The waitlist for Ethereum stakers in search of to exit the community has jumped to a file excessive as Celsius strikes to unstake its ETH holdings.

The queue for stakers exiting Ethereum’s consensus layer, the Beacon Chain, surged to a file excessive of 16,283 validators on Jan. 4 — considerably beating out its beforehand excessive of three,829 from Dec. 4, in accordance with Validator Queue.

The waitlist is projected to take 5 and a half days to clear. A most of 13 validators can offboard per epoch, with every epoch lasting roughly 6.4 minutes.

Analysts have attributed the transfer to Celsius, the failed CeFi lender, asserting it is going to unstake all of its present Ether holdings on the identical day. Celsius stated it’s within the means of recalling and rebalancing belongings in preparation to distribute belongings to collectors. In August, Celsius stated it plans to distribute almost $2B price of BTC and probably ETH to collectors.

“The numerous unstaking exercise within the subsequent few days will unlock ETH to make sure well timed distributions to collectors,” Celsius tweeted.

Celsius filed for chapter in July 2022 after halting consumer withdrawals one month earlier. A July 2023 settlement with the U.S. Federal Commerce Fee discovered that Celsius had misappropriated greater than $4B price of buyer funds previous to suspending operations.

On Dec. 20, An Ape’s Prologue, a web3 researcher, tweeted that Celsius had bought $243M price of Ether over 30 days. Information from Arkham Intelligence suggests Celsius nonetheless holds $227M price of ETH.

Ether ETF hypothesis runs rampant

Regardless of the looming chance that Celsius could transfer to liquidate the rest of its sizable Ether holdings, many onlookers imagine spot ETF hypothesis might quickly drive features for ETH.

With distinguished analysts tipping that the U.S. Securities and Change Fee (SEC) could greenlight the primary spot Bitcoin ETF subsequent week, an growing variety of researchers are turning their consideration to Ether as the subsequent seemingly candidate for spot ETF approval.

“Count on extra spot Ethereum ETFs filings within the coming days,” tweeted James Seyffart, a Bloomberg analyst who expects the SEC to approve an preliminary cohort of spot Bitcoin ETFs someday round Jan. 10.

Throughout a webinar hosted by CryptoQuant on Jan. 4, Eric Balchunas, a fellow Bloomberg analyst, argued that the launch of Ether futures ETFs in October implicitly treats ETH as a commodity and paves the best way for a spot ETF to additionally obtain approval.

“By approving these Ethereum futures ETFs, they’re implicitly accepting these Ethereum futures as commodities futures,” Balchunas stated. “In the event that they name Ethereum a safety, it’ll be going in opposition to their sister regulator, CFTC… That’s why I feel we might see potential Ethereum ETFs accepted this 12 months as properly.”

Satoshi Flipper, a preferred dealer and analyst, argued that Ether’s present value doesn’t replicate its spot ETF prospects.

“Not even 1 cent of the proposed spot ETH ETF has been priced in but,” they tweeted. In my humble opinion… if the market was rational and forward-thinking, the worth of ETH would shoot to $3,000 upon the spot BTC ETF approvals this week.”

DCinvestor, a distinguished investor and web3 influencer, shares the sentiment.

“As soon as the BTC ETF hits, actually everybody within the newly emergent ‘TradFi crypto sector’ will likely be the truth that just one different asset has CME futures, a reside futures ETF, has been referred to previously as a ‘commodity’ by the CFTC and prior SEC chairs,” they tweeted. “It’s ETH.”