Sentiment towards Ethereum Ether (ETH) has sunk to depressed levels of late, but the crypto platform’s latest move linked to President Donald Trump could raise hopes of a reversal.
World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform linked to the Trump family, this week deposited a total of 10,000 ether (ETH) worth $33 million into liquid staking platform Lido Finance (LDO) for staking and earn rewards, blockchain. This was shown by Arkham Intelligence data. Lido is the largest ether staking platform with $31 billion in assets posted on the platform.
The transactions came after World Liberty Finance acquired more than $110 million in crypto assets, including ETH, wrapped bitcoin (wBTC), Tron’s TRX, AAVE, LINK, and Ethena’s ENA, as CoinDesk reported.
The move raises hopes that regulators will soon allow betting on spot ETH exchange-traded funds. SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, who now heads the agency’s cryptocurrency task force, said last month in an interview with Coinage that she was willing to consider betting on ETFs. Former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, known for his anti-crypto stance in the industry, resigned on January 20 when Trump took office.
Staking would increase the attractiveness of investment products, allowing investors to earn a steady stream of returns on their holdings and reducing product fees. The combined US spot ETH ETFs contain $12 billion in assets, according to data from SoSoValue.
Potential regulatory approval could also shake up the price of ETH and adjacent ecosystem tokens like Lido’s LDO. Ethereum’s future has been under the microscope recently, amid falling prices relative to competitors, leadership disputes, and concerns over the project’s development roadmap. ETH recently fell to a 4-year low price against bitcoin (BTC) and ceded market share in trading activity to fast-growing blockchains like Solana.
“I will never trade ETH again afterward, but watch how quickly sentiment changes when staking ETH ETFs arrive in the coming weeks,” said well-known cryptocurrency trader Pentoshi.
“ETH will have a multi-week gigabomb sometime in 2025, around betting ETF news… If [you’re] ETH for too long, that’s when you abandon it and move to better-performing assets,” Alex Krüger, partner at Asgard Markets, said in an X post.
