02.06.2026 iEthereum Commodity Technical Brief

Editor’s Letter
This week’s technical brief focuses on ownership concentration as a structural attribute rather than a normative outcome. By examining the Gino Coefficient across 2025 and introducing the exchange-excluded lens now available in the v3.0 iEthereum Digital Commodity Index; the analysis highlights how custody infrastructure and economic ownership diverge in a fixed-supply digital commodity. The objective is not to judge distribution, but to clarify how iEthereum is held, intermediated, and stabilized through time.

Technical Brief
This week’s technical brief examines the Gino Coefficient as a longitudinal indicator of ownership concentration within iEthereum, interpreted explicitly through a commodity-structure lens rather than an equity or protocol governance framework. As a fixed-supply digital commodity with no issuance discretion, no yield mechanism, and no consumption function, iEthereum’s distribution metrics are best understood as descriptive signals of custody structure, settlement behavior, and participant persistence rather than outcomes to be optimized or engineered. The Gino Coefficient, when observed consistently through time, provides a compact but powerful summary of how supply is held across the address spectrum, while remaining agnostic to motive, identity, or future intent.

Across calendar year 2025, the headline Gino Coefficient remained elevated and structurally stable, beginning the 2025 year at 0.8539 in January and closing at 0.8612 by year-end. Quarter-level averages show a gradual upward drift from an average of 0.8560 in Q1 to 0.8609 in Q2, peaking at 0.8629 in Q3 before modestly easing to 0.8612 in Q4. Taken together, these movements indicate persistence rather than acceleration, with changes occurring incrementally rather than episodically. Month-to-month variation throughout the year remained narrow, with no abrupt inflections that would suggest redistribution events, issuance shocks, or structural regime change. When interpreted through a commodity lens, this pattern reflects durability of ownership rather than concentration risk in the equity sense.

By contrast with early-stage digital assets that experience rapid dispersion or consolidation cycles driven by emissions, incentives, or protocol-level interventions, iEthereum’s fixed and immutable supply introduces a different interpretive boundary. Changes in the Gino Coefficient are necessarily the result of secondary market transfers and custody decisions alone. The observed year-over-year increase of roughly 70 basis points from January to December 2025 therefore signals a slow accretion of holdings among larger addresses rather than an extraction of value from smaller participants. Importantly, the absence of volatility in this measure reinforces the interpretation that iEthereum behaves more like a settlement commodity accumulating into longer-horizon custody rather than a reflexive risk asset rotating rapidly between cohorts.

This interpretation is further sharpened by the introduction, in the January 2026 iEthereum Digital Commodity Index v3.0 reports, of an exchange-excluded Gino Coefficient. For January 2026, the headline Gino Coefficient registered at 0.860588, while the exchange-excluded variant measured 0.813787. The magnitude of this differential is analytically significant. It demonstrates that a non-trivial portion of observed concentration in the headline metric is attributable to custodial aggregation rather than economic ownership concentration. In commodity markets, such aggregation is not anomalous; it is a structural byproduct of centralized warehousing, clearing venues, and settlement intermediaries. When exchange wallets are excluded, the resulting lower Gino value suggests a more distributed underlying ownership profile among economically distinct holders than the headline figure alone would imply.

When interpreted through a commodity lens, this divergence reinforces an important analytical boundary. The Gino Coefficient does not distinguish between custody and control, nor between settlement infrastructure and beneficial ownership. As such, the exchange-excluded series should not be viewed as a “corrected” metric, but rather as a complementary lens that isolates economic ownership from liquidity infrastructure. The coexistence of both series enables institutional observers to separate questions of counterparty concentration from questions of asset dispersion, without collapsing the two into a single narrative.

In summary, the Gino Coefficient across 2025 and into early 2026 reflects a neutral, durable, and structurally consistent ownership profile for iEthereum. Incremental increases over time align with commodity-like accumulation behavior rather than speculative redistribution, while the exchange-excluded metric clarifies that much of the observed concentration resides within liquidity and custody rails rather than among dominant economic actors. The metric is therefore most useful not as a signal of fairness or risk, but as a descriptive indicator of how a fixed-supply digital commodity is held, stored, and intermediated as it matures.

Commodity Behavior Interpretation
The observed Gino Coefficient behavior reinforces iEthereum’s classification as a neutral, fixed-supply digital commodity. Scarcity is preserved through immutable supply, while durability is reflected in the slow, monotonic evolution of ownership concentration rather than abrupt redistribution. The presence of custodial aggregation mirrors physical commodity warehousing and exchange settlement dynamics, underscoring non-consumptive, settlement-native behavior rather than productive or yield-driven use. Measurement consistency across months and quarters further supports the interpretation of iEthereum as an asset whose primary function is storage and transfer of value, not transformation or consumption.

Editorial Independence Statement
This weekly iEthereum Commodity Technical Brief is an independent interpretive analysis informed by the iEthereum Digital Commodity Index (DCI), a longitudinal, institutional-grade research framework tracking the structure and behavior of a neutral, fixed-supply digital commodity. The brief reflects analytical interpretation and synthesis and is not itself an excerpt from the DCI reports.

The iEthereum Digital Commodity Index is offered under formal institutional license. Licensed organizations receive full Monthly and Quarterly DCI Reports, complete valuation frameworks, commodity-focused market structure analysis, longitudinal continuity across publications, and access to the underlying datasets and methodology.

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