia, Vietnam and beyond."
Wealthy families and family offices across Asia are increasing their cryptocurrency allocations, with some planning to allocate around 5% of their portfolios to the asset class. Reuters first reported the trend, which noted a wave of demand from high-net-worth individuals across Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China.
Wealth managers told Reuters they are receiving more enquiries from clients, whilecryptocurrency exchanges have reported rising trading volumes and new crypto funds are drawing strong demand.
Jason Huang, founder of NextGen Digital Venture, said his company raised over $100 million in just a few months for a new long-short crypto equity fund launched in Singapore in May. His previous fund, which wound down last year, returned 375% in less than two years.
UBS, the Swiss investment bank, noted that some overseas Chinese family offices are behind the shift, pointing to crypto allocations of around 5%. The bank said second- and third-generation members of family offices are beginning to learn about and participate in digital assets.
Cryptocurrency exchanges in the region have also reported more activity. Hong Kong’s HashKey Exchange said its number of registered users rose 85% year-on-year by August 2025, while data from CryptoQuant showed trading volumes at South Korea’s three major exchanges were up 17% so far this year, with average daily volumes climbing more than 20%.
Related: Asia’s tokenization boom is shifting capital away from the West: Expert
Asia’s crypto boom has been retail-led until now
Until now, Asia’s crypto boom has been driven from the bottom up. Chainalysis data shows the Central and Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) region saw more than $750 billion in inflows between mid-2023 and mid-2024, about 16.6% of global volume. The inflows were powered mainly by retail users making transactions under $10,000 for trading, remittances and decentralized finance (DeFi).
In the 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index from Chainalysis, India ranked first worldwide, with retail investors driving activity on centralized exchanges. Indonesia placed third, driven by grassroots DeFi participation and a fast-growing Web3 sector.
Vietnam ranked fifth, with adoption spread across both centralized platforms and DeFi. And the Philippines came in eighth, where crypto is widely used for remittances and play-to-earn gaming.
Singapore has also emerged as a hub for crypto payments. Chainalysis data showed that merchant services in the country processed nearly $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency in the second quarter of 2024, with stablecoin transfers widely used for retail-level transactions.
But East Asia has been telling a different story. The region added nearly $400 billion over the same period, with activity shaped more by professional and institutional investors, and in some cases, by wealthy citizens using crypto as a store of value.
South Korea received about $130 billion in crypto, making it the region’s largest market. Professional traders drove much of this activity through altcoins and stablecoins, and with arbitrage strategies tied to the “kimchi premium.”
Hong Kong posted the region’s fastest growth, with activity up 85.6% year-on-year. More than 40% of inflows came from stablecoins, while the approval of three spot Bitcoin
and three Ether
exchange traded funds (ETFs) in April 2024 spurred institutional flows and a shift toward direct BTC and ETH holdings.
In China, activity shifted to OTC and P2P platforms after the 2021 crackdown on exchanges. Wealthy citizens have increasingly used crypto to preserve assets and move money abroad, with flows rising in late 2023 as the property market weakened and stock indexes fell.
Asia also accounts for 32% of active crypto developers, according to the 2024 Electric Capital Developer Report. That’s up from just 12% in 2015, with 41% of new crypto developers now originating from the region.
0 Comments