The 1,000 wallets holding the most PAPER accounted for 91% of Papertrade’s USD Coin (USDC) staking distributions by Oct. 19, IOSG Ventures found, while holding 88% of the token supply.
IOSG’s analysis of on-chain activity took its snapshot at 6 a.m. ET (10:00 UTC), 212 hours after trading began. It calculated $54.1 million in cumulative distributions and $63.2 million in net trader losses.
Dividing the two platform totals yields roughly 86%, but that is not a recovery rate for any trader. A person who lost money trading would receive USDC distributions only if they also staked PAPER, and their share would depend on how much they had staked when each distribution occurred.
Papertrade’s documentation says eligible realized trading losses generate PAPER. Staked PAPER qualifies for USDC distributions from the platform’s liquidity pool; tokens left unstaked do not. Allocated rewards can remain unclaimed in the staking contract, so the $54.1 million figure does not establish how much stakers withdrew.
The liquidity pool also pays profitable traders. IOSG counted about $249 million in losses on closed positions and $185 million paid to profitable positions. Those are gross flows, distinct from its $63.2 million net trader loss calculation.
The top 1,000 PAPER wallets also accounted for 81% of losses among loss-making wallets, IOSG found. The group percentages cannot establish whether any particular wallet’s staking distributions offset its trading losses.
Papertrade offers synthetic perpetual contracts tied to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH); its liquidity pool acts as traders’ counterparty. The Oct. 19 net loss figure exceeded the $49.5 million recorded by Oct. 15, when EconoTimes reported on Papertrade’s trader losses and revenue tally.
That earlier report said the revenue tally included pool funds designated for stakers alongside trading charges. IOSG identified the pool’s reward-cap setting as an indicator to watch for future distributions.
