Ethereum’s staking queues have emptied out and the network can now absorb new validators and exits almost in real time.

This means the rush to lock up ETH has faded for now and staking is settling into a steady-state instead of a scarcity trade.

Queues are simply the time spent to start or stop staking on the Ethereum network, acting as a sentiment gauge and a liquidity gauge.

In one sense, the lack of queues is a feature, not a bug, as these are proof Ethereum can handle staking flows without locking up liquidity for weeks.

At the same time, staking rewards have compressed toward 3% as total staked ETH grew faster than issuance and fee income, limiting incentives for renewed surges in either direction and leaving queues near zero even as overall staking participation remains elevated.

Lower yield can reflect crowding, but also a higher ‘trust premium’ — more ETH is choosing to sit in staking rather than on exchange order books.

What this means in plain terms is that “staking pressure” is no longer a daily narrative.

When queues are long, ETH supply is effectively being locked faster than the network can onboard validators, and that can create a sense of scarcity.

When queues sit near zero, the system is closer to neutral. People can stake or unstake without waiting weeks, which makes staking feel less like a one-way door and more like a liquid allocation.

This changes the psychology around the ether trade.

Staking still reduces immediate sell pressure, but it is not the same as coins being stuck. With withdrawals functioning smoothly, ETH behaves less like a forced lockup asset and more like a yield-bearing position that can be resized when sentiment shifts.

Overall, Ethereum’s staking supply is at 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 staking-induced supply shock, and that layer-2s would overtake layer-1s in economic activity, failed to materialize.

Ethereum’s DeFi TVL sits around $74 billion, well below its roughly $106 billion peak in 2021, even as daily active addresses have nearly doubled over the same period, according to DeFi Llama.

The network still accounts for close to 58% of total DeFi TVL, but that share masks a more fragmented reality.

Incremental growth is increasingly being captured by ecosystems such as Solana, Base, and bitcoin-native DeFi, allowing activity to expand across the Ethereum orbit without translating into the same concentration of value or demand for ETH itself.

That fragmentation matters because Ethereum’s strongest bull arguments used to be simple. More usage meant more fees, more burns, and more structural pressure on supply.

The 2021 TVL peak was also a leverage era; a lower TVL today doesn’t necessarily mean less usage, just less froth.

In the current regime, however, a meaningful chunk of user activity can happen on layer-2 networks where fees are cheaper and experience is smoother, but the value capture that accrues back to ETH can be less obvious to spot markets at the moment.

“One way to frame it is that Ethereum has lost directional clarity,” shared DNTV Research founder Bradley Park in a note to CoinDesk. “If ETH is treated primarily as a trust asset to be staked rather than actively used, it weakens the burn mechanism: less ETH gets burned, issuance continues, and sell-side pressure builds over time.”

“Over the past 30 days, Base has generated significantly more fees than Ethereum itself. That contrast raises a harder question for Ethereum, whether its current trajectory adequately channels usage back into value for ETH,” Park added.

That gap between activity and value capture is showing up in prediction markets.

On Polymarket, traders assign just an 11% chance that ETH reaches a new all-time high by March 2026, despite higher active addresses and a still-dominant share of DeFi TVL.

The pricing suggests the market views fragmentation and unconstrained staking supply as limiting factors, with usage alone no longer sufficient to force a challenge of the all-time high.

But that picture could shift quickly if U.S. policy evolves to allow yield-bearing ETH products, a change that would re-open the ‘staking premium’ trade.