Proof-of-Work Proponents Question Validator Censorship as 59% of Staked Ethereum Is Held by 4 Companies – Bitcoin News

Prior to The Merge, Ethereum used to have dozens upon dozens of mining pools dedicating hashrate toward the blockchain network. That has all changed and most of the miners transitioned or plan on transitioning to other Ethash compatible coins like ethereum classic, ERGO, and the new fork ETHW. Now Ethereum blocks are verified by validators and at the time of writing, there are 429,278 validators. However, a great deal of the 13.7 million staked ethereum is held by four known providers.

4 Known Providers Hold 59% of the Staked Ethereum Today

Bitcoin.com News reported on Lido possessing 30% of the staked ether four days ago. On September 15, the Twitter account Checkmate, the lead onchain analyst at Glassnode, wrote about the entities currently holding the lion’s share of today’s staked ETH. “We profiled a few more entities,” Checkmate wrote to someone discussing Lido’s holdings. Checkmate said data shows that there’s 13.7 million staked ETH and 10 million ether is held by known providers. That equates to 73% of the staked ETH, and the top four providers hold 8.13 million ETH or 59.3% of the aggregate.

“4.17M in Lido, 1.92M in Coinbase, 1.14M in Kraken, [and] 0.9M in Binance,” Checkmate said. The tweet shared by the onchain analyst at Glassnode was further discussed by the popular bitcoiner Tuur Demeester, the editor at satoshipapers.org. “44% of ETH is staked by just 2 entities, Lido [and] Coinbase. Add Kraken, and it jumps to 52% of total ETH staked by 3 entities,” Demeester wrote. The editor also mocked a tweet written by Vitalik Buterin which talks about the idea of having average users validate the system.

SEC Chair Gensler Hints at Taking Another Look at Staking Coins, Jack Dorsey Shares Anti-PoS Editorial, Ethereum Proponents Believe People Are Getting Ahead of Themselves

In addition to bitcoiners like Demeester and Checkmate, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler, recently talked about talking about the Howey test and staking coins. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Gensler said: “From the coin’s perspective … that’s another indicia that under the Howey test, the investing public is anticipating profits based on the efforts of others.” While the WSJ said Gensler remarked that he wasn’t referring to any cryptocurrency in particular, many…