Ethereum staking queues have emptied and the network can now absorb new validators and exits in near real-time.
This means that the rush to lock up ETH has faded for now and bets are settling into a steady state rather than a scarcity trade.
Queues are simply the time spent starting or stopping staking on the Ethereum network, and act as a sentiment and liquidity indicator.
In a sense, the lack of queues is a feature, not a bug, as they are proof that Ethereum can handle staking flows without locking up liquidity for weeks.
At the same time, staking rewards have compressed towards 3% as total ETH staked grew faster than issuance and fee revenue, limiting incentives for further increases in either direction and leaving tails close to zero even as overall staking participation remains high.
Lower performance may reflect crowding, but also a higher “trust premium”: more and more ETH are choosing to participate in staking rather than trading order books.
What this means in simple terms is that “betting pressure” is no longer a daily narrative.
When queues are long, the ETH supply is effectively blocked faster than the network can onboard validators, and that can create a feeling of scarcity.
When the queues approach zero, the system is closer to being neutral. People can bet or undo without waiting weeks, making betting feel less like a one-way door and more like a liquid allocation.
This changes the psychology around ether trading.
Staking still reduces immediate selling pressure, but it is not the same as getting stuck in coins. Since withdrawals work seamlessly, ETH behaves less like a forced locked asset and more like a yield-generating position that can change size when sentiment changes.
Overall, Ethereum staking supply is around 30%, well below the 50% that Galaxy Digital predicted at the end of 2025. Expectations Galaxy had that ETH would sustain prices above $5,500 thanks to the staking-induced supply shock, and that Layer 2s would outperform Layer 1s in economic activity, did not materialize.
ETH all-time highs could be a while away
Ethereum’s DeFi TVL sits around $74 billion, well below its peak of about $106 billion in 2021, even as daily active addresses have nearly doubled over the same period, according to DeFi Llama.
The network still represents about 58% of total DeFi TVL, but that proportion masks a more fragmented reality.
Incremental growth is increasingly being captured by ecosystems like Solana, Base, and bitcoin’s native DeFi, allowing activity to expand across Ethereum’s orbit without translating into the same concentration of value or demand for ETH itself.
That fragmentation is important because Ethereum’s strongest bullish arguments used to be simple. Higher usage meant more fees, more flaring and more structural pressure on supply.
The TVL peak of 2021 was also an era of leverage; A lower TVL today doesn’t necessarily mean less usage, just less foam.
However, in the current regime, 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 this time.
“One way to put it is that Ethereum has lost directional clarity,” DNTV Research founder Bradley Park shared in a note to CoinDesk. “If ETH is treated primarily as a fiat asset that can be staked rather than actively used, the burning mechanism is weakened: less ETH is burned, issuance continues, and sell-side pressure increases over time.”
“Over the last 30 days, Base has generated significantly more fees than Ethereum itself. That contrast raises a more difficult question for Ethereum: whether its current trajectory adequately channels usage back to value for ETH,” Park added.
That gap between activity and value capture is appearing in prediction markets.
On Polymarket, traders assign just an 11% chance of ETH hitting a new all-time high by March 2026, despite higher active addresses and still dominant DeFi TVL participation.
The price suggests that the market views fragmentation and unlimited betting supply as limiting factors, and usage alone is no longer enough to force a challenge to the all-time high.
But that picture could change quickly if US policy evolves to allow yield-yielding ETH products, a change that would reopen “staking premium” trading.
