GM, frens! ☕️ 

Lately, it feels like everyone's performing 🤡 - some louder than others, some with bigger stages, but all chasing the same small drop of relevance.

Meanwhile, though, the real work happens quietly, in the background. Where no one's watching. That’s the part worth paying attention to 🤔 

Here’s what caught our attention this week:

• 👀 All eyes on ETH – something BIG is brewing?

• 🚢 OpenSea sunsets OS1 - users are unhappy

• 🎸 “Song a Day” creator made $3M and lost it to taxes

• 🤵 New data says 30% of BTC is now in corporate hands

The W3oF Degen Portfolio held steady again 🥲 

If you’ve got something a little more unhinged in mind, you know where the Discord is.

And talking about quietly building... how do you think Ambire looks in dark mode? 👀🌓

Good UI/UX in crypto still feels underrated - too many tools treat design as an afterthought 🧠 

But the truth is, interfaces shape how we use things. How often. How confidently. It’s not just about looks - it’s about making self custody less painful, one click at a time 👈️ 

All eyes on ETH – something BIG is brewing?

The market has been twitching. Ethereum hasn’t just shown signs of life - it’s started moving like it means business.

ETFs are lighting up, leverage is peaking, whales are feeding, and staked ETH just punched through a fresh ATH. It’s the sound of something large cracking beneath the surface 👀 

Institutional flows

• Ethereum ETFs just had their biggest day in four months - $125 million of inflows in 24 hours, $745 million across the past 11 days.

• The number keeps climbing, but it’s not the number itself that matters. It’s the pattern.

Institutions are circling back 🪙 

Some of the largest allocators are quietly upping their ETH exposure, even while Bitcoin stalls out at the top of a crowded trade 👇️ 

Spot Ethereum ETFs are now outrunning Bitcoin ETFs. On some days, even outclassing them entirely. The ETH narrative - long overlooked - is starting to trade on its own again 🤌 

Whales are withdrawing, but not dumping

Over $200 million in ETH left centralized exchanges in just 48 hours. Not to sell - as there’s no evidence of them dumping it 💰️ 

Instead, wallets tied to whales and funds have been moving like they know something is coming. Some whales have even shifted millions during quiet hours 🤔 

ETH community started thinking - no one goes through that much trouble unless they believe the upside is real.

ETH leverage hits escape velocity

Ethereum futures open interest is now sitting above $40 billion, the highest it’s ever been. Traders are piling in, positioning around the same levels where prior breakouts have kicked off full rotations 📖 

TA astrologists are already eyeing the $3,000s as the next gravity free zone 🤯 

Staked ETH is locked and loaded

30% of Ethereum’s supply is now staked. When you combine that kind of scarcity with ETF demand and whale accumulation, you’re not just squeezing shorts - you’re starving the float.

And the stakers aren’t moving. ETH’s at $2.7K and they’re still locking it up for single digit APYs. That’s conviction.

This is what it looks like when a chain gears up for a breakout year

If you’re watching closely, you’ll notice what’s not happening: there’s no mass degen frenzy and no headline fueled spikes. This isn’t degen FOMO, this is strategic moves by the serious money, in silence.

Seems like anyone still treating ETH like a bad trade is going to miss what’s being built 🧠

(And one more thing – just to clarify – last time we mistakenly interpreted a tweet from the Ethereum Foundation about their treasury runway. Some sharp eyed folks kindly pointed out the misread, and they’re right: we got that one slightly twisted. Noted, and of course - much appreciated, frens 💗 )

OpenSea sunsets OS1 - users are unhappy

OpenSea, the ex king of NFT Summer, just decided to burn the bridge back to its old platform - OS1 - and not everyone’s clapping 😐️ 

• A week ago, the platform announced it would sunset its OG marketplace version on June 16, forcing users onto OS2 whether they liked it or not.

• That move also yanked out a bunch of features, including “Deals,” shopping carts, and English auctions ⚙️ 

The reaction: messy

Some users weren’t that happy and went searching for alternatives 🕵️ 

• As to the reason why - “Deals” wasn’t just some dusty option buried in the UI. It was one of the few ways traders could swap NFTs without playing pingpong in DMs or risking rug city on Telegram 🥷 

You wanted to trade three random JPEGs for one grail plus a bit of ETH? Deals made that possible. And apparently, now it’s gone.

OpenSea said the feature “wasn’t being used enough” - traders say that’s because they stopped trusting the site to stick to its own features 🤷‍♂️ 

And under the hood, OpenSea’s excuse boiled down to smart contract friction: the ERC-721C standard made Deals unreliable, so they nuked it rather than fix it.

