- The Warmup by Kaizen
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- Ethereum Wants to Burn Its Own Yield
Ethereum Wants to Burn Its Own Yield
PLUS: FTX, In Reverse
Welcome back to The Warmup.
Happy Wednesday to everyone treating earnings season like the Super Bowl.
Here’s what we’re watching:
Market Snapshot
Ethereum Wants to Burn Its Own Yield
BTC Breakout Watch
FTX, In Reverse
Market: Risk-on momentum is building, with gold and the Dow leading gains while crypto edges higher and volatility declines.
Ethereum Wants to Burn Its Own Yield
What’s going on:
Six researchers, including the Ethereum Foundation's Justin Drake, filed a draft EIP that would burn a rising share of validator rewards as more ETH gets staked.
At a saturation point of 60.25 million ETH (about half the supply) the burn hits 100% and consensus-layer issuance goes to zero.
The logic: today's system pays a yield no matter how much is staked, which quietly funnels supply into exchanges and staking providers and squeezes solo stakers out.
What it means:
This is a fight over who owns Ethereum, dressed up as monetary policy.
Aave's Stani Kulechov says a 0% reward "kills" ETH borrowing and yield use cases, leaving shorting as the only reason to borrow.
Grayscale's Zach Pandl counters that cutting issuance is a first-order positive for price. Both are right about their own book.
It landed days before the Hegotá inclusion deadline. Watch whether it survives the week.
LIT Pullback Play
What’s going on:
Lighter ($LIT) remains in a bullish market structure, forming higher highs and higher lows.
Price is now pulling back toward the optimal long entry zone between $1.62 and $1.87.
Key levels we’re watching:
Entry zone: $1.62–$1.87
Key support: $1.62
Major support: 200-day SMA around $1.46
Breakdown risk: Losing the 200-day SMA would weaken the setup
Directional Bias: Bullish, but patient
The long entry is not open yet. We want price to enter the highlighted zone before considering a position.
What we’re waiting for:
Price to reach the $1.62–$1.87 zone
Bullish confirmation inside the range
The broader higher-high and higher-low structure to remain intact
The setup looks promising, but there is no reason to chase. Let the pullback come to us.
FTX, In Reverse
What’s going on:
OKX says the Coldcard exploit has triggered "record levels of inflows" to centralized exchanges.
Compliance chief Jonathan Brockmeier framed it bluntly: FTX pushed everyone into self-custody, and this is the money coming back.
Galaxy now pegs Coldcard-linked losses near $130 million across thousands of addresses, from a firmware flaw that sat undetected since 2021.
What it means:
Four years of "not your keys, not your coins" got repriced by one bad random number generator.
The uncomfortable truth is that self-custody asks every holder to be their own security engineer, and most aren't.
Roughly 890,000 BTC moved onchain last week (the highest active supply of 2026) much of it fleeing hardware wallets for custodians and multisig.
Custody is a pendulum, not a principle. It just swung back.
 | ZEC: |
 | NEAR: |
Should Ethereum burn staking rewards to zero at 50% staked? |
Bitcoin is near $64,000 with its tightest 30-day range since 2023 and realized volatility below the Nasdaq 100. Nothing is happening on the chart. Underneath, 890,000 coins moved in a week.
That gap is the story. Fear reads 27, Clarity has three days before Congress leaves town, and a firmware bug from 2021 did more damage to sentiment than any macro print this quarter. Meanwhile Cloudflare is handing stablecoin wallets to AI agents and BlackRock is tokenizing $311 billion of European money market funds.
Two markets are running at once, one of prices, one of plumbing. They almost never move together, and the second one compounds. Quiet tape, busy chain. Watch what's being built while everyone argues about what's being sold.
— The Warmup Team
Always do your own research. This newsletter is supplemental material to help educate readers as they make their own decisions. Projects mentioned here are provided to give a potential early-mover advantage.