Ethereum 2.0: 95% Ether ready to be staked 

The grand move for the Ethereum blockchain has been approaching and the exchanges in the ecosystem have been providing support for staking ETH. As the community gears up for the release of ETH 2.0, a highly anticipated scalability network upgrade from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, the upgrade will boost ETH’s performance critical to the network enabling it to process a large number of transactions.

The PoS consensus will enable those with a stake in network tokens the right to earn rewards for validating blocks. Even though anyone can stake token, the right to validate blocks and earn rewards will be determined on the proportionate value of the stake. Therefore, someone staking 1% of the total overall value may get to validate just 1% of all blocks, while depending on the time the stake has been locked up may also factor into the validator selection protocol. Staking on Ethereum 2.0 has been presented in a simple format, with a minimum threshold of 32 ETH for participation. The validators will be needed to run their own validator note and the rate of return is expected to be around 4% to 10%.

According to data provided by Arcane research, over 18 million out of the total supply of 111 million are held by the exchange addresses. This could affect the overall staking statistics as smaller investors are just accounted as a part of balances on exchanges. Binance, one of the largest exchanges in the world had announced that users will be able to actively stake via Binance. Binance along with Kraken and Crypto.com run staking pool programs where the exchange deposit users’ funds into a wallet which is then used for staking. This puts pressure on exchanges to enable staking as soon as ETH 2.0 is live.

The number of Ethereum wallets containing at least 32 ETH has increased by 13% over the year. While many users have decided to run their own validators, others are still choosing between running an independent node, joining a staking pool, or using staking provider services. While analyzing the data from Nansen, it was noted that these wallets accounted for approximately 95% of all ETH. To put things in perspective, this was 105 million out of the total 111 million ETH supply held by these 120,000 Ethereum wallets.

As the update nears, the users have been showing signs of strategic wallet sizing above the staking threshold. Even though 32 ETH was the minimum threshold to enable staking, the common wallet-sized above 32 ETH were round number like 50,40, and 100, which were qued behind numbers between 33 to 40.