That went down like a lead balloon 💣️ 

• Collectors started circulating screenshots of broken workflows.

• Some raised flags over scams - without native swap options, users are back to signing stuff in DMs or winging it with smart contracts.

And no, none of this is getting ported “soon” - the company said they’ll maybe bring Deals back in a future version, if feedback justifies it.

So it seems traders are going to do what they always do: complaining, adapt or move volume elsewhere.

Meanwhile, OpenSea’s ETH volume sits somewhere between $1.4M and $2.4M. That’s… thin.

Especially when you remember last year’s number was down 62% from all-time highs already.

“Song a Day” creator made $3M and lost it to taxes

Jonathan Mann had a plan. Kind of.

He was the guy behind Song a Day - 6,000 tracks in 6,000 days - and when the NFT boom hit, he minted the entire back catalog. Every single song. He put them up for sale on the blockchain and, to everyone’s surprise (possibly including his own), they sold.

Fast.

By the end of the run, he’d pulled in 3 million dollars worth of ETH. All in public, all on-chain. A Web3 success story, right?

Not exactly 👇️ 

Because what came next wasn’t fame or freedom. It was a $1.1 million tax bill 🤐 

When profits are priced at the top and taxes are not

Here’s the part they don’t put in the NFT threads:

• According to the guy himself, crypto income in the U.S. is taxed based on the price when you receive the coins, somehow. And he received all that ETH in early January 2022 - right before Ethereum started its long, bloody slide 📉 

• By the time he realized the IRS wanted their cut, the market had already nuked. But the tax amount was still based on ATH prices 🪙 

So the ETH was now worth way less. But the bill was still real.

He held, hoping it’d bounce, but it didn’t.

• Then, in a last-ditch effort to avoid selling the bottom, he took out a loan on Aave using his ETH as collateral. But Luna crash happened and the market kept crashing. Liquidation hit. His last 300 ETH was gone 💸 

The worst part is that the liquidation didn’t reduce the taxes owed. It just erased what was left of the money that could have paid them.

Facing a million-dollar bill and no liquid crypto, he going through old assets and found one last chip - a rare Punk Autoglyph NFT he’d picked up during the early days of Ethereum culture, that he didn’t know was super expensive 🤔 

He managed to find a broker to sell it for just over $1.1 million. Enough to cover the tax man, barely 💰️ 

Bittersweet, as he had no more money left. But at least it meant he was going to keep the house. And in the end, that Autoglyph did more than just save him from financial ruin - it also saved his 13 year long song project from becoming a eulogy.

All in all, still a story that feels right at home in crypto space 🤦‍♂️ 

New data says 30% of BTC is now in corporate hands

A new report from Gemini and Glassnode quietly dropped a stat that should’ve hit like a hammer: nearly 31% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply is now sitting in centralized treasuries 🥸 

That includes governments, ETFs, public companies, and, of course, exchanges – the same ones people claim they don’t trust but can’t stop using 🙃 

This isn’t a theoretical creep. It’s quantifiable. 216 entities now hold a third of all BTC. The biggest chunks are not held by OGs or some HODLer whales, but ETF funds and exchanges. Just those two groups alone control more than 4 million BTC combined.

Public companies aren’t far behind, stacking nearly 800,000 BTC in their treasuries 📦️ 

• This shift didn’t happen overnight. Since 2018, volatility’s been trending down across all timeframes – 1 week, 1 month, 1 year. The report attributes this to “structural transformation toward institutional maturity”.

• Efficiency improved. ETF and fund holdings now dwarf those of most public companies.

While no single institution holds a majority share, the concentration across sectors is striking - in DeFi protocols, ETFs, and public firms, the top three entities dominate anywhere from 65% to 90% of holdings 🧐 

So while the Bitcoin total supply hasn’t budged much – still floating between 3.9M and 4.2M on exchanges – the report suggests we’re watching a redistribution. A reshuffling of keys.

This isn’t a bug, either. It's a new feature of an old dream. Everyone wanted adoption. Everyone got it – with a board of directors and treasury managers attached.

Volatility might stay muted. Adoption might climb. But one thing will still be true: the myth of BTC being held by the people is fading.

The future of BTC looks less like a thousand cypherpunks with USB sticks, and more like a handful of asset managers babysitting billion dollar bags 💰️ 

Other worthy reads

The U.S. Senate voted “yes” on moving forward the GENIUS Act:

“Civil War?” - an article on bad financial conditions and intense conflict by Ray Dalio

Stripe is going full web3 mode:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!