A top executive at leading US-based crypto exchange platform COINBASE says that staking for blue-chip investors is likely to grow in popularity in the years ahead.
In a new analyst call, Coinbase chief financial officer Alesia Haas says that the firm recently offering crypto staking for institutions will be felt further down the line rather than in the near term.
According to Haas, Coinbase has “onboarded institutional clients” by offering them a delegated staking service similar to what’s available for retail customers.
“Previously the way that institutions could have access in staking is via Coinbase Cloud and so they could have used our service to run their own node. But offering it as the delegated staking service similar to what we have for retail customers, we just onboarded institutional clients.”
Haas says this tactic will flourish once Coinbase starts offering large-scale institutions liquid staking for assets they have already massively pooled together, citing top altcoin Ethereum () as an example.
“What I would share with you is its early days. We do see a lot of institutions holding Ethereum, as an example, as a stakable asset. However what I would comment there is we haven’t yet rolled out a truly liquid staking option for ETH2.”
According to Haas, institutions may not want their assets held indefinitely, but Coinbase hopes to solve their issue.
“So when you stake ETH2 you are locking your assets into Ethereum until the Merge and then some period after. For some institutions, that liquidity lock up is not palatable to them. And so, while they may be interested in staking, they want to have staking on a liquid asset.
And that’s something we are looking to solve for them. And I think that once we have liquid staking available for the assets that institutions pooled in higher proportions, that’s when we’ll see the real material impact of institutional revenue. So I think it’s further out, not a near-term phenomenon.”
