当 ETH 深入资产负债表：Staking 的下一阶段历史定位，何去何从？

Currently, if you want to become an Ethereum validator directly, you'll have to wait in line for over a month.

As of July 22, there are still approximately 2.5 million ETH in the Ethereum staking entry queue, with an expected wait time of over 43 days. In contrast, the exit queue wait time is merely a few minutes, almost negligible.

Looking purely at the numbers, it's undeniable that more and more ETH staking is absorbing circulating market supply.

However, what's more noteworthy than the growth in staking scale is that queuing is becoming a capital efficiency issue. After all, for ETH treasury companies and institutions opting for the native staking path, a queue of over 40 days means a significant amount of assets temporarily cannot generate staking rewards. Asset allocation, liquidity arrangements, and opportunity costs all need to be recalculated.

Ultimately, when ETH is more deeply integrated into balance sheets, the issues facing Staking are no longer just about "how to get more people to participate," but begin to evolve into a more traditional and complex set of asset management problems.

1. Staking Rate Hits a New High, How to Understand the Queue?

Ethereum's current high staking rate didn't form suddenly at a single point in time.

In 2023, the Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade enabled staking withdrawals, allowing validators to reclaim their staked principal and rewards at the protocol level. This formed a relatively complete closed loop for entering, running, and exiting ETH Staking. Subsequently, the market for LSD-based derivatives expanded rapidly, driving the ETH staking rate ever higher.

As of writing, the amount of ETH staked has surpassed 40 million, worth approximately $140 billion at current prices, accounting for over 33% of the total supply. This is a significant increase from the ~10% staking rate a few years ago, hitting an all-time high.

In other words, currently, for every 3 ETH, more than 1 is being staked.

With the staking rate at a record high, the persistently large entry queue also exposes a new problem.

As is widely known, Ethereum's entry and exit queues are essentially a rate-limiting mechanism designed to protect consensus stability. New ETH cannot join the validator set indefinitely all at once, nor can exits be concentrated in a short period. The protocol determines the amount of ETH that can be processed per Epoch based on the current validator set size. When the funds applying to enter or exit exceed this processing capacity, a queue forms.

From this perspective, 2.5 million ETH queuing to enter primarily indicates that market demand for staking capacity far exceeds the rate at which the protocol can currently release it. This could include newly entering long-term capital, as well as treasury companies deploying existing holdings, staking service providers adjusting their validator structures, and institutions transferring ETH from custodial accounts into the staking system.

Therefore, this sends a clear signal: at least in the current phase, there is significantly more capital willing to commit ETH to the staking system than capital actively attempting to exit the validator set.

This marks a distinct shift from the staking logic in the early days of the Beacon Chain.

Initially, ETH Staking was more akin to a network participation mechanism for technical users, solo validators, and long-term Ethereum supporters. Participants ran nodes, maintained the network, and assumed technical risks in exchange for protocol rewards.

With the rise of liquid staking, it gradually became a product for regular token holders to generate on-chain yield. For instance, exchange staking, Staking-as-a-Service, and staking pools lowered the technical barrier. Liquid staking protocols like Lido and Rocket Pool further unlocked the usability of staked funds, allowing users to receive liquid staking tokens like stETH and rETH after staking ETH. These tokens can be transferred, traded, and used in lending, liquidity pools, and other DeFi protocols.

Today, with large amounts of ETH entering corporate treasuries, fund products, and professional custody systems, Staking is undoubtedly moving into a third phase, shifting from "who can stake" towards "how should large-scale ETH be managed."

Of course, institutionalization here doesn't mean early staking was solely retail-dominated, nor does it imply that institutions will replace regular users. More accurately, the focus of market discussion is changing:

Previously, the focus was on how ordinary users could obtain staking yields. Now, it's beginning to focus on, when hundreds of thousands or even millions of ETH enter corporate balance sheets, how staking becomes a standardized treasury management capability.

2. Structural Changes Behind Institutions Like BitMine

The emergence of ETH treasury companies is making this shift more tangible.

While the core logic for a Bitcoin treasury company is to accumulate BTC through financing and capital market operations, increasing the Bitcoin amount per share, for ETH treasury companies, holding the asset is not the endpoint of the strategy.

After all, BTC itself does not have a native protocol staking yield. Holders looking for extra returns usually need to introduce counterparty risks associated with lending, custody, or derivatives. ETH, however, can directly participate in Ethereum consensus to earn protocol rewards without selling the asset.

This inherently adds an operational dimension to an ETH treasury: beyond deciding how much ETH to buy, it must also decide how this ETH will be deployed.

BitMine's actions are a concentrated expression of this institutional logic.

According to its latest disclosed data, as of July 19, BitMine held a total of 5,777,468 ETH, accounting for approximately 4.8% of the total ETH supply. Of this, it has staked 4.917 million ETH, representing 85% of its total ETH holdings, valued at approximately $9.2 billion.

Based on the ETH price at that time and BitMine's own 2.67% seven-day annualized staking yield, the company is expected to generate approximately $247 million in annual staking income. If all its ETH were eventually staked, the projected annualized rewards could reach around $290 million.

What's more noteworthy is the speed of this change.

In early February this year, BitMine had approximately 2.8975 million ETH staked, accounting for about 67% of its holdings at the time. By mid-July, its staking scale had increased to about 4.9172 million ETH. This means in less than six months, BitMine deployed over 2 million additional ETH into staking, with the staking coverage ratio increasing from about two-thirds to 85%.

