In wake of last week’s major Ethereum blockchain upgrade enabling the unstaking of ETH tokens from the Beacon chain for the first time since staking was enabled in December 2020, the number of ETH tokens locked in the staking smart contract has continued to surge higher.
Total staked ETH tokens were at 18.62 million on Monday as per data presented by crypto analytics firm Glassnode.
That’s an increase of nearly 500,000 in one week, the fastest pace at which the total number of staked ETH tokens has risen since late February.
It also marks a new all-time high for the total number of staked ETH tokens.
The rapid rise in the number of staked ETH tokens in the last week shocked some traders an analysts who had been expecting the enabling of staking withdrawals to result in net outflows from the staking smart contract.
Some of these traders and analysts had expected ETH investors to withdraw their ETH tokens and accrued ETH yield on masse, potentially triggering a wave of selling and a drop in the ETH price.
Given the opposite happened (i.e. the number of staked ETH tokens rose, rather than falling), the ETH unsurprisingly saw a pop higher as bearish bets were unwound.
ETH/USD jumped from under $2,000 and in the last few days has been consolidating in the $2,100.
It seems that there were more ETH owners waiting on the sidelines for the successful implementation of staking withdrawals before depositing their ETH into the staking contract than there were staked ETH owners eager to withdraw their tokens from the staking contract and sell them down.
The newfound flexibility in ETH staking lowers the risk to investors of putting their tokens into the staking contract.
As a result, substantial inflows of ETH into the staking contract are
Read more on cryptonews.com