Ethereum Liquidity Rebuilds On Binance: December Inflows Signal Strategic Repositioning

A prominent XRP commentator is pushing back on a familiar critique of Ripple’s business model, arguing that skeptics have the causality backwards when they claim the company sells XRP merely to amass traditional assets. In a post on X on Wednesday, CryptoInsightUK founder Will Taylor said the “haters” are “so close to being right,” but miss what he framed as the single step that changes the entire equation.

What ‘Haters’ Get Wrong About XRP

Taylor’s central claim is that Ripple’s token sales are not designed to swap out a volatile crypto asset for safer, conventional holdings. Instead, he described the sales as a means of funding infrastructure and integrations that ultimately increase the token’s long-term utility and value.

“Haters say Ripple sell XRP so they can buy real-world companies and assets, because that’s how Ripple ‘makes money’,” Taylor wrote. “In my opinion, that completely misunderstands the business model and more importantly, the direction of causality. Yes, Ripple monetises some XRP. But not to replace XRP with traditional assets.”

In Taylor’s telling, the misunderstanding starts with treating XRP like operating cash rather than a strategic, asymmetric asset. He argued that a large holder of an asset with outsized upside potential would not logically liquidate it simply to “stack normal companies,” especially if that asset could become worth more than the firm’s balance sheet at scale.

“If you hold roughly 40% of an asset that, at scale, could be worth more than your entire balance sheet, you don’t treat it like operating cash,” he wrote. “You don’t say: ‘Let’s sell the most asymmetric asset we own just to stack normal companies.’ That would be insane.”

From there, Taylor reframed Ripple’s acquisitions, integrations, and buildout efforts not as a pivot away from XRP but as “multipliers” that increase the odds XRP becomes a viable global settlement instrument. Traditional assets, he argued, are inputs to expand distribution, compliance, and liquidity: conditions that would make a bridge asset more useful at institutional scale.

“When Ripple acquires or integrates with firms like Hidden Road, stablecoin infrastructure, or tokenised treasury rails, those assets are not the end goal,” Taylor wrote. “They are multipliers. Those companies are not replacing XRP. They are building the pipes that require XRP to function efficiently.”

Taylor positioned this as a flywheel: XRP sits at the “strategic core” on the balance sheet, Ripple builds a full stack around payments and liquidity, institutions adopt because the rails are complete, and the token becomes a neutral settlement layer whose demand compounds over time. Under that framework, he said, short-term monetization is better understood as capital deployment in service of a long-term network effect rather than straightforward dilution.

“That’s not dilution. That’s capital deployment,” Taylor wrote, adding that if Ripple simply wanted to be “a profitable TradFi-style company,” it would not “obsess over neutral settlement,” keep XRP “architecturally central,” or push it into “regulated institutional rails.”

The distinction matters because it changes how observers interpret Ripple’s incentives. In Taylor’s model, the objective is not to sell the token in order to accumulate off-chain assets; it is to use off-chain assets—licenses, liquidity venues, compliance infrastructure, and institutional integrations—to increase XRP’s necessity as a settlement tool.

“The endgame is not: ‘Sell XRP to buy assets,’” he wrote. “The endgame is: ‘Use assets to make XRP unavoidable.’”

At press time, XRP traded at $1.8773.

Ethereum is up $13.52 today or 0.46% to $2977.52

• Highest 5 p.m. level since Dec. 22, 2025, when it traded at $2986.32
• Largest percentage increase since Dec. 30, 2025, when it gained 1.02%
• Up four of the past five days
• Up two consecutive days, up 1.48% over this period
• Best two day stretch since the two days ending Dec. 20, 2025, when it rose 5.36%
• Down 1.44% month-to-date
• Down 10.98% year-to-date
• Down 39.91% from its all-time intraday high of $4955.23 on Aug. 24, 2025
• Down 11.34% from 52 weeks ago (Jan. 1, 2025), when it traded at $3358.29
• Up 113.24% from its 52-week intraday low of $1387.85 on April 9, 2025
• Traded as high as $3015.76
• Up 1.75% at today's intraday high

Note: The Ethereum price is a 5 p.m. ET snapshot from Kraken

Data compiled by Dow Jones Market Data

Bitcoin’s price could rise in 2026 as easing monetary policy injects “massive” liquidity into markets, according to Bill Barhydt, CEO of crypto exchange and wallet company Abra, though other analysts sound more cautious notes.

