Nearly 36 million Ethereum tokens worth more than $119 billion are now locked in staking contracts — representing close to 30% of the cryptocurrency's circulating supply — as network founder Vitalik Buterin urges developers to stop experimenting and start building applications people will actually use.
What Happened: Staking Surge Reaches 18-Month High
Staked ETH climbed from 35.5 million to almost 36 million since early January, according to ValidatorQueue data. The price has dropped more than 30% since August.
The staking queue now exceeds 2.5 million ETH, its highest level since August 2023. The unstaking queue stands at zero.
Institutional participants including publicly listed Digital Asset Treasuries and major staking services have driven much of the recent activity. Market observers say the growing stake strengthens the protocol's security profile.
Buterin, meanwhile, declared the infrastructure ready. He pointed to proof of stake, lower transaction costs, and functional scaling through ZK-EVMs and Layer 2s as evidence.
"In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web," he wrote on X on Jan. 14.
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Why It Matters: Infrastructure Ready, Apps Needed
Buterin introduced what he called the "walkaway test" — a simple standard asking whether a decentralized application's data and functionality would survive if its operator vanished.
He cited Fileverse, a decentralized document editor, as passing that test.
He criticized consumer devices that lock users into accounts, subscriptions and data collection. The contrast was clear: tools people own versus products that own them.
The split between technical progress and market pressure remains visible. A swollen staking queue signals long-term conviction in the network's future, but developers must now deliver practical software that meets everyday needs.
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