Just recently, Nansen shared a report surrounding the staked Ether (ETH). The firm has revealed that only 5 entities in the Ethereum ecosystem are holding the majority of the staked Ether.
Stats by Nansen
Nansen is a major blockchain analytics platform that has shared details of the 5 entities that have been holding 64% of the total staked ETH throughout the ETH ecosystem.
Nansen has shared the information prior to the implementation of the Merge. The implementation is set to take place on the Beacon Chain.
Upcoming Shift from PoW to PoS for ETH
In the upcoming days, Ethereum will undergo a consensus transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. This is the reason why the ETH developers and other teams connected with ETH are implementing final updates.
In addition to the final updates, the developers are also busy implementing shadow forks. The final shadow fork has been put in place as well and it was done in early September.
With the implementation of the Merge, the miners will lose the authority of being validators. Instead, the stakers would become the validators. Therefore, the more ETH a user commits, the more stake they have in the protocol.
Staked ETH
The report shared by Nansen has revealed that out of the total circulating ETH, around 11% of ETH have been staked. Out of the total staked ETH, 35% are illiquid while 65% are liquid.
The Nansen data has shown that there is a total of 80,000 depositors while 426,000 are validators. The report has also highlighted a small group that reportedly commands the majority of the ETH that are staked.
Major Exchange Stakers
The report has confirmed that out of the total stake, 30% of staked ETH is held by three major crypto exchanges. These major cryptocurrency exchanges include Binance, Kraken, and Coinbase.
Then there is Lido DAO, which is the largest provider of staking for Merge. The current share of Lido DAO for staked ETH is 31%. Then there is another validators’ group that is currently unlabeled but they seem to hold 23% of the total staked ETH.
To ensure that the majority of the staked ETH does not fall in the hands of the centralized exchanges, multiple decentralized exchanges, including Lido DAO were added.
They acted as a counter-risk to the growing hold of the centralized exchanges in staked ETH. The reason behind the growing risk with centralized exchanges holding staked ETH was that they were highly regulated.
Once the Merge is implemented, only then it will be established which platform sticks with staking ETH and which platform withdraws from its stakes.
However, if either of the platforms plans to withdraw, it would take a lot of time to do so.
This would also help push the trading price of ETH much higher compared to its current price.
James Thompson 
Michael Rafael