The Ethereum staking environment has undergone significant changes over the past month, driven by institutional investors led by BitMine and new ETFs.
This influx of funds has placed strain on the network, resulting in new participants having to wait approximately one month from the time they stake their assets until they begin earning rewards.
Institutional investors are flocking to Ethereum even at the lowest yields.
On January 9, blockchain analyst Ember CN reported that BitMine had moved 1 million ETH (over 320 billion yen) into Ethereum's proof-of-stake system over the past 30 days.
This single allocation accounts for approximately one-fourth of BitMEX's total assets, and the network's entry queue has expanded to 1.7 million ETH, reaching its largest size since 2023.
At the same time, one factor behind this rapid increase is the emergence of regulated financial products in the U.S. within the staking ecosystem.
In the past week, Grayscale's Ethereum Staking ETF and 21Shares' TETH ETF have distributed their first rewards. This demonstrates that traditional investment vehicles can now pass protocol-level returns directly to investors.
Notably, despite a significant compression of network staking rewards, institutional inflows continue to grow.
According to validator queue data, the annual percentage rate (APR) for ETH staking dropped to a record low of 2.54% at the beginning of this year, then slightly recovered to 2.85% at the time of writing. The average APR over the past year has exceeded 3.0%.
From this data, it is clear that investors continue to stake their assets despite a significant decline in returns.
Even as regulated U.S. market participants continue to enter, ETH staking dominance remains concentrated among a small number of established players.
According to Dune Analytics data, the decentralized autonomous organization Lido DAO holds 24% of all staked ETH, followed by Binance at 9.15%, Ether.fi at 6.3%, and Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., controlling 5.08%.
Most notably, anonymous participants continue to exist. Dune Analytics data shows that untagged entities hold about 27% of the total staked ETH across the network.
As a result, a large portion of Ethereum's security infrastructure is entrusted to anonymous operators who are not subject to the compliance requirements imposed on firms like BitMEX.
