Bitcoin drops mostly during Japanese trading hours

The importance of crypto traders from South Korea and Japan has been an established fact in the world of digital currencies for a few years already. This became clear once again in recent weeks as Bitcoin continues to plunge during Asian trading hours and then recovers in the afternoon.

Asian afternoon, American morning

During the Bitcoin bull run of 2017 and 2018, it became clear for the first time what impact Asian investors (especially those in Tokyo and Seoul) had on the prices of crypto coins.

There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, due to high house prices, many young people in Tokyo and Seoul are forced to make riskier investments in order to accumulate wealth (owning their own home has become unaffordable for many of them) and secondly, local currencies are limited only to national borders.

This makes other currencies, fiat or digital, more easily acceptable to them. For Europeans and Americans, the Euro and the Dollar respectively are about the only acceptable means of payment and they sometimes (reluctantly) will need to exchange their currencies while traveling.

This is not the case in Asia. Each country uses a different currency and therefore you will find more and more places where payments with crypto are possible (as ‘foreign’ currencies are viewed as normal).

In recent weeks, as Mt Gox has started repaying former customers, Bitcoin mainly drops during Asian trading hours. Usually a selling wave starts in the European morning (the Asian afternoon), after which new buyers are found during the European afternoon, also known as the American morning, and then the price recovers again.

So pay close attention to the volume of buy and sell orders before you think a new bull run has started. By now, Japan has some 500,000 active crypto traders who buy and sell crypto on a daily basis. In South Korea, that number is estimated at around 800,000 (in the first quarter of 2024, the Korean Won was the most heavily exchanged currency in crypto, and not the US dollar as you would expect).

In summary, the moves of Bitcoin during the European morning are currently more important than those in the European afternoon.