Written by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Whenever the market is good, FUD is inevitable.
Today, a piece of news has once again raised concerns about the price of ETH:
Validators on the Ethereum network are queueing to unstake ETH.
As a representative of the PoS consensus mechanism, staking ETH is technically used to maintain the security of the entire Ethereum network, and economically it can generate additional income from staking, locking ETH's liquidity in the staking pool.
However, according to data from the Validator Queue, as of July 23, about 521,252 ETH are queued for unstaking in the Ethereum validators' exit queue, valued at approximately $1.93 billion, with a waiting time of over 9 days and 1 hour for unstaking.
This is also the longest queue validators have faced when choosing to exit in the past year.
Since each validator usually stakes 32 ETH, theoretically, this corresponds to over 16,000 validators seeking to exit staking. The large-scale queue for unstaking raises some danger signals.
Profit-taking?
Are the whales and institutions selling ETH to take profits?
The surge in ETH unstaking may be partly related to the recent price increase.
Starting from the low point in early April 2025 (around the $1,500-$2,000 range), ETH has experienced a strong rebound, with a cumulative increase of 160% to date. Specifically, on July 21, ETH reached a high of $3,812, the peak in the past seven months.
Such rapid increases often prompt some investors to take profits, especially those who staked early; they may decide to lock in profits upon seeing returns rather than continue holding.
From a historical perspective, this pattern is not new.
From January to February 2024, after the ETH/BTC ratio increased by 25% in a week, a similar scale of unstaking occurred, leading to a short-term price drop of 10%-15%. However, it was around the same time that Celsius went bankrupt, with 460,000 ETH being unstaked in a short period, causing a queue congestion of about a week for validators to exit the ETH network.
Not selling pressure
Unlike before, although the current ETH unstaking queue is long and the amount unstaked is large, it does not necessarily indicate direct selling pressure.
First, looking at the data from the Validator Queue, on July 23, there were 520,000 ETH queued for unstaking, but at the same time, 360,000 ETH entered the staking queue.
Offsetting each other, the net amount of ETH exiting the Ethereum network will be significantly reduced.
Secondly, institutional behavior also plays a certain buffering role.
Data from July 22 shows that the total inflow of ETH spot ETFs from various institutions in the open market reached $3.1 billion, significantly greater than the 520,000 ETH (approximately $1.9 billion) that were queued for unstaking that day.
Moreover, this is just the net inflow of ETFs for one day, not to mention that there is a 9-day queue for validators exiting.
At the same time, unstaking does not necessarily mean selling.
In the current environment of rising ETH prices, concentrated unstaking may also be due to institutions adjusting their custodial services or shifting to crypto treasury strategies, meaning they are looking for better returns by changing custodians for ETH rather than selling ETH.
Meanwhile, some of the unstaked ETH on-chain is more likely to be used for DeFi and NFT-related activities. For example, as collateral to provide liquidity, or recently a whale swept the floor of Crypto Punks;
Additionally, on-chain LST tokens often experience decoupling phenomena, which also provides arbitrage opportunities for ETH—such as the recent ratio of stETH to ETH dropping to 0.996 (discount of about 0.04%), with weETH also seeing similar fluctuations. Arbitrageurs buy discounted LSTs and wait for the 1:1 peg to recover to profit, which increases the demand for ETH.
Overall, unstaking seems more like an internal adjustment within the Ethereum ecosystem rather than a direct selling signal.
However, there are various speculations on social media; concentrated unstaking does not necessarily indicate selling pressure but may point to a phenomenon of 'changing operators'.
There is a viewpoint that BlackRock, committed to promoting crypto assets into the mainstream financial circle, has effectively become a major player in ETH. As of July data, BlackRock has accumulated over 2 million ETH (worth approximately $6.9-8.9 billion), accounting for about 1.5%-2% of the total ETH supply (around 120 million ETH).
This is not a secret but rather a public asset management activity of ETFs, so it resembles an institutional-level 'clear market'—publicly holding and accumulating through ETFs to promote institutional adoption of ETH rather than manipulating the market.
The logic of changing operators is that as Ethereum transitions from a value consensus within its circle to a broader consensus as a financial tool, it is a very obvious trend that Wall Street is preparing to make a big move.
This speculation is not without reason; staking and unstaking may also represent a change in the structure of the chips.
However, in any case, Ethereum's growth potential will continue to support its leadership position in the crypto space, and this wave of unstaking may just be the starting point of a new cycle.
