One sliver of the crypto market seems to be rebounding: staking. Despite the doom and gloom cast over the entire blockchain industry after the cascading crisis that was 2022 and the fact that the global economy is in uncharted territory, as noted by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole, proof-of-stake (PoS) revenue generation has almost rebounded to all-time highs.
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As Bloomberg’s Sidhartha Shukla noted in a recent article, the total value locked, or TVL, for liquid staking protocols has surged 292% to $20 billion over the past year and some months. That’s just shy of the $21 billion locked in leading decentralized staking protocols Lido and Rocket Pool in April of 2022, right before the TerraUSD stablecoin death spiral.
To some extent, a rebound in Ethereum staking valuations makes sense – even at a time of general disinterest in decentralized finance (DeFi).
If you remember, Ethereum went officially live with staking on Sept. 15 in an event forever commemorated as “the Merge.” That date shifted the narrative on crypto, at least somewhat, after Ethereum nullified the longstanding criticism of crypto’s carbon footprint by ditching energy intensive miners. (Bitcoin being Bitcoin, it still has its eco critics — but perhaps not for long.)
While it took a few weeks for the withdrawal/unstaking fervor to die down, staking has so far served Ethereum users well – paying out an annualized rate between 3%-4% to anyone with the spare 32 ether (ETH) needed to stake to become a validator. And lest we forget that staking exists in part to shield the World Computer from attacks, it hasn’t failed yet.
Liquid staking – or a democratized form of staking that allows smaller holders to pledge ETH to companies or smart contracts that collate funds and pay out staking rewards commensurately to people otherwise priced out – is such an attractive proposition that many have begun calling it “the on-chain equivalent of government bonds.”
The lingo actually used is “crypto’s risk free rate of return,” but Bloomberg being Bloomberg there’s no way an editor would let a comparison to three-month U.S….
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