staking

Lido has launched 0x02 CSM, allowing permissionless operation for validators with a maximum effective balance of 2048 ETH. Operators do not need to self-fund the staking deposit; they only need to provide a bond. The first key requires 32 ETH, and subsequent keys require 30 ETH, with staking allocated by the protocol.This module adopts an initial deposit queue and an additional staking queue with a limit of 32 seats; the initial share cap upon launch is 0.01% of Lido Core TVL, and the first batch of approximately 32 keys will receive seed deposits.

According to monitoring by Arkham, the address marked as the Polygon multi-signature wallet "0xFA5" has transferred a total of 52,928,000 POL to the staking contract address, valued at approximately 4.82 million USD.Market analysis suggests that the recent increase in Polygon staking activities is related to the rise in APY, which may also provide some support for POL and alleviate its downward price pressure.

Marinade, the Solana staking service protocol, released its Q3 2026 report. As of September 30, the amount of SOL staked was 7.94 million, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 21.2%, mainly driven by the non-custodial native staking product Native and the institutional-focused Select. The amount staked in Native increased by 47.3% quarter-over-quarter to approximately 3.77 million, while Select grew by 38.7% to about 1.68 million, and mSOL decreased by 6.8% to around 2.27 million.Revenue for the third quarter was approximately $1 million, corresponding to 10,918 SOL, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 25.9%, primarily from validator margin settlement income, which grew by 38.1% quarter-over-quarter. In the staking auction market, 48 out of 51 epochs in the quarter had yields higher than the Solana staking index, with an average yield before Marinade fees of 5.93%, compared to 5.67% for the index during the same period.In governance, since the implementation of MIP-22 in July, Marinade has used 10% of auction fees to repurchase MNDE on the open market. In the third quarter, a total of 4.2 million MNDE was repurchased with 906.6 SOL, and the first distribution opened on October 1. The report also disclosed that on September 25, attackers exploited a vulnerability in the DAO voting process to submit two malicious proposals, one of which involved transferring DAO treasury assets; the council vetoed both proposals within about 6 hours, and the fix was completed that night, with no funds being transferred.

In a live broadcast in the third quarter, Aave founder Stani stated that Aavenomics 3.0 will include AAVE buybacks, staking, and burning.The AAVE buyback was suspended the day after the rsETH vulnerability incident on April 19. Since then, the DAO has committed to providing 25,000 ETH to DeFi United to compensate for the losses and has arranged for Mantle to provide a credit line of up to 30,000 ETH. Before the buyback was suspended, there was a proposal in the forum suggesting to reduce the annual buyback budget from approximately 50 million dollars to 30 million dollars.

According to monitoring by Lookonchain, three addresses have cumulatively withdrawn 24,454 ETH from Kraken and Binance, worth 60.68 million USD.Among them, a certain whale withdrew 10,954 ETH from Kraken and staked it after being inactive for 4 months; a certain whale withdrew 9,000 ETH from Binance and deposited it into Aave; a certain whale withdrew 4,500 ETH from Binance 10 hours ago.

The GMX governance forum has released the GMLabs-003 proposal, which plans to use all remaining protocol revenue after the GT buyback on the Solana side to repurchase GMX. The purchased tokens will be added to the staking rewards pool, and the GT buyback mechanism will remain unchanged.The proposal also intends to introduce a 180-day unbonding waiting period for existing and new GMX and esGMX staking positions on Arbitrum and Avalanche, calculated from the submission of the unbonding request, with the previously staked time not counted. Pending requests can be canceled, and existing positions do not need to be migrated. The above adjustments are scheduled to be implemented on October 28, depending on the readiness for implementation.

The Cardano Foundation calls on the European Union not to introduce new independent regulatory rules for DeFi and staking, advocating that existing financial laws should regulate based on the function and risk of activities rather than the technology used. The foundation outlined its 19-page opinion submitted to the European Commission on September 30 in a blog post released on Wednesday, urging a distinction between direct participation in decentralized networks and financial services provided by intermediaries, especially those involving the custody or control of user assets. The foundation stated that regulation should follow the substance of the activity, the functions performed, and the risks generated, rather than the technology relied upon to conduct the activity.The foundation pointed out that Cardano users can delegate native ADA tokens to help secure the network without relinquishing custody or locking up tokens, and this form of direct participation should be treated differently from staking services operated by intermediaries. The opinion also calls for a clearer distinction between the EU MiCA regulations and existing financial laws, warning that overlapping regulatory requirements and inconsistent interpretations among member states could create uncertainty for crypto businesses.This move comes as EU regulators consider expanding oversight of crypto services. In September, the European Securities and Markets Authority suggested adding additional safeguards for staking and lending activities and establishing a new category of regulated services for companies providing access to DeFi protocols. Additionally, the Cardano Foundation, along with five other blockchain organizations, sent a joint letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on October 20, urging it to formally recognize digital commodities as non-securities under the proposed crypto framework.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, the Ethereum treasury company Bitmine deposited 159,728 ETH (390 million USD) into Ethereum staking 6 hours ago, and has currently staked over 5.227 million ETH (1.28 billion USD).In addition, there are 1.33 million ETH queued for Ethereum staking, with a waiting time of over 23 days. The amount of ETH exiting staking is only 149,000, with a waiting time of less than 4 days.

