Four cryptocurrency platforms account for 61.25% of Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency blocked for staking. Reported by Cointelegraph with reference to the report of analytical company Nansen.

The three central exchanges – Coinbase, Kraken and Binance – account for more than 30% of the total. DeFi protocol Lido Finance dominates with 31% of locked Ether.

Nansen experts stated that just over 11% of the Ethereum market supply is involved in staking. A total of 426,000 validators and approximately 80,000 depositors.

The 71% drop in ether price from the historical maximum has resulted in a significant portion of the cryptocurrency being unprofitable to stake. However, 18% of the locked assets are held by illiquid for-profit shareholders.

According to analysts, this category is very likely to liquidate their ETH as soon as the opportunity arises. However, Nansen considers the fear of a massive sell-off after The Merge to be unfounded – withdrawal of the cryptocurrency from staking will be possible in 6-12 months.

“Even in this case, not everyone will be able to withdraw money immediately, as there is a queue for validators to exit, similar to the activation process. It consists of about six validators (usually 32 ETH each) per period (~6.4 minutes), experts recalled.

They stressed that even if all validators decide to withdraw the cryptocurrency from staking, it will take around 300 days with a total of 13.4 million coins blocked.

Ethereum developers have set September 15 as the recommended date for the merger. As a result of the blockchain migration to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, network security protection will completely shift from miners to validators.

According to OKLink, the merger process is 99.77% complete and the transition to PoS will take place on the specified date.

On the eve of the cessation of mining the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization, Arcane Research experts recalled that in 2021 their miners earned more bitcoin miners – $ 18 billion instead of $ 17 billion. however, this will inevitably change in the coming months.

if #EthereumWednesday’s merger is going as planned, ETH miners will be obsolete.

ETH miners earned $18 billion in 2021 compared to $17 billion for BTC miners. pic.twitter.com/md4YPhhDkZ

— Arcane Research (@ArcaneResearch) September 12, 2022

Recall that a group of supporters supporting Ethereum’s continued work on the Proof-of-Work algorithm announced that they will initiate a network fork within a day after The Merge.

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