After translating the final public data of the Sign node recruitment plan @SignOfficial , I found that the market's previous expectations regarding the lock-up and hedging unlocking wave were completely wishful thinking.
Prior to this, the market generally believed that recruiting 20 sovereign nodes + 100 enterprise nodes to full capacity could lock up over 1.5 billion $SIGN , directly covering all selling pressure from the August unlocking wave. However, the final public results were extremely bleak: only 7 institutions submitted applications for the 20 sovereign node slots, which were limited to compliant institutions from the Middle East, and only 2 reached the full pledge threshold of 5 million, with a total lock-up amount of only 120 million, less than 8% of market expectations; of the 100 enterprise node slots, only 31 completed the pledge, with a total lock-up amount of less than 80 million.
More critically, all the institutions submitting applications were small to medium-sized compliant service providers from the Middle East, with no leading banks, sovereign funds, or large cross-border institutions participating. I verified with a friend in Dubai who operates nodes, and the core reason is that the authorities have yet to announce the specifics of the node profit-sharing, only vaguely mentioning "priority in undertaking government projects," without a clear service fee sharing ratio or guaranteed profit commitments, making institutions unwilling to put up substantial pledges. $BTC
In the market valuation for SIGN, at least 40% is attributed to the expected shrinkage of the circulation brought about by node lock-up, and the actual implementation is far below expectations; the so-called hedging unlocking wave is merely self-comforting for the market. I am currently only focused on two core signals: first, whether the remaining sovereign node slots can be fully recruited by Q2 and whether leading institutions will enter; second, whether the authorities will announce clear node profit-sharing specifics. #BTC
