Staking Ethereum has been a major DeFi play in ever since it was enabled back in September 2022. A lot of protocols have emerged with a business around this, such as Lido, Etherfi, etc. enabling, staking, restaking, and even more complicated loops. One of these protocols have been a victim of the biggest DeFi hack with the rsETH from the KelpDAO.
Let’s take a look how are things going under the current market conditions.
Here we will be looking at:
- Staked Ethereum by date
- Staked VS Unstaked ETH since the Shanghai update
- Share of staked ETH
- Number of validators
- Top staking pools
The data presented here is mostly gathered from Dune Analytics and Ethscan.
Staked Ethereum by Date
Here is the chart.
This is the amount of staked ETH since the launch of the Beacon chain and the option for staking Ethereum in November 2020, after what it sorts of slowed down, and started growing again in 2025 with a sharp growth towards the end of the year.
In 2026 the amount of staked ETH is sort of sideways, with a small drop in the last month, probably due to the rsETH incident.
A total of 39.5M ETH staked at the moment. The record high has been around 41M in March 2026
If we zoom in 2024-2026 we get this:
Here we can notice a strong growth in May 2023. The unstaking option has caused more Ethereum to be staked than unstaked. Probably users felt more comfortable staking now knowing that they can unstake at any moment if needed.
At the beginning of 2024 there were close to 29M ETH staked while the year ended with 34.2M ETH staked or 5M more.
For 2025 the year started with 34.2M staked and ended at 36.7M, so more than 2M ETH staked. In 2026 we are close to 40M now so more than 3M ETH staked.
Deposits VS Withdrawals Since the Shanghai Update
If take a look at the daily deposits vs withdrawals since the update, we get this:
Most of the days are in positive, meaning that more ETH is being staked in general that ustaked, even with the ustaking option enabled. There are few big unstaking events in April 2023, where more than 100k ETH was unstaked in a day.
We can notice some bars on the downside that represents the usntaking that has happened in the last period.
Share of Staked Ethereum
What is the share of staked Ethereum? Here is the historical trend.
We can notice that the staking was activated later in the Ethereum lifecycle and since recently it has started to gather more momentum. It’s worth noting that since last year Ethereum cut their inflation down as well and is deflationary in the last period. What this means is that the ETH issuance is lowered, and at the same time the staking is locking more ETH, basically lowering the liquid supply from both ends.
The liquid Ethereum supply looks like this:
We can see the drop in the liquid ETH supply, from 117M at the top in 2020 to 78M now. It seems that there is finally some slowdown in the amount of ETH staked. Will see where the balance is found. Staking provides APR, but if more ETH is staked this APR goes down. Also, the APR for staking depends on the network activity and the fees paid by users.
The current share of staked ETH looks like this:
When compared to the total ETH supply that is around 120M now, the 39M staked ETH represents a 34% of the supply. It seems that there is some equilibrium around this mark.
Number of Validators
Here is the chart.
The number of validators has also continued to grow. At the moment there are 1.2M validators. We can notice some drop at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 and a growth again. A drop again in the very last months.
Note that these are not unique validators, as most of them are represented by a pool or some type of CEX. There is now even a proposal to decrease the upper limit for a validator from 32ETH, so at some point the number of validators might consolidate.
Top Ethereum Stakers
Who is staking the most? Here is the chart.
The Lido pool is on the top with 8.6M ETH staked. This pool has even its own token for governance. On the second spot is Binance followed by another exchange Coinbase on the third spot.
Lido has dominated in the past, but it seems that it has peaked and now has an even lower amount of ETH staked from the beginning of the year. Probably some of the tokens went to ether.fi.
All the best
@dalz
Quite similar to Hive in a way, even though there's so much more you can do with Hive in some ways.
Yea thats true ... its around that number ...
I am very impressed that one player still holds such a strong lead, I actually thought Binance had it all
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