Ethereum is running out: stock on exchanges drops by millions of tokens

In recent weeks, the largest altcoin has mainly moved sideways. In the meantime, stocks on crypto exchanges are decreasing and more and more Ethereum (ETH) tokens are being staked. What’s going on? The analysis platform Santiment delved into it and subsequently shared its findings.

Inventories have been declining rapidly in recent months

On Tuesday, the Santiment platform shared interesting data via its X account. In July 2025, a spike in Ethereum tokens was listed on crypto exchanges. At the time, there were no fewer than 12.31 million tokens on the platforms. However, this has decreased to 8.15 million tokens in recent months.

According to Santiment, this development may continue as long as the price continues to move sideways and investors continue to stake more and more ETH. More staking activity usually means there is confidence in the currency, while unstaking indicates impending selling.

65 day queue to strike

However, staking and unstaking is not easy. According to the “Ethereum Validator Queue” there is a large queue. To stake your tokens, which keep the network running, you currently have to wait almost 65 days. At the same time, the waiting time for unstaking is more than 14 hours. So there are currently many more investors wanting to stake their ETH than unstake.

The queue was created by a built-in security mechanism of the Ethereum network. Only 256 tokens can be processed per time period, also called epoch. In this way, the network tries to maintain its stability during heavy traffic.

$164 million per year in “interest”

To date, more than 36 million tokens have been staked. This corresponds to approximately 29 percent of the total available stock. Part of this ETH has been staked by the crypto company BitMine. In total, they have secured more than 2 million tokens, or almost 60 percent of their Ethereum holdings, in the network.

By securing the coins, the owners earn a fee. This now provides a nice source of passive income for the BitMine company. Recent reporting shows that this amounts to approximately 164 million dollars per year.