Nansen: Four platforms control more than 61% of staked Ethereum

Four crypto platforms account for 61.25% of Ethereum (ETH) locked for staking, according to Cointelegraph, which cited a report from analytics firm Nansen.

The share of the three centralized exchanges — Coinbase, Kraken and Binance — totalled more than 30%. The dominant DeFi protocol Lido Finance accounts for 31% of the locked ether.

Nansen analysts noted that just over 11% of the Ethereum circulating supply is staked. In total, there are 426,000 validators and about depositors.

Ether price has fallen 71% from its all-time high, leaving a large portion of staked crypto unprofitable. However, 18% of the locked assets are held by illiquid stakers who are in profit.

Analysts say this category is highly likely to liquidate its ETH as soon as such an opportunity arises. However, concerns of a large sell-off after The Merge are considered unfounded by Nansen — withdrawals from staking will become available in 6-12 months.

“Even in this case, not everyone will be able to withdraw funds immediately, since validators face a withdrawal queue analogous to the activation process. It consists of about six validators (usually 32 ETH each) per epoch (~6.4 minutes),” the experts noted.

Even if all validators decide to withdraw their stake, it would take about 300 days for a total of 13.4 million locked coins, they noted.

Ethereum developers set September 15 as the expected date for the merge. As a result of migrating the blockchain to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, network security will fully shift from miners to validators.

According to OKLink data, the merge is 99.77% complete and the transition to PoS will occur within the specified timeframe.

In anticipation of Ethereum mining ending, Arcane Research noted that in 2021 its miners earned more than Bitcoin miners — $18 billion vs $17 billion. This year they also edge the latter in revenue, but in the remaining months this will inevitably change.

If #Ethereum‘s merge on Wednesday goes as planned, ETH miners will be obsolete.

ETH miners earned $18 billion in 2021, compared to $17 billion for BTC miners. pic.twitter.com/md4YPhhDkZ

— Arcane Research (@ArcaneResearch) September 12, 2022

As reported, a group of supporters of continuing Ethereum on the Proof-of-Work algorithm announced that will launch a network fork within 24 hours after The Merge.

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