Original author: hildobby, Dragonfly
Original translation: Rhythm BlockBeats
Editors note: Coinbase, as the largest custodian of staked ETH, manages about 21% of the staked ETH, but has not disclosed the information of staked ETH for five consecutive quarters. Data shows that its stake ratio has dropped from 15%, which may be related to address rotation. Although Coinbase emphasizes transparency, it has not disclosed the amount of staked ETH and the support of cbETH. More than 75% of the cbETH circulation supply is unused, reminding investors to pay attention to the underlying staked ETH rather than the LST circulation. Coinbase chose to inflate cbETH through unused supply rather than transparent operation.
The following is the original content (for easier reading and understanding, the original content has been reorganized):
This is the fifth quarter that the largest staked ETH custodian Coinbase has refused to share any information about their staked ETH.
The estimate in the chart below shows that they manage about 21% of all staked ETH.
X user @adcv_ estimated that the constant proportion of ETH staked in the past few quarters was about 15%, and recently increased by 6%, and analyzed that this may be related to Coinbase Custody.
My staking dashboard shows Coinbase at 8.4% because only the tagged addresses are labeled and the rest are “unidentified”.
As a result of regular polling over the past few months, I currently have 227k addresses marked as having Coinbase staking deposits.
But Coinbase regularly rotates addresses and changes its custody structure, making it more difficult to track their staking operations.
Here you can see my data has been steadily decreasing from 15% in 2024, which I attribute to some address rotation.
I will continue to mark new addresses once they are found and enough evidence is gathered. Here is an example of what the investigation will look like in 2023.
Coinbase is so closely aligned with ETH that they control 21% of its security layer but refuse to disclose it.
Coinbase has always emphasized transparency, but has never shared any information about their staked ETH amount, cbETH support, or cbBTC support.
Brian Armstrong also wrote: “Imagine if every government expenditure was transparently conducted on the chain. Auditing will become much easier.”
It was revealed that over 75% of cbETH’s circulating supply is actually unused. This finding reminds us that we should focus on the underlying staked ETH rather than just the circulating supply of LST (liquidity staked tokens). cbETH might have been more successful if we could track the staked ETH backing cbETH, but instead of being transparent, they inflated the amount of cbETH through unused supply.
