Demand for ETH Staking Soars Despite Nearly Month-Long Waiting Period
Since the implementation of the Shanghai upgrade to the Ethereum mainnet just over one month ago, which allowed Ethereum validators to withdraw all or some of their staked Ether (ETH) tokens from the staking smart contract for the first time, demand for ETH staking has soared.
According to wenmerge.com, the waiting period for an ETH owner to enter the Ethereum network as a new validator has surged to 27 days and 7 hours, with 50,398 prospective validators current in the queue.
Ether owners can set up as network validators and earn a yield of around 4-5% annually via token staking.
ETH staking has been available on the Beacon chain since December 2020, but staking withdrawals were only enabled at last month’s upgrade.
The addition of withdrawal flexibility to ETH staking reduces its risk in the eyes of many investors, who may have been deterred from staking their ETH tokens prior to the implementation of withdrawals for fear their funds would be locked up for a prohibitively long period of time.
The surge in the number of validators queueing up to join the network comes hand in hand with a surge in the number of ETH tokens being entered into the staking smart contract.
As of Monday, the number of staked ETH tokens had hit 21.652 million, up around 3.5 million in the one month since the Shanghai upgrade, as per Glassnode data.
Given the total supply of ETH tokens was last around 120.08 million, that means the staking participation rate is now just over 18%.
That’s up from around 15% prior to the upgrade, when the number of staked ETH tokens was around 18.1 million and the total ETH token supply was around 120.4 million.
Competitor proof-of-stake chains with flexible staking contract withdrawals like Cardano have staking
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