Ethereum’s staking queues have emptied and the network can now absorb new validators and output in near real-time.
This means that the rush to block ETH has faded for the moment and staking is settling into a steady state instead of a scarcity exchange.
Queues are simply the time spent to start or stop staking on the Ethereum network, acting as a sentiment gauge and a liquidity gauge.
In a sense, the lack of queues is a feature and not a bug, because it is proof that Ethereum can handle staking flows without tying up liquidity for weeks.
At the same time, staking rewards have shrunk to 3% as total ETH staked has grown faster than issuance and fee revenue, limiting incentives for further pushes in either direction and leaving queues near zero, even as overall staking participation remains high.
A lower yield may reflect overcrowding, but also a higher “trust premium” – more ETH choosing to sit in staking rather than exchange order books.
What this means in simple terms is that “betting pressure” is no longer an everyday narrative.
When queues are long, the ETH supply is effectively locked up faster than the network can onboard validators, which can create a sense of scarcity.
When queues are close to zero, the system is closer to neutrality. People can stake or opt out without waiting for weeks, making staking feel less like a one-way door and more like a liquid allocation.
This changes the psychology around ether trading.
Staking always reduces immediate selling pressure, but it is not the same as locking up coins. With withdrawals operating smoothly, ETH behaves less like a forced-lock asset and more like a yield-bearing position that can be resized when sentiment changes.
Overall, Ethereum’s staking supply sits at around 30%, well below the 50% predicted by Galaxy Digital at the end of 2025. Galaxy’s expectations that ETH would maintain prices above $5,500 thanks to staking-induced supply shock and that layer 2s would overtake layer 1s in economic activity have not materialized.
ETH All-Time Highs Could Be Some Time Away
Ethereum’s DeFi TVL sits at around $74 billion, well below its 2021 peak of around $106 billion, even though daily active addresses have nearly doubled over the same period, according to DeFi Llama.
The network still represents almost 58% of total DeFi TVL, but this share masks a more fragmented reality.
Incremental growth is increasingly captured by ecosystems like Solana, Base, and Bitcoin-native DeFi, allowing activity to grow in Ethereum’s orbit without translating into the same concentration of value or demand for ETH itself.
This fragmentation matters because Ethereum’s strongest bullish case was simple. Increased usage meant more costs, more burn, and more structural pressure on supply.
The 2021 TVL peak was also an era of leverage; a lower TVL today doesn’t necessarily mean less usage, just less foam.
In the current regime, however, a significant portion of user activity may occur on Layer 2 networks where fees are cheaper and the experience is smoother, but the value capture that accrues to ETH may be less obvious to spot markets at the moment.
“One way to understand it is that Ethereum has lost directional clarity,” Bradley Park, founder of DNTV Research, said in a note to CoinDesk. “If ETH is treated primarily as a fiat asset to be staked rather than actively used, this weakens the burning mechanism: less ETH is burned, issuance continues, and selling pressure increases over time.”
“Over the past 30 days, Base has generated significantly more fees than Ethereum itself. This contrast raises a more difficult question for Ethereum, namely whether its current trajectory is adequately returning usage to value for ETH,” Park added.
This gap between activity and value capture appears in prediction markets.
On Polymarket, traders assign just an 11% chance of ETH reaching a new all-time high by March 2026, despite higher active addresses and still dominant DeFi TVL share.
Prices suggest that the market views sharding and unconstrained staking supply as limiting factors, with utilization alone no longer enough to force the challenge of the all-time high.
But this situation could change quickly if US policy evolves to allow yield-bearing ETH products, a change that would reopen the “staking premium” trade.