The NEAR ecosystem governance proposal HSP-029 has entered the voting stage, proposing to gradually reduce the maximum annual issuance rate of NEAR tokens from 2.5% to 1.6%. This proposal was put forward by SVRN CEO Sal Ternullo, planning to linearly decrease by approximately 3.75 basis points per epoch over 24 months, while maintaining a 90/10 allocation ratio between stakers and the treasury. After the vote passes, there will be a 90-day grace period before the reduction officially begins.The proposal's calculations indicate that this plan is expected to reduce the issuance of approximately 11.8 million NEAR tokens over two years, with a cumulative reduction of about 66.1 million tokens over six years, equivalent to a 4.36% decrease in supply compared to the current situation. The annualized staking yield will gradually decrease from the current 5.268% to 3.372%. The author points out that this move aims to reduce the degree of dilution for non-staking holders and responds to discussions regarding the protocol's discretion risk following the withdrawal of the previous Sovereign Fund proposal.This proposal must go through a dual process to take effect: after passing the House of Stake vote, validators must also independently adopt it through the standard protocol upgrade process. The proposal cites Solana's SGP-0002, which was passed in August 2026 with a staking weight approval of 67.001% for a similar issuance reduction, as a precedent. Currently, the NEAR network has a total of 406 active validators, with a staking rate of 42.71%.

A network startup company called Optimum, led by Professor Muriel Médard from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced that its block propagation software mump2p has officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The Ethereum liquid staking protocol ether.fi has made mump2p a mandatory requirement for all 12 of its node operators, whereas previously the software was optional for its operators.Optimum stated that there are currently 16 node operators running mump2p in production environments, collectively managing approximately 22,000 validator keys and over 1.4 million staked ETH, accounting for more than 3% of the total staked amount on Ethereum. Partners include Blockdaemon, Everstake, P2P.org, Stakefish, and Bitcoin Suisse. The software operates in a sidecar gateway manner, not replacing Ethereum's default GossipSub, but rather overlaying it on top of libp2p and utilizing random linear network coding technology. Optimum claims that the block arrival speed is 2.42 times faster than GossipSub, with an approximately 7.88 times reduction in arrival time variance.Rok Kopp, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of ether.fi, stated that they will not require the entire validator set to adopt a new infrastructure unless they are confident that it can enhance the overall level of stakers and the network. Médard mentioned that traditional financial institutions invest billions of dollars to shorten execution times to the millisecond level because speed is money. Optimum launched its private testnet in June 2025, having previously completed a $11 million seed round financing led by 1kx, and plans to expand the protocol to other high-throughput blockchains after Ethereum.

According to Cointelegraph, the current amount of staked Ethereum has risen to a record 43.8 million ETH, accounting for 35.9% of the total ETH supply. Meanwhile, both the staking yield and the number of validators have decreased.

Dmitry Gusakov, the engineering lead of the Ethereum liquid staking protocol Lido, warned at the developer conference ACDC #189 that the one-time builder access mechanism introduced by the Glamsterdam upgrade could interfere with the existing deposit protection logic of the staking protocol, leading to the hijacking of staking deposits. This issue involves multiple deposits sharing the same validator public key.According to Ethereum's current deposit rules, the first valid deposit determines the withdrawal credential, and staking protocols typically leverage this feature to prevent credential manipulation, such as initially depositing a small amount of ETH and then topping up the remaining funds once the expected credential appears. However, the special access mechanism introduced for builders by Glamsterdam may change the interpretation of subsequent pending deposits under the same public key during the fork transition period, putting the staking protocol at risk of a third outcome: the validator does not appear, and the deposited ETH is credited to the builder.Lido's proposed fix is to maintain the distinction between validator deposits and builder deposits during the one-time access process. However, core developers rejected this modification on the grounds of timing, mainly because the Sepolia testnet has already been activated according to existing specifications, and the Hoodi client version is also in preparation. Changing the behavior at this point could require redeploying Sepolia and conducting additional testing. The issue affects the access process during the fork transition period, rather than the ongoing deposit processing rules, but its consequences could impact deposits waiting in the queue.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a certain whale staked HYPE worth 10.95 million dollars, incurring a loss of 2.02 million dollars within 30 days.The whale staked 139,050 HYPE (worth 10.95 million dollars) and delegated it to Infinitefield(.)xyz. The wallet also holds a long position worth 202,250 dollars, involving CXMT, CXMT, SKHX, and LYTE, with an unrealized profit and loss of -36,540 dollars. Its perpetual contract history has a total profit of 7.22 million dollars, but it has overall lost 2.02 million dollars in the past 30 days.

