On August 3-4, 2026, three funding clues that would normally not be seen together suddenly overlap on the timeline: on one side is the proposal for the “NEAR Sovereign Fund” put forward by NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin at the governance forum, attempting to manage the protocol treasury and revenue priced in NEAR, using treasury earnings to fund network security and public goods in the long term while alleviating inflation pressure; on the other side, a new address 0x341…CaADb quickly acquired about 40 million ENA in the market, with a position valued at approximately $3.69–3.71 million based on a single-source price of about $0.09269, and subsequently, instead of engaging in short-term trading, transferred all to the synthetic dollar protocol Ethena for staking, locking both chips and revenue preferences, while indirectly applying demand to the derivative market of the two major reserve assets through BTC and ETH perpetual contracts; at the same time, Dunamu, which operates Upbit, again increased its investment in the medical big data company Inocras through Dunamu & Partners, bringing the total investment to about 14.5 billion won, guiding exchange profits that were originally usually circulating within the chain to the Web2 medical technology track on a larger scale. These three events point to a macro-level rebalancing: public chains are beginning to seek protocol treasury sovereignty and monetization, on-chain capital preferences in DeFi earnings and BTC/ETH hedging structures are being amplified, and the cash flow of leading exchanges is beginning to be systematically diverted to off-chain assets. A new redistribution path is forming among on-chain funds in the NEAR ecosystem, around BTC/ETH derivative positions, and traditional tech assets represented by Inocras.

The Emergence of Public Chain Sovereign Funds and Inflation Recovery

The “NEAR Sovereign Fund” proposed by Illia in the governance forum essentially brings a long-ignored macro issue to the forefront: the fiscal deficits at the protocol level of public chains and the resulting inflation expectations. In past cycles, like other public chains, NEAR paid for security costs and funded public goods through token issuance and increases, looking on the surface as "ecological support," but macroeconomically it continuously raised the long-term inflation faced by holders. The core design of this proposal is that the fund directly prices and holds the protocol treasury and revenue in NEAR instead of just lying in the warehouse as static reserves, then using the earnings generated from these assets to fund network security and public goods. On the narrative level, it represents an attempt to shift from “bottomless pit spending” to “earnings-backed expenditure,” with the goal plainly stated—to reduce NEAR's inflation trajectory in the long term through fund earnings.

If this design is implemented, the first macro variable it will change is the fiscal income and expenditure structure of the protocol: expenditures on security and public goods will no longer be entirely tied to the issuance of new NEAR but instead will be partially covered by “fund assets × returns,” partially hedging the fiscal deficit, which means shifting inflation pressure from current token holders to the performance of future fund earnings. For the NEAR market, this directly indicates three transmission paths on-chain: first, the expectation of selling pressure from new token issuance; if the community believes the fund can cover most of the fixed expenditures in the medium to long term, there would be room for correction in NEAR's long-term inflation curve, reopening the currency premium and valuation multiples for spot holders; second, funding costs; since the protocol treasury and revenue operate in NEAR assets, it essentially means locking back the reserve part that could have flowed to BTC, ETH, or dollar-pegged assets into its own currency system; capital willing to bear NEAR volatility will theoretically gain more competitive interest rates in the future when receiving funding or security returns within the ecosystem; third, risk preferences; if the market views the “sovereign fund” as a long-term commitment capable of asset management, then NEAR not only serves as fuel for financing the security budget but also becomes an equity-like chip that captures protocol earnings, with allocation motivations shifting from pure speculation to leaning towards “enjoying deflation expectations + public goods dividends.” However, the proposal is still at the community discussion stage, and whether it can effectively recover inflation, reduce selling pressure, and lower funding costs will depend on the governance's execution strength and asset management capability being recognized by on-chain capital.

The Transformation of the Protocol Treasury into an On-Chain Central Bank and BTC/Ethereum Pricing

If the community ultimately accepts managing the treasury and revenue priced in NEAR and uses NEAR for settling security budgets and public goods expenditures, then this treasury will no longer merely be a “multi-asset fund” but will resemble an on-chain central bank instead: its balance sheet will be highly currency-based, and its core function will shift from simple volatility resistance to actively managing NEAR's inflation, yield curve, and the rhythm of chip circulation. In traditional practices, many protocols allocate BTC, ETH, or dollar-pegged assets within their treasuries; on one hand, this outsources systemic risk to these more mature reserve tools, and on the other hand, it implicitly accepts their anchoring rights over on-chain risk asset pricing. The vision of the NEAR sovereign fund, however, is to dismantle this layer of protection, pulling all earnings and expenditures back to NEAR assets themselves, thus taking responsibility for profits and losses at a macro level.

This choice will first change the market's risk premium structure for different assets: when the treasury favors holding NEAR over BTC, ETH, or dollar assets, the price fluctuations of the native token are no longer buffered by “external reserves” but are directly reflected in the quality of protocol revenue, inflation recovery efficiency, and the credibility of expenditure governance. Investor demands for NEAR's premium will upgrade from “technology + ecological story” to “quasi-sovereign credit + fiscal discipline” dimensions. Correspondingly, BTC and ETH's roles as on-chain “reserve assets” and hedging tools will be reassessed in light of these sovereign attempts: they will no longer be passive base layers in every public chain treasury but will rather resemble externally settled assets that are either actively chosen or deliberately discarded. As more protocols choose to bind their fate to their chain assets rather than BTC/ETH, funds will undergo repricing between “mainstream reserve assets” and “protocol coin sovereign assets,” leading to a shift in market perception from the past notion of “everything fluctuating around BTC/ETH” to distinguishing which public chains truly have the ability to manage their own balance sheets and inflation.

