Instead, third-party staking platforms are becoming more dominant, making up 60.6% of institutional investors, but these platforms raise concerns about network centralization, as a close to 48.6% of ETH stakers using third-party platforms are using just one integrated platform such as Coinbase, Binance, Kiln, and others.
Despite the growth within the Ethereum staking ecosystem, ETH’s price has underperformed against BTC, but some crypto research firms remain optimistic about ETH’s potential comeback against BTC later this year.
While solo staking gives full control over the ETH, the high entry barrier of staking 32 ETH is losing popularity, and currently, around 18.7% of stakers are solo stakers. The shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) has allowed for around 1.1 million on-chain validators staking 34.8 million ETH and has seen 28.9% of the total ETH supply staked, making it the network with the highest dollar value of staked assets, worth over $115 billion.
However, this high level of staked ETH has led to a decrease in the annualized yield of 3% as more ETH is staked.
The Ethereum staking landscape is rapidly transforming, with almost 70% of institutional investors participating in ETH staking and 22.6% of institutional investors holding more than 60% of their portfolio in ETH or ETH-based liquid staking tokens (LSTs).
