Ethereum Gets Extra $38M In Staking From Ether Capital

Publicly traded company Ether Capital has added an additional $38 million or 10,240 to Ethereum 2.0 staking. Per a press release shared with Bitcoinist, the company has a total of $59 million staked into this network’s Proof-of-Stake consensus layer.

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Based in Canada, Ether Capital attracted media attention in 2021 when a became one of the first public companies to allocate millions into Ethereum staking. As part of a treasury strategy, the company is determined to support the development of this network its Web 3 ecosystem, and become its investment hub.

Ether Capital has a portfolio of over 44,061 ETH and plans to allocate at least 30,000 ETH into Ethereum 2.0 staking. This would represent 65% of its total ETH balance, which goes to show the optimist of the company on the development of Ethereum’s consensus layer.

In order to achieve this objective, the company made a partnership with Figment to build and run their own validator infrastructure. Thus, making it not only investors on the Ethereum migration to a PoS consensus, but a direct contributor to the network’s security.

Additionally, the company will be turning 766 of their MakerDAO tokens (MKR) into gross proceeds, according to the press release, which is about $1.9 million. The funds will be used for “general corporate purposes”, such as share purchases or an increase in their ETH balance.

The company has a $162 million market valuation due to their ETH balance, and a $166 million market valuation when accounting for their ETH and MKR balance along with an investment made in Wyre, a payment APIs provider.

Why Ethereum Could See More Companies Stake Into Its Consensus Layer

On their recent ETH allocation, Ether Capital CEO Brian Mossoff added the following emphasizing the company’s commitment to the Ethereum ecosystem:

We are thrilled to announce that we are now staking over 20,000 Ether and are well on the path to staking a majority of our Ether balance in the coming months. We are firmly committed to our unique strategy of being a net accumulator of Ether and are proud to provide validation and security to the Ethereum network as it transitions from proof of work consensus to proof of stake.

Bitcoin recently conducted an interview with Ether Capital CEO on their participation in Ethereum staking, crypto adoption, and their plans for 2022. When asked if ETH staking could see interest from other public companies, Mosoff said:

I think we’re still a fair bit away from seeing other companies stake ETH, but we can anticipate that eventually, we’ll see more institutional adoption of the asset. Currently, capital markets are fascinated with Bitcoin and will likely dip their toes in the water on that asset before they consider Ethereum. That said, innovations like DeFi and NFTs have turned heads and now institutions with young, eager employees are starting to pay attention to Ethereum, which is a good sign.

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Data from the Eth2 Rewards bots indicates that the current rewards for Ethereum staking stand at a 5% annual percentage rate, as seen below. The PoS network or Beacon Chain has over 290,000 active validators with a 97.44% participation rate.

—Current Network—
🤑 Reward rate: 5.00%
👨‍🌾 Participation rate: 97.44%
💻 Active validators: 293,574

—Queue—
⏰ Wait time: 0 hours
💻 Validators: 0
📉 Rewards impact: -0.07%

—Projected Annual Returns—
Ξ 1.6 ($4,599.26)

— Eth2 Rewards Bot (@Eth2Bot) February 14, 2022

As of press time, ETH trades at $2,950 with a 1.9% profit in the past 24-hours.