The Ethereum 2.0 contract is currently the biggest holder of Ether, with the same edging closer to the psychological level of $30 billion by the hour.
With more and more Ether deposits streaming in, Kraken’s Crypto-Platform Product Lead Brian Hoffman recently came as a guest on the Staking Rewards show. On the said edition, the topics discussed included crypto-staking, “decentralized Amazon,” and why consumers resist spending their cryptos.
Staking on Proof-of-Stake
When host Mirko queried about the staking ecosystem, Hoffman recalled a time when people doubted the merits of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Noting that such days were “long gone,” he remembered how Kraken had added Cardano, Polkadot, Kusama, and Solana. Hoffman added,
“Those have been crushing it. I think we just crossed 11 billion dollars’ worth of staking assets under management, which is just an incredible amount of interest and business, and it’s growing hand over fist.”
Coming to Ethereum 2.0 staking, the exec claimed that Kraken is the “number one centralized staking holder for ETH.”
As of July 2021, Kraken traders had staked more than 800,000 in the ETH 2.0 contract. A month later, the Ethereum Foundation received a $250,000 donation from Kraken to support its developer teams. Kraken also reminded the world it was the “first major exchange” to list ETH.
Worth noting, however, that Hoffman acknowledged that Lido had surpassed Kraken. The Lido mining pool had staked 1,167,007 ETH as of 6 September, 2021.
Convergence
Hoffman and Mirko also discussed the convergence of real-world goods and digital goods in the crypto-market. According to the exec, consumers prefer to use “rocketing” cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether to buy digital assets – rather than joining a “decentralized Amazon.” He said,
“We still haven’t really gotten past the problem of like. . . people want to hold on to crypto, and they only really relinquish it when there’s an investment opportunity, like a profit-capturing opportunity.”
Staking and NFTs both arose as potential answers to this conundrum. In fact, Kraken offers yearly percentage-based rewards for staking crypto-assets, including Ethereum [ETH 2].
Coming to NFTs, Hoffman also noted that people have been “flipping” non-fungible token assets and putting them back on OpenSea for profit opportunities.
