Ethereum Staking Demand Is Skyrocketing Even as Yields Sink Toward 2.5%

More ETH is being locked up even as the return for doing so keeps declining. A recent report from Bitwise informed that Ethereum finished Q3 with 43.8 million ETH staked, equal to almost 36% of the total supply, after nearly 2 million tokens flowed into staking during that three-month period. Although this marked the sixth consecutive quarter of growth in this metric, the annualized staking yield has been on a steady decline, dropping from 2.81% to 2.63%. Keep Staking What’s perhaps even more interesting is what took place after the end of the third quarter of the year. Beaconcha.in currently shows approximately 1.39 million ETH waiting in the deposit queue, with an estimated wait of more than 24 days. The queue for those waiting for the exit is significantly lower at just 39,000 tokens. This imbalance suggests that demand to enter the staking ecosystem remains substantially stronger than demand to leave, even though the network-wide staking rate has dropped toward 2.6%. Recall that the numbers were entirely different just over a year ago, when the exit queue skyrocketed to over 475,000 validators wanting to get out. Bitwise said institutional entities, including staking ETFs and c...