Papertrade launched in under 10 minutes, with nominal trading volume hitting $14.4 billion.

According to Goldman Sachs data, investor bullish sentiment toward large-cap tech stocks has reached an all-time high. Hedge funds’ total net exposure to the U.S. Magnificent 7 tech stocks has risen to 22%, a record high. This figure has surged by 7 percentage points since July, marking the largest three-month increase since 2023, and breaking the previous peak of 21% set in June 2024 (compared to just 8% during the 2022 bear market low). Meanwhile, hedge funds’ total net exposure to U.S. semiconductor stocks has climbed to 12%, only slightly below the 14% peak reached in June 2026, while this metric stood at just 2% at the start of 2025. Current market demand for tech stocks is extremely strong. (The Kobeissi Letter)

According to official data, Papertrade recorded a cumulative trading volume of $39.9 billion in its first 30 minutes post-launch. The platform’s contract open interest also dropped sharply, with Bitcoin and Ethereum contract positions standing at $1.27 billion and $890 million respectively. The initial trading boom may be linked to its project mechanism: per official documentation, PaperTrade’s native token PAPER is minted via a model where the protocol mints a set amount of PAPER on a curve for every $1 a platform user loses. When the LP balance is below $2 million, the minting ratio is fixed at 100 PAPER per $1 of losses; once the LP scale exceeded $2 million, PAPER token emissions entered a decay phase. Papertrade is a fully on-chain synthetic perpetual trading platform built on HyperEVM, which pulls prices from the Best Bid Offer (BBO) mid-price of the Hyperliquid order book. Users trade directly against the protocol’s liquidity provider (LP) as counterparty, rather than through traditional order book matching. The protocol’s key features include high leverage, zero slippage, and no funding fees.

According to official website information, the synthetic perpetual protocol Papertrade built on HyperEVM has officially launched. Its pre-deposit phase is now closed, with 11,465 addresses depositing a total of $138 million. Papertrade is a fully on-chain synthetic perpetual trading platform deployed on HyperEVM. It sources prices from the Best Bid/Offer (BBO) mid-price of Hyperliquid’s order book, enabling users to trade directly against the protocol’s liquidity providers (LPs) rather than relying on traditional order book matching. The protocol boasts high leverage, zero slippage, and no funding fees. Its native token PAPER has an initial supply of zero, with no pre-mining, team, or venture capital (VC) allocations. The only source of token minting is user losses or liquidations. During its early launch phase, the token cannot be freely transferred and is primarily used for staking.

According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa), two addresses belonging to the same whale have built positions worth $14.89 million in ETH. Over the past 20 minutes, the two addresses have withdrawn a total of 5,965 ETH from Binance at an average price of $2,496.95 per ETH. Notably, the address that sourced the funds also transferred similar amounts of USDC to several other new addresses, suggesting it may continue to buy ETH in batches.

Cross-chain protocol Relay announced via Twitter that it will shut down Relay Vaults. Users holding funds in the vaults must withdraw via the official portal, which will close on December 31, 2026. After that date, users can still withdraw funds directly from the smart contracts. The project stated that Vaults are an optional product for users to provide liquidity, and the shutdown is to make way for an upcoming improved version, with relevant details to be announced later. Swaps, payment services, and all other integrations remain unaffected and will operate as normal.

According to official announcements, NEAR treasury firm SVRN has acquired NEAR infrastructure platform FastNEAR. FastNEAR will join SVRN as a wholly owned subsidiary, with its co-founders Evgeny (Eugene) Kuzyakov and Mike Purvis also joining the SVRN team. The announcement notes that FastNEAR is a high-performance RPC infrastructure provider powering NEAR applications, and it also supports most of NEAR’s data layer, including server clusters handling network read and write operations, archival infrastructure storing full transaction histories, and NEARDATA – a data source for developers to process these historical records.