When Will the Selling Trend Come After the Completion of the Shapella Update?
Previously on
What Is the Future of Ethereum?
Ethereum Has Officially Completed Its Transition to PoS
Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade was completed on April 13, 2023, at 06:28 at Epoch 194,048 altitude. As of 15:00, Ether has risen 2.4% in the past 24 hours, with a trading volume of approximately $12.5 billion. After the upgrade was completed, the Ether fluctuated narrowly between the $1925.06 and $1902.5 ranges, with little overall market change and no sharp drop as previously predicted by some analysts.
24-hour price trend of Ether - source coingecko
According to Token Unlock data, there are currently 736,700 Ethers (approximately $1.41 billion) waiting to be withdrawn. The total amount of staked Ethers has decreased by approximately 69,000, and the staked APR has decreased to 5.06%. In addition, the expected withdrawal amount in the next 11 hours is 96,400 Ethers (approximately $185 million).
Source: Token Unlock
Will a Sell-off Wave Come?
The withdrawal service brought by the Shapella upgrade is divided into two parts - partial withdrawal and full withdrawal. Partial withdrawals can decompress the excess of 32 Ethers and directly withdraw them to the Ethereum address. Users can continue to validate as Ethereum validators; Full withdrawal refers to the withdrawal of all Ethers (32 Ethers and rewards), and upon withdrawal, the validator completely exists and is no longer part of the beacon chain. Meanwhile, the beacon chain validator contains a field called the withdrawal credential, which is either 0x00 or 0x01. This field is set by the user when depositing through the deposit tool. Validators with a withdrawal credential of 0x00 cannot withdraw immediately and need to migrate to 0x01 to make partial and full withdrawals.
Currently, there is only one withdrawal queue in the Ethereum network that can process partial and full withdrawals. Partial withdrawals occur 16 times every 12 seconds, starting from index 0. If the validator successfully exits, full withdrawals are uted; If the validator’s balance exceeds 32 ETH, a partial withdrawal will be uted through automatic scanning. The current partial withdrawal time is approximately 4.34 days. It is worth noting that entering the Ethereum network to become a validator also requires queuing, and the algorithm for becoming a validator is the same as exiting a validator, which largely ensures the stability of the Ethereum network.
Although partial withdrawals may have some impact on selling pressure, they will not have a long-term impact on Ether’s price. The latest report from Glassnode states that, Even in extreme situations where the maximum number of rewards and stakings are withdrawn and sold, the seller’s trading volume is still less than the average weekly inflow of the exchange. Therefore, even the most extreme scenario can have an acceptable impact on the price of ETH. Due to the Ethereum protocol’s limit on the number of ETHs that can be unlocked daily, only 70,000 ETH (approximately $133 million) will actually become liquid.
On the other hand, according to Dune data, approximately 40% of staked Ether currently belongs to independent validators and staking pools, while the remaining portion belongs to service providers that provide collateral liquidity derivatives. The service providers of collateral liquidity derivatives have secondary market exit channels, which means that we can assume that the number of stakings that will make full withdrawals is the portion of independent validators and staking pools, which is 40%.
Ether staking details - Source Dune
Although both full and partial withdrawals are in the same withdrawal cohort, the rate of full withdrawals is more limited. As shown in the data below, the current limit for full withdrawal loss is 8. According to the analysis of Everest Ventures Group, assuming that in extreme cases, there are no more user deposits after the upgrade and the daily withdrawal volume reaches its maximum, it will take 125 days for all staked Ethereum to exit fully.
Source: Dune
In addition to the limitations of the Ethereum network itself, major service providers provide a minimum APY of approximately 4.8%, and if there are stakers exiting, there is a high possibility of more people entering. From this, we can speculate that most stakers will not immediately sell the staked assets.
To Sum Up
Although Ethereum‘s growth performance this year is far behind that of market leader Bitcoin, as Ethereum‘s development landscape gradually improves, with the help of the bullish market, the increase in trading volume and the increase in gas consumption will further accelerate Ether’s deflation. At the same time, this year’s mainstream narrative, liquidity staking, will fully realize the potential of Ethereum, and we believe that Ethereum will always exceed people’s expectations.