This shows that Tom Lee and BitMine are visibly moving their held ETH into staking at a rapid pace, transforming their ETH from merely a crypto asset awaiting price appreciation into an on-chain foundational asset with native yield-generating capability.

For ordinary investors, the staking rate might just be a yield option. But for BitMine, it is becoming a key treasury operational metric, standing alongside ETH holdings, net asset value per share, and financing costs.

Meanwhile, BitMine has also launched its own institutional-grade staking platform, MAVAN, to serve the company's own ETH treasury. It also plans to offer staking infrastructure to institutional investors, custodians, and ecosystem partners in the future (see our extended reading: Hong Kong Ethereum Observation: When the 'World Computer' Meets 'Yield-Generating Assets', How Will Two Types of ETH Resonate?).

This means Staking serves at least three functions for BitMine: first, it adds a layer of ETH-denominated returns to long-term holdings; second, staking rewards can be reinvested, increasing the number of ETH in the treasury; third, when the in-house validator capability is opened to external parties, the staking infrastructure itself could become a service business.

SharpLink takes this logic a step further, from native staking to active yield management. For them, basic staking yield is just the starting point; some of the staked ETH can further enter on-chain yield funds, allocated to DeFi strategies like lending and liquidity provision.

The changes in Lido V3 occur at the infrastructure layer. Previously, users and institutions primarily entered a unified liquid staking pool. Now, institutions can use more independent staking vaults to choose their own node operators, fee structures, and risk parameters, while retaining the option to access stETH liquidity. This means liquid staking is evolving from a standardized product towards isolable and customizable institutional-grade infrastructure.

Therefore, the competition among ETH treasury companies in the future may not just be about who holds more, but also about who can manage these ETH at a lower cost, with higher uptime, and with better risk control.

From this perspective, ETH is also transforming from a crypto asset waiting for price appreciation into an asset requiring ongoing management and operation.

3. Despite Low Yields, Why is Staking Becoming More Important?

As of writing, the estimated staking APR across the entire Ethereum network is approximately 2.64%. Honestly, compared to some DeFi products, this level is not particularly outstanding, and as the amount of ETH staked continues to increase, this base yield could face further dilution.

But institutional demand for Staking cannot simply be understood by yield levels alone – staking reduces their opportunity cost of holding ETH long-term.

For short-term traders, a 2-3% annualized return is hardly enough to offset ETH's own price volatility. However, for treasury companies, funds, or large addresses that have already decided to hold ETH long-term, the issue is different: since ETH is already on the balance sheet, they must find a way to continuously accumulate more ETH, without giving up their ETH price exposure, by participating in network security (see our extended reading: When Wall Street's ETH Starts to 'Yield': From BlackRock's ETHB, Looking at the Shift in Ethereum's Asset Attributes).

This is easy to understand. For an ordinary user holding 100 ETH, a 2.6% yield might not be significant. But for a treasury company holding millions of ETH, the same yield translates into substantial absolute income, which can gradually affect the amount of ETH per share through long-term reinvestment.

This is also one of the key differences between ETH and BTC in the treasury narrative.

Therefore, when ETH enters institutional balance sheets, the treasury department is not facing a static position but an on-chain asset that can be continuously deployed, accounted for, and adjusted.

Furthermore, with increased institutional participation, native staking yield could also take on another function: becoming the benchmark yield for the entire ETH asset system.

This is easy to understand. For example, in the future, when a DeFi strategy promises a yield of 5%, 8%, or even higher, institutions will need to compare not just "with yield" versus "without yield," but how much more it earns relative to the ~2.6% native staking yield, and what additional risks it entails.

Lending, liquidity market making, structured products, and restaking strategies all need to prove their risk-return profile is reasonable against this base yield. From this perspective, the importance of Staking in the next phase lies not only in the amount of ETH it brings to holders but also in its role as the underlying benchmark for measuring other on-chain strategies.

However, it cannot be simplistically regarded as Ethereum's "risk-free rate." Stakers bear risks like ETH price volatility, validator downtime, node failure, and potential slashing. Participating through service providers introduces operational and custodian risks. If staked ETH is further deployed into DeFi, risks compound with each additional layer of protocols and strategies.

Beyond that, a higher staking rate isn't exclusively positive. If most new capital is concentrated in the hands of a few treasury companies, custodians, liquid staking protocols, and node operators, it could exacerbate centralization among validators, cloud service providers, and legal jurisdictions.

Thus, as staking evolves from a network participation mechanism into an institutional asset allocation tool, Ethereum needs to solve not just how to accommodate more capital, but also how to maintain a balance between capital efficiency, institutional demands, and decentralization.

Final Thoughts

Overall, from the initial 32 ETH validator requirement at the Beacon Chain's launch, to liquid staking protocols lowering the barrier to entry, and now to treasury companies, in-house validator networks, and institutional on-chain yield funds, the evolution of Staking is essentially a change in how the market understands ETH.

Initially a mechanism for participating in network consensus, it subsequently became a tool for ordinary users to generate on-chain yield. Today, it's entering corporate balance sheets, custody systems, and professional yield management frameworks.

For these long-term holders, a yield of 2-3% might not be dazzling.

But as long as ETH no longer has to sit idly in an address or custodial account waiting for price appreciation, can participate in network security, earn protocol rewards, be continuously compounded, and maintain a degree of liquidity, it will accelerate its evolution into the foundational asset layer for other financial strategies.

This is the new defining challenge of the ETH era.