Let's get to the big story breakdown.
Metallic Buerin published Ethereum's white paper back in 2013 envisioning a programmable blockchain that could do far more than Bitcoin.
The network went live in July 2015 after an initial token sale, and today, it's the second largest chain in crypto, with ES boasting a market cap of about $450 billion.
Now we are halfway through 2025, the 10th anniversary of Ethereum's Genesis blog was just marked less than 24 hours ago.
So joining me this morning is Andy Beer, head of product and research at Coin Desk Indexes.
Good morning.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Well, there's a lot of economic data as well as headlines, and here at the New York Stock Exchange, we have an IPO, but today we're focusing on Ethereum and its 10th anniversary.
So tell us about this.
Everybody was kind of getting their AI image generators going yesterday to come up with party hats and birthday cakes for Ethereum's 10th birthday.
It's a great event tomorrow.
Mark, you know, a decade contract platforms tremendously in the education process for new Bitcoin, but then after that they feel that they have to start afresh with things like smart contracts and stablecoins and layer 1s and layer 2.
So it's a good reminder, especially with Ethereum's performance this year, to think about things beyond Bitcoin.
And tell us about Ethereum's staking yields first and foremost why this is important and what we're seeing right now.
A couple of years ago, Ethereum changed it.
Security mechanism from a mining mechanism like Bitcoins to a staking mechanism where people would commit values basically pools of eth financial staking in order to help secure the network and in exchange for that they're receiving a yield.
So this is a very democratized and low energy way to create a secure blockchain.
That yield or that reward yield that people get has been declining somewhat very slowly as more and more validators get in on the action.
But it still trends around 3%.
It's been very steady.
This is the kind of yield that one hopes would be allowed to be delivered to ETF holders, and that's a regulatory change that we're all waiting for in the industry.
But right now, about, about a quarter, between 25% and 30% of all Ethereum is staked to provide security for the network, and those, those that are doing that are receiving a roughly 2.8 or 3% yield.
We have a benchmark for that rate called Caesar, and you know that's that's.
Used quite a bit in the industry.
And Andy, tell us about the validator queue as well.
So there was a lot of talk last week, especially Eth has been on a performance tear, right?
It's more than doubled since the low in April or the end of the first quarter.
It's pretty close to where it reached last November at 4000.
It's still far away from its all-time high, which was about 4 years ago.
But people started to think, are people, have they had enough profit?
Are they going to get out?
One of the signals that people are looking at is our people taking their Eth away from those validator networks which takes time.
They have to get in line to unbond from that process, and that unbonding line has gone from less than a day to about 11 days.
People are concerned that means that people are going to just take their Eth out unbonded from that process and sell it, which is the bearer signal.
We see other things at play.
For example, Ethereum's validator framework changed so that you can now put more.
In each validator node that you used to be able to, used to be limited to 32 e.
Now you can put more than 2000 eth in a single node.
So we think at least some of that is the nodes kind of as each one can get bigger, individual nodes can unbond.
So we think it's more of a technical effect than a selling signal.
And finally, Andy, before I let you go, tell us a little bit about the SEC's approval when it comes to in-kind creations as well as redemptions.
What does this Actually mean for ETFs.
So it's it's a it's a good big step towards efficiency.
Back in January of 2024, only a few weeks before actually the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, the SEC imposed a rule that said basically you can't take Bitcoin and put it directly into a trustee to fund the creation of an ETF share.
You actually have to buy the Bitcoin, which means if you had Bitcoin, you'd have to sell it into dollars.
You'd have to buy it back, and then you can do your creation.
Many felt that this was an unnecessary extra piece of plumbing that would complicate things, create a little trading friction friction, and ultimately it wouldn't benefit the ETF holders because of that friction.
So allowing people to actually deliver Bitcoin and ether directly into those ETFs will take a piece of task out of the chain and help things be more efficient.
OK, Andy, well thank you so much for joining us today and for simply finding some dense and complicated concepts.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
