🧱🚀 ETH Supply: 4.11M ETH Cornered

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here

Hello there you embodiment of curiosity;

Welcome to today's edition of Osiris News. The liquidity is thin, and the price action is designed to hurt the impatient. Bitcoin is chopping in the high $80,000s, flushing out longs with too much exposure while retail sentiment sits in "Extreme Fear." The holiday lull is masking a significant divergence: public companies are aggressively cornering supply while the average trader is distracted by a silver squeeze rumor involving a major US bank. It’s the classic end-of-year stop-hunt before the real flows return in January.

🔍 Quick Overview

• Corporate Treasuries: A public company now owns 3.4% of all ETH. The public float is shrinking.

• Uniswap: The fee switch is on, burning $600M in tokens. UNI is now a productive asset.

• Perp DEXs: Lighter launched with more volume and 80% less revenue than its main competitor.

• Flow Blockchain: A $4M exploit forced a chain halt. The token immediately dropped 40% on the news.

• Bitcoin: Retail sells in "Extreme Fear" while public companies corner the supply. A classic divergence.

Beyond the Noise

The trade of the week is the valuation disparity in the perpetual DEX market. Lighter (LIT) finally launched its token today, and the market is immediately trying to arbitrage the gap between it and Hyperliquid. Lighter is trading at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of roughly $2.8 billion, while Hyperliquid sits at a massive $24 billion FDV. On paper, Lighter looks cheap; it actually leads in 30-day volume with $200 billion processed compared to Hyperliquid's $161 billion. However, the revenue story paints a different picture. Hyperliquid generated $47 million in fees over the last month, while Lighter pulled in just under $9 million. The volume on Lighter is heavily subsidized by incentives, and the market is now testing whether that liquidity is sticky or if it was just mercenary capital farming points.

The tokenomics for LIT are the elephant in the room. The protocol allocated 50% of the supply to the team and investors, a concentration that makes Hyperliquid’s 23.8% allocation look generous. This is a red flag for long-term alignment, but in the short term, the market is fixated on the repricing opportunity. If Lighter can retain even a fraction of its volume post-TGE without aggressive farming incentives, the 7x price-to-sales ratio suggests it is undervalued relative to the sector leader. Conversely, if the volume evaporates, the valuation gap closes the other way.

While degens fight over perp DEX valuations, a much quieter and more significant supply shock is occurring in corporate treasuries. Strategy (the proxy for MicroStrategy) added another 1,229 BTC, bringing their stack to over 672,000. But the real shocker came from BitMine Immersion Technologies. They reported holdings of 4.11 million ETH. That is roughly 3.41% of the entire Ethereum supply sitting on one corporate balance sheet. They aren't just sitting on it; they have begun staking over 400,000 ETH, aiming to launch a validator network in 2026. This is a massive removal of liquid supply from the market. When you combine this with public companies now holding over 1 million BTC (5.1% of total supply), the "float" available for retail panic-selling is shrinking rapidly. The supply side is getting cornered by entities with multi-year time horizons, completely decoupling from the retail "fear" sentiment currently dominating Twitter.

In the infrastructure sector, Flow blockchain took a significant hit. The network suffered a ~$4 million exploit that targeted its execution environment, forcing the team to halt the chain. The token puked 40% as the team scrambled to remediate. They initially considered a rollback, a move that always terrifies purists, but pivoted to a "network restart" to restore 99.9% of accounts. The EVM environment remains in read-only mode. This effectively kills their momentum during a week of thin liquidity, and trust will be expensive to buy back.

On the governance front, Uniswap finally turned on the value capture engine. The "UNIfication" proposal passed, burning 100 million UNI tokens (worth nearly $600 million) and activating the fee switch. This is a significant moment for DeFi tokenomics; it transitions UNI from a governance-only token to a value-accruing asset where trading fees partially fund deflationary burns. However, analysts estimate this could reduce rewards to liquidity providers by around 25%. This creates a new friction point: LPs might migrate to zero-fee competitors or demand higher spreads to compensate for the lost yield. It’s a calculated risk to bolster the token's fundamental value at the expense of deep liquidity.

Meanwhile, the "real world assets" narrative is validating itself with actual cash flow. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has paid out $100 million in cumulative dividends, proving that tokenized treasuries can function as on-chain money markets at scale. Tokenized stocks have also quietly hit a $1.2 billion market cap, a growth curve that insiders are comparing to stablecoins in 2020. Even China is moving on this front; the PBOC announced that banks can pay interest on digital yuan wallets starting in 2026. The rails for interest-bearing digital cash are being laid globally, regardless of the regulatory pace in the US.

Finally, the market vibe is being heavily influenced by traditional finance contagion rumors. A viral story about a major US bank (suspected to be JP Morgan) facing a $675 million margin shock due to a silver trade blow-up is circulating. Silver has been incredibly volatile, rallying 73% recently before a 20% flush. While crypto is its own asset class, these liquidity shocks in commodities often bleed over into risk assets as traders with high exposure get margin called across their entire portfolio. This explains some of the skittishness in Bitcoin despite the bullish on-chain accumulation data.

This Caught My Eye:

Here’s a breakdown:

• The Copper/Gold ratio RSI is back at deeply oversold levels where past bounces (2016, 2020) lined up with major Bitcoin uptrends, hinting at another possible “reflation + risk-on” phase.

• Still, this is a macro sentiment signal, not a timing tool: it shows conditions that have preceded BTC pumps before, but it can stay low or whipsaw longer than traders expect.

Looking Ahead

The immediate focus is on Lighter’s price discovery; if it holds above $3.00, expect a rotation out of other beta plays into the "cheap" perp DEX narrative. Watch the Flow network restart carefully; if the EVM environment remains read-only for too long, developers will migrate to stable L2s. On the macro front, the ISM Manufacturing PMI drops on Thursday (Jan 1). A weak print could reignite recession fears, but a strong one validates the "no landing" scenario. Until then, liquidity remains thin, so expect volatility to be driven by deleveraging events rather than fundamental news.

Until tomorrow,
- Dr.P