As The Merge approaches and the community anticipates its advent, confident investors have taken to staking their ETH tokens, awaiting rewards upon The Merge. Coinbase has announced that institutional investors in the US will now have the opportunity to join the bandwagon on its institution-targeted platform.
US institutional clients can initiate ETH staking on their Coinbase Prime accounts
In an official announcement on August 1, the American exchange revealed it would launch ETH staking in the US on its Coinbase Prime platform – the division tailored explicitly for institutional investors. US institutions that wish to will be able to yield interest from staking their ETH tokens.
“Clients can create a wallet, decide how much to stake, and initiate staking from the ETH asset page on their Coinbase Prime account,” the blog post said. Coinbase further assured clients of the security of their staked ETH and yields earned – a disclosure which has recently become necessary, considering recent events within the space.
According to Coinbase, the staked ETH tokens will have the ticker “ETH2” on the platform since the values of both ETH and ETH2 tokens would be the same. Following the imminent Merge, all tokens will be identified with the original “ETH” ticker.
There are currently about 13.8M staked ETH tokens
Besides ETH, institutional investors using Coinbase Prime also have the chance to stake a wide range of other crypto assets for yield generation, including Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT) and Tezos (XTZ), among others.
Staking on a proof-of-stake chain is equivalent to mining on a proof-of-work chain – stakers have the opportunity to participate in transaction validation on the PoS blockchain and earn yields for their efforts. This also helps secure the network.
Ethereum proponents have the opportunity to deposit 32 ETH in the staking pool to assume validator status as The Merge approaches. Although it is possible to stake less ETH, 32 ETH is the minimum required to actuate one’s own validator software.
At the time of writing, there are about 13,876,398 ETH tokens staked, representing 11% of ETH’s total circulating supply of 121M tokens. The total number of independent validators is 411,587. These values are expected to rise as most crypto institutional investors are concentrated in the US.
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