$3.7 Million ENA Whales Locking Chips

At the same time that public chains begin to discuss how to “self-hold balance sheets,” a new address 0x341…CaADb, which had not appeared before, quietly surfaced: it bought about 40 million ENA in one go, equating to approximately $3.69–3.71 million based on current disclosed data, with a building price of about $0.09269 (this price comes from a single source and still needs further verification). More importantly, it’s not the absolute size of this capital, but the trading structure—this address did not engage in any tentative batches, but directly transferred the entire holdings into Ethena for staking, showing no obvious signs of short-term reduction or high-selling low-buying, taking the chips from the “freely sellable” circulating supply directly into the protocol's revenue machine.

For such whales, the macro variables are not ENA's short-term price but rather two things: DeFi yields and protocol-level risks. Choosing to lock the entire position into Ethena's synthetic dollar system means it is more concerned with the on-chain interest rate curve and strategy robustness rather than daily fluctuations of the spot market; this is an expression of a preference for “sustainable yields + controllable protocol risks.” The direct result of concentrated staking on the market is that the amount of ENA available for short-term circulation is drawn away, with the percentage of locked chips rising, which theoretically helps to alleviate selling pressure and increases the stability of price ranges; on a structural level, this position will be transformed by Ethena's underlying strategy into a hedging demand for BTC and ETH perpetual contracts, earning profits for synthetic dollar holders while also amplifying the short positions of mainstream assets in the derivatives market. This approximately $3.7 million “all-in” is both a vote of confidence in Ethena's revenue model and an active bet on the resonance of on-chain interest rates and BTC/ETH derivative demand, with subsequent performance becoming an important sample for observing the linkage between DeFi yield preferences and the mainstream asset derivatives market.

Upbit's Parent Company Increases Investment in Medical Data External Profit

Compared to the whale that directly placed $3.7 million on on-chain interest rates and BTC/ETH perpetual contracts hedging in the previous section, Dunamu, the operator of the South Korean exchange Upbit, chose a different path for fund diversion: continuing to increase equity investment in medical big data company Inocras through its subsidiary Dunamu & Partners. With multiple rounds of investments, following this additional funding, Dunamu's cumulative investment in Inocras has reached about 14.5 billion won; this asset is clearly defined as a Web2 medical technology company rather than any crypto-native project. For a leading exchange operator, this “off-chain allocation” primarily rewrites its profit structure—shifting reliance from high-volatility income solely dependent on trading fees and proprietary trading, gradually adding another cash flow source closer to long-term industrial logic such as medical data services, replacing some of the periodic high-frequency oscillations of trading volume and BTC/ETH market conditions with exposures to medium- to long-term demands in the medical technology industry.

In traditional pathways, the money earned by exchanges mostly rolls onto more crypto-related activities: expanding matching and custody businesses, participating in public chain rounds, or leveraging project equity against the next bull market driven by BTC and ETH. Dunamu's investment of 14.5 billion won into Inocras means that this portion of profit no longer flows directly back into on-chain infrastructure or next-generation token assets, but is solidified in the medical big data track in the form of equity, thereby weakening the sensitivity of this leading platform to BTC/ETH prices and trading volumes, and reducing its motivation to “use its own capital to chase mainstream coins and to provide liquidity for new public chains” in the next cycle. For the entire industry, this represents a path markedly different from NEAR's attempt to sovereignly manage its treasury or Ethena's expansion of interest rates and short positions in derivatives: profits begin to scale out to off-chain tech assets, weakening the reinvestment capacity of the crypto ecosystem in mainstream coins, while simultaneously lowering operating Beta against BTC/ETH market conditions for exchanges, allowing the “value of crypto enterprises” to gradually be determined by both on-chain asset prices and off-chain industrial earnings.

On-Chain Sovereignty and the Risk Trends of DeFi Yields

Viewing the NEAR sovereign fund, ENA whale staking, and Dunamu's external investment together in the same time window, it becomes easy to see three main lines of current fund diversion: the protocol side is attempting to use NEAR to price, sovereignize the treasury and revenue, sustainably lowering inflation while supporting security and public goods; the DeFi side, through Ethena's synthetic dollar earnings, has locked about 40 million ENA on-chain, strengthening the logic of the “token = revenue chip” game; while on the exchange side, profits have been significantly invested in medical big data companies like Inocras, leading capital that should circulate within the chain to begin overflowing into Web2 technology. In this round of risk preference repricing in early August 2026, BTC/ETH continues to play the role of reserves and hedges for the protocol treasury and Ethena's underlying hedged positions, with their relative weight depending more on whether the sovereign fund is still willing to hold onto these two types of assets in the long term; if the NEAR sovereign fund successfully establishes a closed loop of funding security and public goods through protocol earnings, its attractiveness within the “on-chain sovereignty + endogenous earnings” combination will increase; otherwise, NEAR will still just be a beta of a high-inflation public chain; after ENA is staked by the whales, the short-term circulation of chips contracts, and pricing is more driven by Ethena's yield rates and BTC/ETH perpetual contract demand, making it suitable for inclusion in a portfolio centered on on-chain earnings with exposure hedged to derivatives, though liquidity risk needs independent assessment. Moving forward, three sets of variables deserve close monitoring: first, the specific proposals and voting progress of the NEAR sovereign fund in the governance forum, which will directly affect the treasury's allocation ratios toward BTC/ETH and NEAR; second, changes in the scale of ENA staked on Ethena and the underlying BTC/ETH perpetual positions, determining whether this “synthetic dollar + hedging” interest rate curve can continuously draw in chips; third, the proportion between on-chain reinvestments and off-chain tech equity in profit distributions by leading exchanges like Dunamu, the evolution of these variables will determine whether the next round of funds leans more towards on-chain sovereign yields or off-chain tech exposure.

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