Grayscale’s NEAR ETF Dream: Cash Cow or Cautionary Tale?
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This bombshell, dropped on January 21, 2026, came from a spot of sleuthing involving leaked documents and blockchain data. The sleuths mapped over 50 wallet addresses linked to the CBI, though Dr. Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s co-founder, chimes in to say this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. After all, they’ve only included wallets they’re jolly sure belong to the CBI.
So, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the dynamic duo behind the crypto exchange known as Gemini (which one can only assume was named after the twins’ zodiac sign and not a particularly indecisive star), donated a whopping 3,221 ZEC-valued at around $1.4 million-to Shielded Labs, an independent organization that appears to exist solely to fund the core work on the Zcash network. Who knew blockchains needed patrons like Renaissance artists?
This fund, a dual-edged sword, shall dance with the market’s whims, betting on both the rise and the fall, ensuring profit in every twist and turn. A clever stratagem, indeed, for turbulent times.
After a year of major ETF filings tied to Solana [SOL] and Ripple [XRP], Grayscale Investments has decided to join the party, turning its beady little eyes to NEAR Protocol [NEAR]. Oh, what a delightful twist! In a Form S-1 filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the 20th of January, Grayscale announced plans to convert its existing Near Trust into a spot ETF. Fancy that! From a developer’s darling to the institutional spotlight-NEAR is growing up, whether it likes it or not.

Imagine, if you will, a market so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Now picture a whale the size of a zeppelin quietly hoovering up ETH through backchannels like a butler tidying up after a raucous party. According to Lookonchain-the Sherlock Holmes of blockchain analytics-our OTC whale friend has been buying 10,000 ETH at a time, because nothing says “subtlety” like moving $58.8 million worth of crypto in one go. Trend Research, ever the drama queen, borrowed $70M in USDT just to join the frenzy. One might call it “accumulation,” but really, it’s just rich folks playing musical chairs with a blockchain twist.
As blockchain and decentralized finance (buzzwords that sound like a wizard’s spellbook) gain traction, crypto-first platforms are suddenly everywhere. It’s like watching a bunch of teenagers try to fit into their older sibling’s jeans-except the jeans are made of math, and the teenagers are investors yelling “FOMO!”

While the rest of us are out here stress-sweating over 5-minute candlesticks, big players are quietly treating this price action like a Black Friday sale at REI-tents, hiking boots, and now, apparently, LINK. As speculative bros log off to sell their GPUs on Craigslist, large holders are scooping up 16.1 million LINK tokens like they’re the last avocados at Whole Foods. And they’ve been doing it since November, folks-long before the price remembered what going up felt like.
It was a quiet January morning when the venerable Steak ’n Shake-a monument to greasy resilience in the American culinary pantheon-announced not a raise, not a holiday bonus, not even a slightly fresher pickle, but a grand new vision: the proletarian masses, those tirelessly flipping burgers beneath the fluorescent heavens, would now be compensated in digital gold.
In a plot twist worthy of a bad rom-com, a “risk-off” wave swept through markets like a bossy network exec, erasing $1.8B in crypto liquidations and $1.3T in US equities in 48 hours. Wall Street dubbed it the “Sell America” trade, thanks to Trump’s 10% tariff tantrum over Greenland (because who doesn’t want a frozen island?) and Japan’s bond market deciding to go full drama queen.