Staking is no longer a niche add-on to Ether Ethereum$3,106.53 Investors in 2026 — This has become a defining feature of how financial institutions gain exposure to cryptocurrencies and shape product design, returns, and risk management across markets.
Short-term selling is limited by staking, but the coins are no longer locked up. With withdrawals occurring smoothly, Ether now trades less like a locked-up asset and more like a yield-bearing position that investors can scale up or down as sentiment changes.
Keene Gilbert, head of institutional relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, said the foundation was laid last year for the introduction of institutional staked ether (stETH). The clearest sign came in December, when asset management company WisdomTree launched a staked Ether exchange-traded product (ETP) using Lido’s stETH and listed it on major European markets such as SIX, Euronext, and Zetra. The product is completely fixed, and Gilbert believes this design choice will set the tone for what comes next.
Gilbert said it took more than a year and hundreds of questions from the publisher to feel comfortable, and described a due diligence process that included about 450 questions. “While fully staked products are operationally complex, they are becoming the benchmark that investors increasingly expect.”
Many existing Ether exchange traded funds (ETFs) and ETPs store a portion of their ETH without staking it to meet liquidity and redemption requirements. Gilbert says this approach has diminishing returns. With Ethereum staking yields hovering around 3%, a product that only stakes half of your ETH is effectively leaving yield on the table.
“With a 50% equity ETF, you only get half the reward,” he says. “If you can bet 100% and still get a T+1 or T+2 redemption, the economics are even better.”
Europe has already shown that this is possible. Gilbert points to fully staked products using liquid staking tokens like stETH, which can meet redemption timelines while remaining fully deployed. He expects the US market to follow the same path.
“Seeing products like WisdomTree stETH ETP (LIST) in Europe is a good indicator of where institutional ETH products are heading,” Gilbert said.
“The fully staked structure backed by stETH alleviates the need to hold large unstaked buffers for redemption, primarily because the liquidity already exists. Approximately $100 million of stETH liquidity is viable within 2% of the redemption value of ETH, allowing issuers to continue to fully stake their products without reducing staking rewards to investors,” he added.
Staking has emerged as an important way for crypto holders to generate income from their assets, but staking has also come under increased regulatory scrutiny in the United States.
US regulators, particularly the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), are starting to draw a clearer line between protocol-level staking (proof-of-stake network validation) and staking services that are more like investment products, and this distinction is now colliding with the next tier of crypto ETFs.
“The United States is monitoring what’s happening in Europe very closely,” Gilbert said. “Leading up to the launch of WisdomTree, US regulators have become more comfortable with staking, and we expect the process to be similar, with regulators becoming more focused on how staking ETFs are structured, rather than whether they should exist.”
There is a possibility that the changes will become clearer as early as 2026. Gilbert said he is confident that mid-summer is a realistic target for the VanEck Equity Ether ETF powered by Lido to become operational, pending regulatory approvals and the easing of the recent government economic slowdown. Unlike partial staking designs, VanEck products are expected to be fully staked from day one.
Beyond ETFs, Gilbert sees infrastructure as a bigger story. The latest version of the protocol, Lido v3, is designed to meet the needs of institutions. This allows institutional allocators to choose node operators and custodians, and even decide when or if to issue stETH. “That optionality is key,” Gilbert says. “Financial institutions want control, they want customization, they want liquidity and flexibility around exits.”
Native staking vaults are another piece of the puzzle. With these structures, Ether can be staked directly within the vault, and later liquid staking tokens can also be minted and sold if liquidity is needed.
Gilbert said this approach is particularly attractive to data-driven and cost-conscious allocators due to lower fees and a cleaner process, especially in the US, where the tax treatment of liquidity staking tokens is not yet defined.
Diversification underpins all of this. Lido acts as a middleware and distributes the stake across approximately 800 node operators. Gilbert contrasts this with centralized exchanges, where staking can be concentrated with a single operator.
If one large carrier were to go offline, the impact could be significant, he says. Diversification is not a nice-to-have, but a necessary condition for risk management.
Gilbert says that despite Ether’s volatile price performance, institutional investors remain confident. Net staking inflows via Lido are increasing, indicating that investors are committing to ETH for the long term rather than moving in and out. “They’re not thinking about what’s going to happen in a few months,” he says. “They’re thinking years ahead.”
That long-term thinking may be the clearest signal of where staking is heading. Gilbert predicts that by 2026, staking, especially liquid and fully deployed staking, will be less about experimentation and more about anticipation.
“Native staking is not designed for liquidity,” he says. “So what we’re seeing now is that institutions are staking ETH and sticking with it. That says everything about where this market is going.”
“Looking to 2026, we expect full bet exposure to become the norm for ETH ETFs rather than the exception,” Gilbert says.
“As Spot ETH ETFs mature, platforms and allocators may question why the product is holding idle ETH instead of more closely reflecting Ethereum’s staking economics. Fundamentally, a fully staked structure is a better representation of how staking actually works within Ethereum,” he added.
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