Making Treasury ETH Productive

Fri, 13 Nov 2026 03:34:50 +0000

Institutional adoption of Ethereum has entered a new phase: shifting from balance-sheet accumulation to active capital deployment. Public companies now hold 8.03M ETH (6.6% of supply), US spot ETFs hold roughly 6.1M ETH (5.0%), and DAO/foundation treasuries hold hundreds of thousands more. Across the network, 37% of all ETH (45.2M ETH) is staked, while 74% of visible DAO treasury holdings are staked.

However, staking alone is no longer sufficient. As staked ETH grew 3.5x since 2022, Lido’s benchmark yield halved from 4.5% to 2.2%, with major liquid staking tokens now yielding 2.1%-2.3%. Alternative ETH-denominated strategies offer few superior risk-adjusted returns: lending (1.3%) and liquidity provision (1.2%) underperform staking, while only higher-risk options like first-loss cover (4.8%) and covered calls (7.6%) pay more.

Treasury on Ethereum Market Research Center

Making Treasury ETH Productive