Ethereum (ETH) Staked Supply Hits Record 43.8 Million, Bitwise Reports

Update 14:51 UTC: Average fees for four common Ethereum (ETH) transaction types dropped 67% year over year to $0.45, which Bitwise ties to larger block capacity, and cheaper execution feeds back into the fee portion of staking income.

Sixth Straight Quarter of Net Inflows

Ethereum (ETH) ended the third quarter with a record 43.8 million ETH locked in its proof-of-stake contract, the consensus design that pays validators for securing the chain, equal to 35.9% of total supply. The average annualized staking yield, tracked as APY, came in at 2.63%, down from 2.81% in Q2, according to the 65-page report Bitwise released on Tuesday, October 20. Net inflows added 1.99 million ETH over the quarter, a sixth consecutive quarter of positive flows, up from Q2's 1.44 million though well below Q1's 4.53 million. Cumulative net additions for the first nine months of 2026 reached 7.96 million ETH, roughly six times the 1.31 million recorded over the same stretch of 2025. More than 96% of the quarter's yield was paid in freshly issued Ethereum (ETH), with MEV and priority fees covering the rest. Bitwise ties the thinner rate to arithmetic: as more ether competes for the same issuance, the reward earned on each coin falls. Fee income moved the other way. Network revenue on Ethereum fell to $40.6 million from $63 million in Q2, and fees plus MEV earned 18,210 ETH, about 198 ETH per day against 331 in the second quarter. That decline matters because fees are the part of the yield tied to actual usage. Demand for entry remains strong: the wait for new stakers shortened from about 70 days in February to about 25 days at quarter end, and our guide to how to stake Ethereum walks through the current options. Besides Ethereum, the report covers Solana, NEAR, Hyperliquid and Robinhood Chain.

Bitmine Eyes 5% of Supply

Bitwise credits institutional balance sheets for most of the acceleration. The report spotlights BitMine, the Ethereum treasury company chaired by Tom Lee, whose stake grew more than 1,000% in nine months, from 410,000 Ethereum (ETH) in December to 5.07 million ETH on September 27. Lee told the Token2049 conference in Singapore that BitMine will stop buying once it holds 5% of ETH supply, and said the company could sell its staking rewards to stay under that ceiling. Around 84% of the treasury is already staked through the MAVAN network, a position the report estimates will generate about $363 million a year at the prevailing 2.63% seven-day yield. The accumulation has continued past the report's cutoff, with Bitmine's holdings topping 6.04 million ETH since. Below the corporate flows, the validator layer itself is consolidating. The Pectra upgrade, which lifted a single validator's maximum from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH and enabled automatic compounding of consensus rewards, let operators fold balances together, and the count of active validators fell from about 1.1 million to roughly 881,000 even as total stake rose. Bitwise is trimming its own Lido fleet from around 8,000 validators to 125. Outflows cut the other way: MetaMask pulled roughly 523,000 ETH from validators run through Lido, the largest liquid staking service, after a security incident disclosed on September 30, and the exit queue peaked at 850,736 ETH. Solana set its own record in the same report, with active stake at 440.5 million SOL, 69% of supply, and a gross yield easing to 5.99% from 6.38%. Its validator count shrank to 659 from 696, about 30% fewer than a year ago, while the network processed a record 14.2 billion non-vote transactions and tokenized equity volume rose 45% to $6.93 billion. Bitwise put NEAR at 46% staked with a 4.87% yield and Hyperliquid at 2.24% on about 437.5 million HYPE.

The compression looks structural rather than cyclical. With more than 96% of rewards arriving as new issuance, staking returns now track monetary policy more than usage, and the fee side turned sharply against stakers this quarter. Institutional demand compounds the dilution: every treasury ETH joining the pool trims the rate for everyone already in it, and BitMine alone is accumulating toward 5% of supply, which gives that flow a defined endpoint. Solana's numbers in the same report sharpen the contrast, with fees up 49% to $76 million against Ethereum's decline and 14.2 billion non-vote transactions processed. Traders positioning around the yield story can follow our Ethereum technical analysis for the market-side levels.

The Ethereum Foundation, meanwhile, declined on September 7 to adopt EIP-8363, a proposal to cut issuance, for the next upgrade, per the report's researchers, leaving monetary policy and the staking yield's direction as the open question ahead. That decision lands against the backdrop of yields now tied almost entirely to issuance: 96.3% of the quarter's rewards came from new emissions rather than fees.

The report also extends its tokenization coverage beyond raw staking figures. Robinhood Chain's daily tokenized equity trading volume ended September at 22 times its level in early July, according to Bitwise, the sharpest single-network jump among the chains the firm tracks. On Solana, tokenized stock volume climbed 45% over the quarter to $6.93 billion, a figure the article already records, but the Robinhood Chain multiplication is a newer data point and lands in the same section of the report covering traditional financial assets moving on-chain. Bitwise reads both together as evidence that blockchain usage keeps spreading from plain crypto transfers toward tokenized capital markets products, which can trade outside conventional market hours on certain platforms.

Bitwise also breaks the 2.63% quarterly yield into its two parts, with consensus issuance contributing 2.53 points and priority fees plus MEV only 0.10 points, figures it calculates before operator commissions. The report credits Pectra's automatic restaking, introduced in May 2025, with swelling validator balances, since rewards on participating validators compound without a fresh deposit. The document also details the mechanics of the EIP-8363 debate: the proposal would burn part of validator rewards in proportion to the amount staked to hold net issuance down. The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol department took its September 7 position against adding the proposal to the Hedgotá upgrade on the grounds that a change to issuance policy requires wider community discussion first.

The same report shows usage costs falling alongside yields. Average fees for four common Ethereum transaction types dropped 67% year over year to $0.45, which Bitwise ties to larger block capacity, and cheaper execution feeds back into the fee portion of staking income. Off Ethereum, the tokenization figures extend beyond Solana and Robinhood Chain: Hyperliquid's non-crypto perpetuals reached $261.5 billion in volume, 36.5% of its total, with equity-linked contracts among its largest products, and Robinhood Chain generated $51.1 million in fees over the quarter while daily tokenized stock volume climbed from $17 million in July to $377.1 million by September. Bitwise frames the pattern as cheaper, higher-capacity chains absorbing activity from traditional markets, a shift it says changes the question for stakers from yield alone to whether blockchains can serve as infrastructure for markets larger than crypto itself.