Huge swiss bank launches ETH staking

• Citing growing demand from its institutional clients, Swiss bank SEBA has decided to offer ETH staking services.
• The staking services shall be available on a monthly basis and via an adjustable lock-up period post the Merge upgrade.

As Ethereum approaches close to its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) transition, the interest in staking ETH tokens continues to grow significantly. As per the data from CryptoQuant more than 13.32 million ETH tokens have been staked so far.

With the growing demand for ETH staking, even traditional financial institutions have been jumping into the game. On Wednesday, September 7, Switzerland-based leading banking institution SEBA announced that it has launched Ethereum staking services for its institutional clients. Thus, SEBA clients can now earn staking rewards on the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum.

The decision by SEBA to launch “staking services” comes amid growing demand from its institutional clients. Ethereum staking services will allow SEBA’s clients to earn rewards in an accessible and flexible manner.

As per the official statement from SEBA, the staking services shall be available on a monthly basis and via an adjustable lock-up period post the Merge upgrade. Additionally, to guarantee asset security, SEBA shall also implement a cost-effective fee structure. Speaking of the development, Mathias Schütz, Head of Technology & Client Solutions of SEBA Bank said:

The launch of our Ethereum staking services will enable institutional investors to play a key role in securing the future of the network, via a trusted, secure and fully regulated counterparty.

Our institutional grade staking services offer a comprehensive and fully integrated platform for earning rewards from investments across a range of leading PoS crypto networks.

By launching support for Ethereum staking we continue to deliver our clients the cutting-edge technology that they need to stay apace with the rapidly evolving digital assets industry.

The Merge developments

On Tuesday, September 6, Ethereum developers announced that the Bellatrix upgrade has finally gone live taking a step closer to the Ethereum Merge. The Bellatrix upgrade strengthens the Beacon Chain and prepares the Ethereum mainnet for the Merge. The final Merge upgrade shall happen around September 15 as per the earlier schedule.

A number of exchanges are also preparing for the Ethereum Merge with giants like Coinbase announcing that they will only support the PoS version of the Ethereum blockchain. After the PoS transition, miners will have no role to play as stakers and validators shall be approving transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

However, one concerning development today was that the price of staked ETH (stETH) was dropping on the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Curve Finance. As first reported by blockchain security and analysis firm PeckShield, stETH was trading at a price of 0.958 ETH. Crypto journalist Colin Wu reported:

The stETH exchange price on Curve has dropped to 0.9585 ETH. There are currently 155,860 ETHs (accounting for 22.72%) and 530,141 stETHs (accounting for 77.28%) in the current pool. There may be some demand for receiving forked airdrops.