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Staking Rewards Will Double to $18.9 Billion by 2022: Report

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Staking Rewards Will Double to $18.9 Billion by 2022: Report

Total staking rewards on proof-of-stake blockchains will almost double this year to $18.9 billion, up from last year’s $10 billion, predicted a report on staking by ETH infrastructure firm Staked.

“In every case, staking provided better returns than simply holding the asset: stakers earned an additional yield of between roughly 4% and 34% in one quarter,” the report said.

Staking means to pledge cryptocurrency money to a blockchain network. Staking helps the blockchain validate transactions—key to keeping things running. Staked funds can’t be used elsewhere.

Staking can only be performed on blockchains that rely on a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to validate transactions, such as Tezos. You can’t stake BTC on the BTC blockchain because it uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, whereby energy-intensive mining validates transactions.

ETH is currently a proof-of-work network, but it’s preparing to shift to a proof-of-stake as part of its hotly-anticipated ETH 2.0 upgrade. Last November, ETH opened up staking for ETH 2.0. There are 3.9 million ETH staked on ETH 2.0, which is worth about $8.6 billion in today’s price.

ETH staking will accelerate

Tim Ogilvie, CEO of Staked, said that ETH 2.0 staking will accelerate in the next six to twelve months, thanks to two major changes that ETH will undergo this year.

The first is EIP-1559, an improvement proposal to reduce the supply of ETH. A hard fork to implement the upgrade is scheduled for 14 July, as confirmed by an announcement yesterday.

EIP-1559 will burn transaction fees instead of paying them directly to miners. At a total of $8 billion, transaction fees account for 3-4% of ETH’s total supply, according to Staked’s report. And burning those fees could pump ETH’s price, Ogilvie told Decrypt last month, since it would constrict the supply of ETH.

The second change to ETH is the merge to ETH 2.0, which is provisionally set for late 2021. That’s when ETH1 and ETH2 will be able to communicate with each other, marking a milestone in the full transition to ETH2.

ETH Upgrade Could Pump Price By Burning Billions in ETH Each Year

But the merge this summer won’t complete the switch to ETH 2.0. It still “leaves out things like sharding,” Ogilvie told Decrypt. Sharding slices down data into smaller chunks to make the ETH network faster and cheaper to use—one of the flagship features of ETH 2.0.

Crypto exchanges also driving staking

Outside ETH, there’s another driver of growth for staking: cryptocurrency exchanges. Over the past year, more cryptocurrency exchanges have started to allow their uses to stake ETH, “which makes [staking] easier for lots of people,” Ogilvie said. The minimum amount of ETH required for staking is also much lower than the 32 ETH required by the ETH 2.0 contract, meaning staking is much more accessible to retail investors.

But ETH staking, however small, locks up funds. “After the merge, the second step will be enabling transfers on ETH 2.0,” Ogilvie predicted, “and that’s when funds are opened up.” That’ll reintroduce a whole lot of ETH into the market.

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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All content in this article is for informational purposes only and in no way serves as investment advice. Investing in cryptocurrencies, commodities and stocks is very risky and can lead to capital losses.
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