Speaking to the Schwab Network, Barhydt said he expects a “ton” of liquidity injections from the US Federal Reserve next year as policymakers continue cutting interest rates, potentially reviving quantitative easing and boosting risk assets such as Bitcoin, adding:

Ether prices may have spent much of 2025 in the doldrums, but Ethereum as a protocol certainly did not.

In a year defined by reshuffled leadership, back-to-back upgrades, intensified security work, and a renewed focus on interoperability and privacy, the network used the past twelve months to realign its long-term vision and sketch the contours of what comes next.

The year opened under tension within the Ethereum Foundation, following a wave of community criticism accusing the organization of drifting and calling for what some described as a "wartime CEO." This internal debate spilled into public view as developers and stakeholders questioned the foundation's mission and pace. That pressure eventually led to a high-profile restructuring that would herald major updates throughout the rest of the year.

In February, longtime executive director Aya Miyaguchi formally "stepped up" into the role of president as Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin pledged to rework leadership structures. Within days, the foundation appointed Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak as co-executive directors. It simultaneously created a new marketing and narrative arm, Etherealize, under former foundation researcher Danny Ryan.

The reorganization continued into spring as Buterin and the new directors laid out an updated board structure and clarified a more explicit mission anchored in cypherpunk values and long-term protocol stewardship. By mid-year, the foundation also restructured its R&D division, consolidating teams and issuing layoffs as part of a push to refocus on core protocol priorities.

Pectra

Those internal shifts coincided with one of the year's two major technical milestones. In May, developers activated Pectra — a combined Prague-Electra hard fork containing eleven network changes. The upgrade introduced account abstraction via EIP-7702, raised the maximum validator stake limit to 2,048 ETH, expanded blob throughput, and brought multiple quality-of-life improvements to validator operations and Layer 2 infrastructure. Within a week of activation, more than 11,000 EIP-7702 authorizations were created on mainnet, signaling immediate uptake from wallet providers experimenting with new smart-account flows.

The foundation followed Pectra with a sweeping security agenda branded the "Trillion Dollar Security." As The Block reported, this initiative focused on supporting Ethereum's long-term vision of powering global finance. Also in May, the foundation released the first phase outlining critical threats and attack surfaces. A subsequent report expanded on those challenges, identifying protocol-level risks and UX shortcomings tied to safety. Later in the year, a follow-up framework emphasized that improved user experience — including better defaults, clearer signing flows, and safer account recovery — was inseparable from security itself.

Treasury management also became a strategic priority. A mid-year update revealed that the foundation was reallocating portions of its ETH holdings into stablecoins and other onchain assets to ensure sustainable funding through 2025 and 2026, which it described as "pivotal" years for the ecosystem.

Fusaka

As the summer progressed, protocol attention shifted toward the next major milestone: Fusaka. Buterin argued that PeerDAS — a data-availability scheme central to the upgrade — would be key to scaling Layer 2 throughput. At the same time, the foundation unveiled a set of initiatives to shape Ethereum into a base layer for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. A new "dAI" team began work on positioning the network as infrastructure for decentralized AI systems.

In parallel, a multi-phase interoperability effort sought to make Ethereum’s increasingly saturated Layer 2 ecosystem "feel like one chain." The foundation published early frameworks and followed with additional details on an "Interop Layer" designed to standardize cross-rollup messaging and developer experience later in the year.

Privacy research accelerated alongside these efforts. The EF released an end-to-end privacy roadmap covering private reads, writes, and proving. A dedicated Privacy Cluster team formed soon after to push the work forward. By autumn, Buterin introduced Kohaku, a proposal framing how Ethereum could support privacy-preserving applications without compromising auditability or decentralization.

As developers prepared for Fusaka's activation, Ethereum's throughput journey hit another milestone when the network raised its block gas limit to 60 million in late November. Days later, Ethereum initiated the Fusaka rollout, launching its twice-a-year hard-fork schedule and beginning a phase of more predictable upgrade cadence. Shortly after the upgrade, Buterin sparked fresh debate by pushing for a trustless gas-futures market to help users hedge fee volatility — an idea that drew both skepticism and curiosity from developers and users.

Ethereum closed the year by naming "Hegota" as the upgrade following Glamsterdam in 2026, anchoring the medium-term roadmap and signaling that the protocol's next phase will focus on consolidating the work of Pectra and Fusaka while advancing interoperability, privacy, and rollup maturity.

Price may have stayed quiet, but the Ethereum protocol did anything but.

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© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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