By the end of 2025, a corner of the market that most Ethereum traders rarely see has built positions large enough to matter to everyone else.
Everstake’s Ethereum Staking Annual Report estimates that the “digital asset vaults” of listed companies held a total of approximately 6.5-7 million ETH by December, representing more than 5.5% of the circulating supply.
The numbers are huge, but more important is why these companies chose ETH in the first place.
Bitcoin’s corporate finance strategy is built around scarcity and reflexivity. That is, you buy a coin, let the market revalue the stock wrapper at a premium, and then issue stock to buy more coins.
Ethereum adds a second leg that Bitcoin cannot. Once you have your ETH, you can stake it. This means you can earn protocol-native rewards for helping to secure the network. Everstake Frame streams rewards at approximately 3% APY for Treasury-style operators.
Corporate ETH vaults are becoming listed vehicles to hold ETH, earn additional ETH through staking, and persuade equity investors to pay for that packaged exposure. The main bet is that wrappers can increase their underlying holdings over time and that the public markets will fund the growth phase if sentiment is favorable.
Basic mechanism of staking
Ethereum runs proof-of-stake. Instead of miners competing with computers and electricity, Ethereum uses “validators” that lock ETH as collateral and run software that proposes and proves blocks.
When validators do their job correctly, they receive rewards paid by the protocol. If you go offline or cheat, you may lose some of your rewards, and in more serious cases, you may lose some of your ETH locked by Slash.
Staking is attractive to institutions because the rewards do not depend on lending assets to borrowers and are specific to the protocol. Although operational risk is still involved, it is mitigated by the fact that the core source of revenue is the network itself.
According to an Everstake report, approximately 36.08 million ETH had been staked by the end of 2025, accounting for 29.3% of the supply and recording a net growth of over 1.8 million ETH over the year.
This is important to Treasury because it shows that staking is no longer a niche activity, but has become a large, established market.
ETH Treasury Flywheel: Premium Funding and Protocol Yield
Everstake describes two levers that finance companies are trying to pull.
The first is mNAV arbitrage. If a company’s stock is trading at a premium to the market price of the underlying asset, it can issue new shares and use the proceeds to buy more ETH.
If the premium is large enough, existing shareholders could see an increase in ETH per share even after dilution. This is because investors are effectively paying more for each Ethereum exposure than the cost of acquiring ETH directly.
This loop works as long as premiums are maintained and capital markets are open.
The second lever is to stake your reward. Once a company owns ETH, it can stake it and receive additional ETH over time.
Everstake charges around 3% APY for staking legs, and the key point is low marginal costs once the infrastructure is in place. The Treasury, which owns the stake, wants to compound interest in terms of the token, not just price appreciation.
Taken together, the proposition for Treasury staking is straightforward. Premiums fund growth when markets are optimistic, and staking creates stable accumulations when markets are quiet.
Both mechanisms aim for the same output: more ETH per share.
Three financial staking strategies
Everstake’s report concentrates the sector on three major holders and assigns each a role in the story.
BitMine is estimated to hold around 4 million ETH, a figure that dominates Everstake’s “hockey stick” chart. Everstake also stated that BitMine is moving towards even larger staking, including plans for its own validator infrastructure and disclosure that “hundreds of thousands of ETH” have been staked via third-party infrastructure by late December 2025.
SharpLink Gaming holds approximately 860,000 ETH, which is staked as part of an active finance approach where staking rewards are treated as operating income and remain on the balance sheet.
Ethermachine owns approximately 496,000 ETH with a 100% stake. Everstake cites a reported net yield of 1,350 ETH during one period as evidence of what a “fully staked” model looks like.
These numbers are evidence that the strategy is becoming institutionalized. These are no small experiments for companies. Their position is large enough that staking venues, operating structures, disclosure practices, and risk management become part of the product.
Where Institutions Stake and Why “Compliance Staking” Exists
The most practical insight from Everstake’s report is that staking is divided into lanes.
Retail businesses often stake through exchanges for simplicity, while DeFi native users seek liquidity and composability through liquid staking tokens.
Many institutions want something closer to traditional separation of duties: defined roles, multiple operators, auditability, and a structure that fits existing compliance expectations. Everstake points to Liquid Collective as a compliance-oriented staking solution and uses its liquid staking token LsETH as a proxy for institutional migration.
The report notes that LsETH has increased from approximately 105,000 ETH to approximately 300,000 ETH, and links that increase to outflows from Coinbase exchange balances, a sign that large holders are moving away from exchange control while still preferring “enterprise-grade” staking structures.
I’ll add an exchange snapshot to reinforce this point. According to Everstake, Coinbase’s share decreased by approximately 1.5 million ETH staked from 10.17% to 5.54%, while Binance’s share increased from 2.02 million ETH to 3.14 million ETH, increasing its share from 5.95% to 8.82%.
This number is important not as a verdict on either venue, but as evidence that staking allocations change significantly when large players change positions.
For treasury companies, the problem with staking lanes is structural.
When a strategy relies on staking rewards that support compounding, operator diversification, slush protection, downtime risk, custody architecture, and reporting practices cease to be back-office details and become a core part of the investment case.
Underlying rails for transactions: stablecoins and tokenized government bonds
Everstake does not treat corporate treasury as a separate phenomenon, but links it to the institutional appeal of Ethereum in 2025: stablecoin liquidity and tokenized treasury issuance.
Regarding stablecoins, Everstake states that the total stablecoin supply across the network is over $300 billion, with Ethereum L1 and L2 accounting for 61-62%, or approximately $184 billion. The argument is that Ethereum’s security and settlement depth continues to attract an on-chain dollar base that is actually used by institutions.
For tokenized U.S. Treasuries, Everstake says the market is approaching $10 billion and estimates Ethereum’s ecosystem share at about 57%. It positions Ethereum L1 as a security anchor for major issuers, citing products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money fund.
This background is important for financial transactions.
Publicly traded companies looking to justify long-term ETH positions and staking programs need a story that goes beyond crypto speculation.
Tokenized cash and tokenized government bonds are easier to defend as structural adoptions than most other on-chain categories, and their growth makes it easier to explain why ledger-securing assets will be important in the long term.
Risks that could disrupt Ethereum’s staking model
Everstake includes warnings about concentration and related failures.
Citing the Prysm client outage in December 2025, which saw validator participation drop to around 75% and missing 248 blocks, the magazine argues that client herding could be used to exploit this event to create network-wide vulnerabilities.
That risk becomes even more significant when large treasuries are consolidated into similar infrastructure options, as their staking decisions can impact concentration. This is also important because staking returns will only be clean if your operations are resilient.
Downtime, misconfigurations, and thrash may sound abstract to enterprises, but they are as much a part of business as staking.
The second risk is capital markets. Because mNAV arbitrage is a mechanism that only works when the market is strong. When the stock premium is compressed, stock issuance becomes diluted rather than increased, and the loop stops working.
While equity financing is the engine of growth, staking yield alone will not solve the problem, as yield increases.
The third risk is governance and regulation.
Finance companies operate within a disclosure and custody regime that can be rapidly enhanced. This strategy depends on maintaining a structure acceptable to auditors, boards, and regulators, especially when staking contributes significantly to reported profits.
ETH financial transactions are built on a simple proposition. The idea is to accumulate ETH, stake it to grow your holdings in token units, and use public market access to scale faster than private balance sheets.
Whether it survives as a durable category depends on two measurable things. One is how well these companies can operate staking without creating hidden vulnerabilities, and how consistently the equity wrapper can retain the premium that makes the funding loop work.