Risk Assets Rally: Asia-Pacific Stocks Surge, Bitcoin Tops $70,000

February 9th — Per GMGN monitoring (via [link]), Base ecosystem meme coin CLAWNCH saw its market cap briefly surge to nearly $10 million before pulling back to $7.5 million, with a 62% gain over the past 24 hours. CLAWNCH is reportedly a launchpad built for AI agents, drawing inspiration from Moltbook (an AI agent interaction and social ecosystem) and Clanker (another AI-focused launch tool on Base). BlockBeats notes that meme coin trading is highly volatile, largely driven by market sentiment and hype, and lacks tangible value or use cases. Investors are advised to exercise caution.

On February 9, ai.com announced its beta version is now live. Once users secure a username reservation, they’ll get their own AI assistant—each comes with a fully functional virtual machine that does more than just chat. It handles a range of tasks, from basic ones like managing emails and scheduling meetings, to making appointment calls or canceling unwanted subscriptions. ai.com is the world’s first user-friendly, secure implementation of OpenClaw, an open-source intelligent agent framework that gained traction two weeks ago. As previously reported, Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek paid $70 million to acquire the ai.com domain.

February 9 — Per data from Telegram’s HyperInsight and CoinGlass, Bitcoin’s brief spike to $72,300 early today drove roughly $93.14 million in BTC liquidations over the past 4 hours. BTC led all assets in liquidations, with 81.4% of closed positions being short positions. Hyperliquid accounted for 60% of these liquidations. Monitoring shows a whale with the address prefix 0x5dc on Hyperliquid had their BTC short positions liquidated in quick succession across 201 positions, totaling ~$14.49 million. The largest single liquidation from this whale hit $11.63 million, and the position is now fully closed. Separately, the platform saw another large liquidation topping $18 million over the same period.

On February 9th, per monitoring from HyperInsight, "Big Brother Whale" trader Huang Licheng liquidated his HYPE long position and increased his ETH long position to 4,600 coins—valued at $9.46 million—with an average entry price of $2,068.6 and a liquidation price of $2,023.5.

February 9: Spot gold has risen 1.2% to $5,029.09 per ounce, following a nearly 4% surge last Friday. Spot silver is up 4.3% to $81.10 per ounce, after a 10% gain in the previous trading session. The U.S. dollar index has dropped to its lowest level since February 4, making dollar-denominated precious metals more attractive to overseas buyers. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that even with Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve Chair nominee, she does not expect the Fed to shrink its balance sheet quickly. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly noted last Friday that another rate cut may still be needed amid a weakening labor market. Investors are awaiting the January U.S. non-farm payrolls report to gain further clarity on the Fed’s monetary policy path.

On February 9th, Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang posted: “We’re in one of the most extreme asymmetric moments in history. The only sound strategy right now is to extend your time horizon and abandon short-termism entirely. Obsessing over a bubble is foolish—so is trying to time the market. Short-term volatility and corrections are inevitable, but when we’re this close to the singularity, they’re just noise. We’re on the cusp of exponential breakthroughs in AI, robotics, energy, and innovation. The future will bring billions of AI agent workers, humanoid robots, space data centers, interplanetary colonization, and drastically improved medical therapies—all fundamentally accelerating the pace and output of technological progress across fields over the next decade. Over the next 20 years, we’ll compress more technological advancement and economic growth than all of human civilization’s history combined.” We’re already on the steep part of the J-curve, but it’s hard to sp