当 ETH 深入資產負債表：Staking 的下一階段歷史定位，何去何從？

Now, if you want to become an Ethereum validator directly, you need to queue up for over a month.

As of July 22, the Ethereum staking entry queue still holds approximately 2.5 million ETH, with an estimated waiting time exceeding 43 days. In contrast, the exit queue takes only a few minutes, which is almost negligible.

Looking purely at the numbers, there is no doubt that an increasing amount of ETH staking is absorbing market circulating supply.

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

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

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

Ethereum's current high staking rate did not form overnight.

In 2023, the Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade unlocked staking withdrawals, allowing validators to reclaim their staked principal and rewards at the protocol level. This created a relatively complete cycle for ETH staking - entry, operation, and exit. Subsequently, the market for LSD-based derivatives expanded rapidly, pushing the ETH staking rate ever higher.

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

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

Against the backdrop of a record-high staking rate, the persistently high entry queue also reveals a new problem.

As is well known, the Ethereum entry and exit queues are essentially a speed-limiting mechanism designed to protect consensus stability. New ETH cannot join the validator set without limit simultaneously, and exits cannot occur in a highly concentrated manner. 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 the processing capacity, a queue forms.

From this perspective, the 2.5 million ETH waiting in the entry queue primarily indicates that market demand for staking capacity far exceeds the speed at which the protocol can currently release it. This could include newly entering long-term capital, 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 actually sends a clear signal: at least in the current phase, there is far more capital willing to stake ETH than capital actively withdrawing from the validator set.

This is a significant shift from the staking logic in the early days of the Beacon Chain.

In the early stages, ETH staking was more of a network participation mechanism for tech-savvy 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 ordinary token holders to earn on-chain yields. Exchange staking, staking-as-a-service, and staking pools lowered the technical barriers. Liquid staking protocols like Lido and Rocket Pool further enhanced the usability of staked capital, allowing users to obtain liquid staking tokens like stETH and rETH after staking their ETH. These tokens can be transferred, traded, and even used in lending protocols, liquidity pools, and other DeFi applications.

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

Of course, the institutionalization mentioned here does not mean that early staking was entirely dominated by retail investors, nor does it imply that institutions will replace ordinary users. More accurately, the focus of the market discussion is shifting:

The past focus was on how ordinary users can obtain staking yields. Now, the focus is shifting to how, when hundreds of thousands or even millions of ETH enter a company's balance sheet, staking can become a standardized treasury management capability.

2. Structural Changes Behind Institutions like BitMine

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

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

After all, BTC itself has no protocol-native staking yield. Holders seeking additional returns typically need to introduce lending, custody, derivatives, or other counterparty risks. In contrast, ETH can directly participate in the Ethereum consensus to earn protocol rewards without selling the underlying asset.

This naturally gives an ETH treasury an additional layer of operational complexity: besides deciding how much ETH to buy, it also needs to decide how to deploy that ETH.

BitMine's actions are a concentrated manifestation 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, a total of 4.917 million ETH was staked, representing 85% of its total ETH holdings, valued at approximately $9.2 billion.

Based on the ETH price at the time and BitMine's own 2.67% seven-day annualized staking yield, the company is estimated to earn approximately $247 million in staking revenue annually. If all its ETH were eventually staked, the estimated annualized reward could reach approximately $290 million.

Even more noteworthy is the speed of this numerical change.

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

This indicates that Tom Lee and BitMine are visibly moving their ETH holdings into staking at a remarkable pace, transforming their ETH from a crypto asset merely awaiting price appreciation into an on-chain base asset with inherent yield-generating capabilities.

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

Concurrently, BitMine has launched its own institutional-grade staking platform, MAVAN, to service its own ETH treasury. It also plans to provide staking infrastructure to institutional investors, custodians, and ecosystem partners in the future (for further reading: “Hong Kong Ethereum Observation: When the 'World Computer' Meets 'Yield-Bearing Assets', How Do Two Types of ETH Resonate?”).

This means Staking takes on at least three roles for BitMine: First, it adds a layer of ETH-denominated returns to its long-term holdings; second, staking rewards can be continuously reinvested, increasing the number of ETH in the treasury; third, when the capability to run validators is opened externally, the staking infrastructure itself could become a service business.

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

The change in Lido V3 occurs at the infrastructure layer. In the past, users and institutions primarily entered a unified liquid staking pool. Now, institutions can use more independent staking vaults, selecting their own node operators, fee structures, and risk parameters, while retaining the option to obtain stETH liquidity. This means liquid staking is evolving from a standardized product towards an isolatable 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 who can manage these ETH at lower cost, with higher uptime, and better risk control.

From this perspective, ETH is also transforming from a crypto asset waiting for its price to rise into an asset requiring ongoing operational management.

3. The Yield Isn't High, So Why is Staking Becoming More Important?

As of the time of writing, the overall network staking APR for Ethereum is approximately 2.64%. To be realistic, this level is not exceptionally prominent compared to some DeFi products, and this base yield could be further diluted as the amount of ETH staked continues to increase.

However, the institutional demand for Staking cannot be understood solely by the yield rate. Staking reduces their opportunity cost of holding ETH long-term.

For short-term traders, a 2% to 3% annualized return hardly offsets ETH's own price volatility. But for treasury companies, funds, or large address holders who have already decided to hold ETH long-term, the issue is different. Since ETH is already on the balance sheet, they need to continuously earn more ETH by participating in network security without giving up their ETH price exposure (for further reading: “When Wall Street's ETH Starts 'Accruing Interest': Viewing the Shift in Ethereum's Asset Properties from BlackRock's ETHB”).

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 generates substantial absolute income and, through long-term compounding, gradually influences the amount of ETH per share.

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

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

Furthermore, as institutional participation increases, the native staking yield may assume another function: becoming the benchmark yield for the entire ETH asset system.

This is easy to grasp. For example, in the future, when a DeFi strategy promises a yield of 5%, 8%, or even higher, institutions 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 are undertaken.

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

However, it still cannot be simply viewed as Ethereum's "risk-free rate." Stakers bear risks such as ETH price volatility, validator downtime, node failures, and potential slashing. Participation through service providers adds operational and custodian risks. Further involvement in DeFi layers risks that compound with the number of protocols and strategies.

Moreover, a higher staking rate is not without negative consequences. If new capital is primarily 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 within certain jurisdictions.

So, 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 32 ETH validator requirement in the early days of the Beacon Chain, to liquid staking protocols lowering the participation barrier, and now to treasury companies, self-built validator networks, and institutional on-chain yield funds, the changes in Staking are essentially a reflection of the market's changing understanding of ETH.

Initially, it was a mechanism for participating in network consensus. Then, it became a tool for ordinary users to earn on-chain yields. Now, it is entering corporate balance sheets, custody systems, and professional yield management frameworks.

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

But as long as ETH no longer has to just sit idly in addresses or custodial accounts waiting for its price to rise, but can participate in network security, earn protocol rewards, be continuously compounded, and maintain a degree of liquidity, it will accelerate its evolution into the underlying asset for other financial strategies.

This is the new defining theme of the ETH era.