Staking has moved from a crypto-native validator activity to a mainstream product generating real revenue. Success depends on choosing the right infrastructure partners, a lesson shared by leading regulated platforms Uphold and eToro in a recent webinar with Figment’s Head of Revenue, Josh Deems, and Fireblocks.
The Business Case Is Real
Uphold, the FCA-registered platform operating across UK, US, and EU markets, discovered staking users are 4x more valuable than non-staking users. “These users are more likely to diversify holdings and have proven sticky even during market downturns,” Marcos Santillana, VP of Digital Asset Services, Institutional at Uphold, explained. The proof is in the growth: Uphold’s staking user base grew 5x over the past 12 months despite fluctuating market conditions.
eToro, which went public a year ago, has been staking for 5-6 years and actively scaled the offering over the past 2-3 years. The platform highlighted an underrated benefit: unlike trading volume-based revenue, staking can provide predictable income as long as clients hold assets, regardless of market activity.
Safety Amid DeFi Alternatives
When DeFi protocols experienced hacks, staking continued to function safely. Assets never leave Fireblocks custody when staking to Figment validators — they stay in the original custody location throughout. That’s a meaningful distinction from DeFi: delegating funds to a validator is not the same as transferring them out of a wallet. Platforms and their users earn rewards on Proof-of-Stake networks like Solana and Ethereum without giving up control of their assets.
Operational Reality
The two biggest challenges? Transaction signing and reporting.
Users are looking to stake with operational efficiency. Reporting serves dual purposes: internal tracking of rewards and revenue, plus external communication showing users their earnings. Without solving both, platforms struggle to drive adoption. The Fireblocks-Figment integration provides APIs, Click-to-Stake capabilities, and transaction signing workflows that enable this.
Partnership > Build
Both platforms chose the Fireblocks and Figment combination to avoid the significant lift of building in-house. This enabled faster time-to-market and allowed teams to focus on the customer-facing product rather than infrastructure complexity.
Figment brings institutional credibility: serving over 1,500 clients globally, with approximately 6% of staked Ethereum and Solana on their respective networks. Figment achieved SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and maintains a “safety over liveness” principle, never putting customer funds at risk of slashing. Figment offers coverage for the primary risks associated with protocol staking: missed rewards, downtime penalties, and double-sign slashing.
Fireblocks handles the custody piece with non-custodial infrastructure: assets never leave secure vaults, private keys are never held in one place, and every staking transaction flows through the policy engine for compliance and audit trails.
Marketing to Customers
Fee structures vary by platform. eToro runs a tiered model (55% to 10% of rewards, depending on membership tier). Uphold uses a flat spread, applying the same fee across assets to prioritize simplicity and transparency.
Both platforms took different approaches to user education. eToro relies on website pages and monthly communications; Uphold by displaying commission rates and unbonding periods at the point of staking. The goal for both is limiting technical complexity while keeping detailed information available for those interested.
Takeaway
Building strong operational infrastructure for monitoring, reporting, and scalability is achievable with lean teams — the key is partnering with the right providers for the infrastructure. Platforms don’t need to be experts in staking, risk management, or custody to launch successfully. Working with Figment and Fireblocks, both Uphold and eToro got to market and revenue faster and built better products than they would have going in-house.
Watch the full webinar here.
