Rào cản rút ETH: Tại sao Crypto Twitter đột nhiên quan tâm đến hàng đợi xác thực viên

ETH staking used to be simple: deposit 32 ETH, earn rewards, collect passive income. Post-Shapella upgrade (April 2023), you could finally withdraw. Sounds easy, right? Wrong.

Right now, the exit queue for full validator withdrawals has ballooned to 16+ days — a record. And it’s creating a cascade of problems across Ethereum’s financial layer.

How the Withdrawal Queue Actually Works

Ethereum processes validator exits using a clock mechanism: 16 partial or full withdrawals per block, scanning through validators in chronological order. One complete loop of all active validators takes roughly 9 days. Full exits face an additional bottleneck — the exit queue limits throughput to just 8 full validators per epoch (roughly 3 minutes).

The Electra upgrade capped exit requests at 256 ETH per epoch, essentially creating a hard ceiling on how fast validators can leave.

Why This Breaks Liquid Staking

Liquid staking tokens (LST) like Lido’s stETH are meant to trade 1:1 with ETH. But when exit queues stretch past two weeks, market makers have a problem: they’re holding inventory that takes weeks to convert back to cash.

The math gets brutal:

• Longer wait times = higher carrying costs
• Market makers demand steeper discounts to compensate
• stETH starts trading at 0.98 ETH, 0.95 ETH, or worse
• This peg drift triggers forced liquidations on leveraged LST positions
• Liquidations dump more LST onto market makers
• More inventory = even longer exit queues

It’s a negative feedback loop.

The Hidden Cost: Perpetual Futures Rates

Here’s the domino effect most miss: if ETH perpetual contracts trade at a negative funding rate (below spot price), market makers hedging LST positions face additional losses. Those costs trickle down to traders as even larger discounts.

Current State: Deceptive Calm

Staking inflows have roughly matched outflows since mid-July — total staked ETH sits stable around 35.5 million ETH. But here’s the catch: deposit and exit queues are completely separate systems. Balanced inflows don’t clear the exit backlog.

Bulls wave this off as typical FUD. They’re wrong. Extended exit times aren’t cosmetic — they’re a structural constraint squeezing DeFi capital markets.