The landmark was eclipsed yesterday, with the exchange assessing that its staking facility accounts for roughly 8% of all ETH staked for Ethereum 2.0 as of yesterday. Kraken forecasts that its facility will offer APY in the range of 5% to 17%.
Kraken’s vice president of product, Jeremy Welch, pointed out that the cryptocurrency exchange has been an advocate of Ethereum for a long-period of time.
Welch also stated that Kraken’s ETH trading volume usually accounts for 15% to 40% of daily Bitcoin trading volumes as of the beginning of this month.
Kraken is not the foremost firm in offering Eth2 staking facility. Over the last week, Binance, Bitcoin Suisse and Huobi had rolled their own services. OKEx also anticipates rolling out its own facility by the end of December, while Coinbase will start offering the service next year.
For that reason, a considerable percentage of staked ETH could turn out to be centralized amidst a few top cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum wallet provider MyEtherWallet has also revealed the inclusion of staking DApp ‘Staked.’ MEW users can stake Ether (ETH) through the company’s web interface or Android wallet app. Staked’s CEO Tim Ogilvie stated:
“MEW is rightly regarded as one of the original Ethereum wallets and it is only fitting that MEW users can now take advantage of our staking infrastructure to participate in Ethereum’s major upgrade.”
While the roll out of Eth2’s beacon chain at the beginning of the month paved way for ETH staking, tokens cannot be withdrawn by stakers until Eth2 transfers are facilitated, with crypto enthusiasts and analysts forecasting the availability of the functionality only after a year.
Several stakers seem to have opted for third-party service providers to negate concerns about suffering slashing as a result of interruptions to their node. Certain Eth2 validators whine that their Ethereum is getting frozen until withdrawals are allowed and no rewards are paid because of slashing retributions.