Overview

• Roughly 2.5 million ETH now await exit from the validator set, extending withdrawal waits to more than 46 days, the longest on record.
• Dashboards and analyst commentary show the entry side backing up too, with the activation queue currently around 13 days.
• Analysts expect most exiting ETH to be restaked under new keys rather than sold, easing sell-off fears but shifting pressure to activations.
• Ethereum’s protocol limits exits and entries to 256 ETH per epoch to protect network stability, slowing how fast large flows can be processed.
• Figment’s Benjamin Thalman projects that restakes combined with ETF-driven demand could push aggregate activation delays toward months, with a scenario totaling about 129 days.