The long-awaited Shapella upgrade finally went live late Wednesday at block height 6209536, marking the first major change since September’s Merge. With withdrawals enabled, the network has now fully transitioned to proof-of-stake.
At the time of writing, 822,720 ETH (around $1.63 billion) is currently waiting in a withdrawal queue, with 83,900 ETH ($162 million) estimated to be released in the next 11 hours, as per data from Token Unlocks. At such rate, the amount of withdrawn Ether will reach $323 million in the next 24 hours.
Currently, 17.45 million ETH — excluding rewards — is staked on the blockchain, which accounts for 15.5% of its supply in circulation. Since the Shapella upgrade, Ethereum’s net staking balance shed 84,000 ETH, with 112,330 ETH withdrawn from the network and 28,260 ETH deposited.
The expected validator rewards dropped 10.6% and currently amount to 5.06% APR. The price of Ether is up over 6% since the Shapella upgrade, flirting with the $2,000 mark for the first time since August 2022. The governance tokens for three leading liquid staking protocols — Lido, Rocket Pool, and Frax Finance — also surged, adding between 2.5% and 6% over the last 24 hours.
Glassnode analysts estimated that between 76k ETH ($141m) and 162k ETH ($300m) will flow to the market from partial withdrawals and 57.6k ETH ($100m) from full withdrawals in the first week after Shapella.
“Even in the extreme case where the maximum amount of rewards and stake are withdrawn and sold, the sell-side volume still falls within the range of the average weekly exchange inflow volume. Therefore, we conclude that even the most extreme case will have an acceptable impact on the price of ETH,” they stated.
