After months of relative equilibrium in Ethereum’s validator set, a clear shift is underway. Validator activations are once again outpacing exits, signaling renewed staking demand and growing participation across multiple investor segments.
Activations Are Rising, Exits Have Cleared
On December 24th the exit queue crossed the activation queue:
After months of a more-or-less steady validator set, activations have started to outpace exits. The activation queue is now over 47 days, or 2.7 million ETH, while the exit queue has disappeared.
What’s Driving the Increase in Activations?
Over the last several months, validator activations have been driven by a mix of new inflows and re-entries. These include ETH ETFs, DATs, reactivation of stake following prior exits, and ongoing churn among large staking pools such as Lido.
On the ETF front, Grayscale, since the addition of staking to its ETH ETFs, has been staking a significant amount of ETH since the beginning of Q4 2025, reaching about 1.126M ETH by mid-January 2026 [see fund information for ETHE and ETH]. In fact, Grayscale recently announced that it will be passing on staking rewards directly to customers, the first US ETP to do so.
On the DAT side, Bitmine now represents 3.45% of all ETH supply (4,167,768 ETH), having staked 1,256,083 ETH of that – 596,864 in the first week of January alone.
Additionally, since December 1st, Lido has added over 352,000 of net new stake:
Finally, it appears we are also seeing many reactivations following some larger exits toward the end of last year, i.e., churn:
(here)
What’s next? Time to Stake
There are several plausible paths forward for the activation queue. One plausible scenario is that Ethereum experiences a sustained entry queue over the next year as pent-up staking demand continues to work its way into the validator set.
Additionally, there are some potential changes coming in the Glamsterdam upgrade – EIP-8080 and EIP-8061 – which will decrease time-to-liquidity significantly, further lowering barriers to staking.
It’s quite possible that ETH staking participation goes from 30% today to 60% in the next couple of years. As a reminder, Ethereum can process a maximum of 256 ETH/epoch in activations and this is unlikely to change in Glamsterdam. This means that 57,600 ETH can be activated in a day, assuming no missed blocks, or 21,024,000 ETH/year.
Of course, assuming the maximum amount of ETH is activated over a year with no exits is quite unlikely. That said, given the large rotation we’ve seen over the last 6 months or so – millions of ETH exiting the validator set only to re-enter – it’s easy to forget about all of the stake sitting on the sidelines that is about to enter the validator set.
(here)
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A Growing Validator Set Comes With Tradeoffs
It’s also worth noting that a rapidly expanding validator set presents its own challenges for Ethereum. As the number of validators increases, achieving goals such as single slot finality becomes more difficult. In extreme scenarios, particularly as validator counts approach 2 million (see here and here, for instance), the overhead of aggregating data across the peer-to-peer networking layer can become unsustainable.
Additionally, some researchers and contributors at the Ethereum Foundation have suggested that long-term staking participation may need to be capped around 50–60% of total ETH supply (approximately 60–72 million ETH) to preserve network performance and security.
Bottom Line: Timing Matters
All of this is to say, if you are thinking about staking, now is the time. Activations are accelerating, structural changes are on the horizon, and demand from institutions and large holders continues to build.
And if you’re not ready to stake just yet, keep a close eye on the size of the validator set, and on how Ethereum core developers and the Ethereum Foundation respond as participation continues to grow.