The Nasdaq-listed company SharpLink (SBET) announced that it has cumulatively deployed $400 million in ETH to the liquidity staking protocols Ether.fi and Lido. The company stated that both funds have been actively invested, aiming to enhance the yield efficiency of its ETH treasury.According to the plan announced in August, SharpLink intends to stake $200 million in ETH through Lido and obtain wstETH, with the related assets being custodied by Anchorage Digital. The other portion of the funds will be deployed through Ether.fi to the Linea network under Consensys, and jointly participate in re-staking with EigenCloud to obtain DeFi yields and incentives.SharpLink is one of the largest enterprise-level ETH holders globally, advocating for Ethereum ecosystem applications for a long time. This deployment continues its existing staking and re-staking strategy, further allocating treasury assets to institutional-grade DeFi products.

According to official news from IoTeX, the Zanzibar hard fork has been activated on the IoTeX mainnet (block height 53,533,081). According to IIP-59, voter rewards will be calculated and distributed on-chain during each reward cycle, eliminating off-chain services and intermediaries, allowing anyone to directly verify each payment on-chain. The first on-chain distribution will take place the following day.This upgrade also strengthens consensus by checking the proof of holding representative keys, preparing for subsequent BLS signature aggregation. Node operators need to upgrade to iotex-core v2.5.1 without the need to modify configurations or resynchronize.

Aster officially announced that from October 5, 2026, 00:00 to October 19, 2026, 00:00 (UTC), 99% of the daily transaction fees on the platform will be used for buybacks, totaling 2,721,732.41 ASTER repurchased for stakers; at the same time, an equivalent amount of ASTER tokens allocated by the team has also been burned.Since adopting the upgraded token economic model on June 17, 2026, the total amount of ASTER burned has reached 32,307,874.94 tokens; the project's historical total burn amount has reached 210,088,876.51 tokens. As of now, Aster expects the annualized staking yield to be: 4.53% for a 26-week lock-up and 24.8% for a 208-week lock-up. Actual yields may vary.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a giant whale has newly staked 399,994 HYPE (approximately 30.92 million USD), bringing its total staked amount over the past day to about 500,000 HYPE (approximately 38.92 million USD). This batch of HYPE was unstaked by this address two months ago.

According to Cointelegraph, Solana has not reported any mainnet outages for two consecutive years. The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) report indicates that its network health has made progress in resilience, economic security, and performance metrics.The report points out that high staking participation and incentive mechanisms for rewarding validators support Solana's economic security, while low latency, improved scalability, and low-cost transactions also support its large-scale applications.The report also states that the concentration of staking among a few validator identities and operators, as well as the concentration of custodial and client software, still requires ongoing observation. Jacob Creech, Vice President of Technology at the Solana Foundation, stated that Solana reduced the slot time to 350 milliseconds on August 21; the foundation announced plans in June to further reduce it to 200 milliseconds, with three subsequent adjustments of 50 milliseconds each.

Stacks, the second-layer platform for Bitcoin, has released its third-quarter ecosystem report. The data shows that a total of 735 BTC entered the Bitcoin staking system during the first two locking periods. Since the PoX-5 hard fork, the number of STX participating in staking has increased by over 25%, rising from 392 million to 493 million.In the first locking period (Bond 1), a total of 230 BTC was deposited, with participants including 21shares, HashKey Cloud, UTXO Management, and Sypher Capital. The deposit amount in the second locking period doubled to 505 BTC. The locked value of Zest Protocol exceeds 80 million dollars, with deposits over 122 million dollars, total borrowings exceeding 42 million dollars, and 800 Bitcoin deployed as collateral.Stacks plans to launch a self-custodial lending feature backed by staked Bitcoin in the fourth quarter, along with the introduction of the Earn treasury, and further integration of stBTC with platforms such as Zest, Bitflow, and Hermetica. Additionally, Stacks plans to release the Epoch 4.1 network upgrade in early December, which includes improvements to the smart contract language Clarity.

Lido announced the integration of direct ETH staking functionality for Arbitrum, Base, Linea, and Optimism Layer 2 networks into its official staking interface, which was announced on October 15. This process is supported by Chainlink's cross-chain interoperability protocol CCIP, allowing users to directly obtain wstETH on the originating network without manually transferring ETH across chains to Ethereum and back.Lido stated that users' ETH will be exchanged for wstETH through dedicated liquidity pools on the same L2, with the Chainlink price feed reflecting the exchange rate of the Lido protocol rather than the exchange market price. The underlying staking still occurs on the Ethereum mainnet: the ETH deposited by users on L2 will automatically be transferred to Ethereum and staked through Lido, after which wstETH will be sent back to replenish the local liquidity pool. Users receive the wrapped version of stETH, wstETH, which maintains a fixed balance while its value reflects staking rewards.This functionality integrates existing cross-chain infrastructure into Lido's own interface. Lido previously introduced relevant channels for Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism in October 2024, with third-party frontends including XSwap, OpenOcean, and Interport, while Linea followed up in October 2025. In terms of fees, users will still need to pay L2 transaction gas, and cross-chain costs come from the separately funded contract balance rather than staker deposits;