What has recently happened in the ETH staking market? To sum it up in one sentence — two extremes are playing out simultaneously.

The story on the withdrawal side is this: the waiting time has dropped to nearly zero. Compared to the major congestion in September 2024 (27 days withdrawal cycle, 2.67 million ETH queued), the current liquidity is worlds apart. But ironically, the deposit side has completely collapsed in reverse. Currently, 1.3 million ETH are queued to enter, with waiting times exceeding two weeks, hitting a record high.

Behind this bizarre contrast is a key driver — the big move by institutional player Bitmine. Starting from December 26, 2025, in less than a week and a half, they continuously injected nearly 660,000 ETH for staking, which was roughly $2.1 billion at the time. More notably, Bitmine’s total ETH holdings have now surpassed 4.1 million, accounting for 3.4% of the entire ETH circulating supply. In other words, this institution holds nearly one-thirtieth of the global ETH chips. Such a scale of operation by one institution directly changes the supply and demand structure of the entire staking market — this is not an exaggeration, but hard data in front of us.

Why does Bitmine dare to massively increase its staking position at this time? The core logic is actually not complicated. On one hand, the current ETH staking yields still remain attractive…