Ethereum Unstaking Process Now Takes About 17 Days To Complete

According to data from Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm, Ethereum validators who requested withdrawals following last week’s “Shanghai” upgrade will have to wait 17 days to withdraw their staked Ethereum (ETH). There are some 28,436 validators in unstacking request queue that want to leave the Ethereum Beacon Chain.

Meanwhile, data shows that there are approximately 575,359 validators on the Ethereum blockchain. Thus, about 5% of validators are choosing to exit Ethereum’s staking process.

There are several processes that must be gone through before exiting staking.

Niklas Polk, an analyst at Nansen stated that validators will first send an exit message. Here they have to wait for 25 minutes. These validators then join the departure line, which currently sits at 11.7 days. After exiting this phase, they face a withdrawal delay of approximately 27 hours. Finally, the actual withdrawal will be processed and deposited after another 4.25 days.

However, if a validator chooses to join the exit queue today, it will take 17 days to process their Ethereum back.

Meanwhile, partial withdrawals take just 4.27 days. A partial withdrawal means that the validator is only pulling his staking rewards. However, already staked Ethereum will remain in the original state in the process so that the validator can participate in further validation.

Ethereum Staking Is Still Gaining Popularity

Over 1 million Ethereums have been unstaked since the “Shanghai” upgrade.

In February, US-based crypto exchange, Kraken, was forced to cease its crypto staking program as part of a settlement with the US SEC. According to Nansen, the company accounted for about 43% of ETH’s withdrawal queue.

Meanwhile, investors have deposited more Ethereum into the chain in the last 24 hours than withdrawal requests. Despite all withdrawals already made, it generated a net of 86,000 ETH staked or a 0.3% increase in staked Ethereum. This shows that investors are becoming more interested in the Ethereum blockchain staking process.

Ethereum adopted a PoS (proof-of-stake) consensus mechanism in 2022. PoS is energy efficient, more secure, and better suited to implement new scaling solutions than the previous PoW (proof-of-work) consensus algorithm.

In PoW miners compete with each other to add blocks of the transaction to the Blockchain network and earn new coins. Miners have to consume high computational power and a lot of energy in PoW. While in PoS there are validators instead of miners for the validation of transactions. Validators first have to stake some Ethereum in the ETH blockchain. After staking, they add blocks and receive rewards of newly minted ETH and a portion of the associated transaction charges.