“In Asia, we all love our gold,” says Eugene Ng, acknowledging the cultural reality that has shaped investment behavior across the region for millennia. But as Head of Business Development for APAC at Gemini, with over 15 years of experience trading derivatives across Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Citibank, Eugene Ng has witnessed a fundamental shift in how sophisticated Asian investors think about store-of-value assets. The emergence of Bitcoin as what he calls “gold 2.0” is reshaping portfolio strategies and challenging centuries-old investment wisdom.
“Bitcoin is actually gold 2.0. So it’s really easy to digest that,” Ng explains, providing perhaps the most accessible explanation for Bitcoin adoption among traditional Asian investors. This framing reflects fundamental improvements over physical gold that resonate particularly strongly with Asian wealth preservation strategies.
Bitcoin’s Superior Properties for Asian Wealth Preservation
“I think bitcoin is the better version of gold. It is the gold 2.0. Its digital scarcity, its portability and its divisibility—these are three things that gold does not have,” Ng explains, highlighting characteristics that address longstanding limitations of traditional store-of-value assets.
The portability advantage particularly resonates in Asia, where cross-border wealth management and international business operations are common. Ng’s experience building Gemini’s Asian operations across Australia, Hong Kong, and India exposed him to how regulatory differences and capital controls complicate traditional asset transfers. Bitcoin’s borderless nature offers solutions to problems wealthy Asian families have struggled with for generations.
Divisibility represents another crucial advantage. While gold requires significant minimum investments and complex custody arrangements, Bitcoin enables precise allocation and easy portfolio rebalancing—flexibility that proves especially valuable for sophisticated portfolio strategies.
Rethinking Portfolio Allocation in a Zero-Yield World
Ng’s traditional finance background provides crucial context for understanding why Asian institutions are abandoning fundamental portfolio principles. “The tradition of popular 60-40 is not going to play out. It’s not going to work, especially with three-quarters of the bonds yielding a negative yield,” he observes.
This breakdown creates particular opportunities in Asia, where “40% of the average Asian portfolio actually sits in cash and alternative assets—a significant chunk that is essentially in play for cryptocurrency, digital assets, alternative assets.” This statistic reveals the scale of potential Bitcoin adoption among Asian investors already comfortable with alternatives.
“Having a small allocation whether there is 0.1% to 5%, it all makes sense. And we are starting to hear and have that sort of conversations with a lot of different persons,” Ng explains. This represents dramatic evolution from his early Gemini days, when institutional interest was “very lukewarm.”
From Skepticism to Strategic Allocation
Ng’s front-line experience building institutional relationships across Asia provides unique insight into investor evolution. “When I first spoke with institutions six months ago, the response was very lukewarm. Fast forward today, they’re actually sending us a lot of inquiries. It’s all in-bound. So that’s really a 180-degrees change,” he observes.
The quality of conversations has evolved dramatically. “The type of conversations are a lot deeper, a lot more thoughtful and with news like Square, PayPal, all these big giant fintech companies talking about crypto, and banks. I’m confident that a lot of the CEOs at C-level suite management are asking what’s a digital asset strategy,” Ng notes.
His experience at Gemini, where Asia became the fastest growing region with a $50-75 million revenue pipeline, demonstrates how regulatory clarity drives institutional confidence. Asian institutions, particularly family offices and corporate treasuries, operate with longer time horizons and more sophisticated risk management—once they begin serious evaluation, adoption follows systematic patterns.
Addressing Volatility Through Long-Term Perspective
Volatility concerns frequently arise from traditional Asian investors, given Asia’s cultural emphasis on wealth preservation. Ng’s response draws from both traditional finance experience and understanding of Asian investment psychology.
“Whenever anybody asks me about volatility, I say, ‘take a look at some of the crazy stuff that we are seeing in today’s market. You have GameStop that’s trading like bananas.’ And so it makes bitcoin volatility look very simple and very minute,” he explains, providing context that resonates with investors witnessing extreme volatility across traditional markets.
More importantly, Ng advocates for long-term perspective that aligns with Asian wealth preservation strategies. “If you’re going to be buying bitcoin, look at it as a generation of bet. Look at it as a long term investment. If it stretches on the chart over 10 years, that volatility is just a small blip in the chart,” he advises.
This generational perspective resonates particularly strongly in Asia, where wealth preservation often spans multiple generations and investment decisions consider decades-long time horizons.
Bitcoin and Gold: Complementary Rather Than Competitive
Ng’s most sophisticated insight concerns how Bitcoin relates to traditional Asian gold holdings. Rather than positioning digital and physical assets as competitors, he argues for complementary allocation strategies.
“For me, I don’t think bitcoin is competing with gold. I think bitcoin is a digital store of value that represents something slightly different. And a gold investor can also be a bitcoin investor,” he explains.
This perspective acknowledges the deep cultural significance of physical gold while recognizing Bitcoin’s unique properties as digital store of value. For wealthy Asian families who maintain traditional gold holdings for cultural purposes, Bitcoin offers additional diversification without requiring abandonment of cultural practices—creating additive rather than substitutive investment opportunities.
The Digital Evolution of Asian Wealth Management
As Bitcoin adoption accelerates across Asian institutions, Ng believes the transformation represents a permanent shift rather than temporary trend. “It’s really increasing the Sharpe ratio of that entire portfolio. And with the innovation that we’re seeing in crypto space today, you don’t just buy bitcoin and hold it, there are so many other use cases,” he observes.
For Eugene Ng, who has witnessed Asia’s financial evolution from traditional derivatives trading through cryptocurrency institutional adoption, Bitcoin represents the natural evolution of Asian wealth preservation strategies for the digital age. As he puts it: “I think being in Singapore, it’s really allowing Gemini to help Asians to access cryptocurrency more easily than ever before.”
The result is a fundamental rethinking of portfolio allocation that honors Asian cultural values while embracing digital innovation—positioning Asian investors for the future of global finance.
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