Today, Ethereum completed the Shapella upgrade at the height of Epoch 194048. This upgrade includes: the upgrade of the execution layer (Shanghai upgrade), the upgrade of the consensus layer (Capella upgrade), and the change of the engine API. One of the most important ones is the opening of the ETH withdrawal function. Users can withdraw the ETH and related income previously participated in the pledge of the beacon chain. After the upgrade was completed, Coinbase, Kraken, Ankr, BitGo, etc. announced the opening of the ETH unstaking function.

Before the upgrade, the market was not optimistic about the trend of ETH, worried that the huge selling pressure would lead to a sharp drop in prices. The weak trend of ETH in the past two weeks also verified market expectations. However, since last night, the price of ETH has slowly risen from $1,870, and it once touched $2,000 this evening, exceeding 6% in the past 24 hours, which seems to have dispelled market concerns.

as well astoken.unlocks (click to jump)as well asNansen (click to jump)。

The data shows that after the upgrade is completed, the unstaked amount is 108,300 ETH, while the new pledged amount is 28,260, and the net withdrawal amount is 80,120 (about 160 million U.S. dollars). It seems that there is a lot of selling pressure on the market, but the price of ETH has not fallen, but has risen, indicating that these ETHs have not been thrown into the market.

Why? Because nearly half of them are exchanged by Lido in advance to meet the needs of users to withdraw coins. The data shows that Lido, the liquidity staking protocol, has withdrawn 54,477 tokens today, accounting for more than 50% of the total token withdrawals. Previously, Lido issued a document stating that a protocol buffer zone will be established to meet user withdrawal needs-withdrawal requests of less than 1,000 ETH can be completed within 1 day (standard Ethereum withdrawal takes 2-6 days), and 1,000 to 5,000 ETH can be completed within 2 days. It will take 4-10 days for more than 5000 ETH, and it will take two weeks for more than 10. From the perspective of the average position price, the average price of ETH pledged by Lido users is 2,552 US dollars, which is much higher than the market price, so the possibility of selling ETH is also low.

In addition, it can be seen from the pending withdrawal data that the vast majority of validators are more optimistic about the future trend of ETH and have no short-term sell-off plan. The data shows that although there are currently 293,000 verifiers (accounting for 51%) in the status of pending withdrawal (the status is 0x01 type), only 16140 of them (accounting for 2.8% of the total number of verifiers) are "full amount "Withdraw" to withdraw from the ranks of verifiers, and the rest of the verifiers only partially withdraw money and withdraw pledge rewards. A total of 832,000 ETH tokens (approximately US$1.65 billion) are pending withdrawal. According to the Ethereum withdrawal restriction rules, it is estimated that it will take 10 days to fully withdraw (up to 1,800 validators withdraw per day).

According to the analysis of the entity behind it, we believe that these users who are waiting to withdraw their coins are not willing to sell, but are "forced" to withdraw. Among entities waiting to unstake, Kraken ranks first with 551,300 ETH, Coinbase ranks second with 51,000, and Huobi ranks third with 45,000, according to Nansen. The total withdrawal demand of the three companies accounts for nearly 80% of the entire sequence of pending withdrawals.

The withdrawal of Kraken and Coinbase is mainly due to the pressure of the SEC. In February of this year, Kraken reached a settlement with the SEC and stopped staking services. Although Coinbase has repeatedly stated that it will continue to provide services, the kraken incident may prompt some users to migrate from Coinbase to decentralized platforms such as Lido for staking. According to informed sources, a large number of ETH pledged withdrawals in Huobi are mainly related to the handover of new and old shareholders; Li Lin needs to make a handover after the withdrawal is opened, and some ETH may be withdrawn and then deposited.

Finally, from a global perspective, the current total amount of ETH pledged is 17,456,038, the total pledge rate is 15.09%, and the average price of all pledged ETH is $2134; this shows that under the current spot price, the average unrealized loss is 7%, it may not be high for users to sell 100 million yuan. Coupled with the fact that the encryption market has passed its darkest moment and is in the transitional stage from a bear market to a bull market, selling at this time does not seem to be the best time.

Odaily also observed a phenomenon that after the upgrade is completed, the enthusiasm of the market to participate in ETH pledge becomes higher. The data shows that in the past 24 hours, there were 37,648 new pledges on the entire network, of which 28,260 were carried out after the upgrade was completed, accounting for 75%. The surface market is more optimistic about the future price of ETH, and there is a strong willingness to hold it for a long time. The previous survey report released by OKX also showed that 83% of the respondents expect more ETH to be pledged in the next three months; 63% of the respondents predict that by the end of 2023, ETH will hit a record high of more than $5,000.

At present, ETH pledged ARP is close to 5%, which is relatively high among all mainstream currencies. The high security and profitability also attract more and more traditional institutions like Swiss financial bank InCore Bank to join the Ethereum ecosystem, provide ETH pledge services, and promote ETH to a broader financial market.

As a final reminder, ConsenSys has now opened the public version of the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade commemorative NFT series "Ethereum, Evolved: Shanghai" to be minted. The minting window will be open for 72 hours. Any user can use the MetaMask wallet to receive NFT for free, and only need to pay the gas fee. Interested users can log on to the official website to apply: https://shanghai-capella.consensys-nft.com/.