With the sudden and catastrophic collapse of the Bitcoin platform FTX that affects the global digital currency ecology, QSearch compares and contrasts different countries’ popular reaction to the issue. For this, we track public content and reactions from Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and India. This overview provides an estimate of the issues’ track in each country, as well as the country’s existing specialist vs. generalist, and most interestingly, as a comparison with other estimations of Bitcoin interest by countries.
According to Statista, bitcoin holders, sorted by ranking, in these ASEAN countries claim to use cryptos in 2022; Thailand (#2), The Philippines (#6), Vietnam (#7), India (#8), Singapore (#9), Malaysia (12), which provides a supposed baseline. While these rankings are for Bitcoin in general, I will use FTX as a proxy.
All the countries share a similar reaction curve, as represented by Taiwan. This is a crisis with a large number of public posts driving the public reaction. Unlike other bitcoin crises driven by an insider or advanced analysis, the FTX collapse is very pure in its explosion.
Looking at ASEAN countries, a few salients stood out. Countries that purport to have heavy bitcoin don’t have lasting influencers. With Taiwan, where the bitcoin exposure is not ranked, there existed a few commentators who consistently talked about FTX even before the disaster, whereas Vietnam had zero, and neither did Singapore, the reputed Decentralize Finance center of Asia.
Another interesting pattern is in the duration of the reported disaster. Malaysia and India had much longer publicity periods, partially driven by their larger number of media outlets, and partly by the regulator clap back and ideologically inspired commentaries, but the level of attention paid to it also suggests that its impact is more lasting.
For a more thorough analysis and detailed graphics, or other related issues in Asia, such as the recent Malaysia election or the region’s reaction to the US election, please email roger@qsearch.cc