Survey: Nearly 70% of institutional investors holding Ethereum participated in staking

According to Cryptoslate, according to a report by Blockworks Research, nearly 70% of institutional investors holding Ethereum participated in staking, with 52.6% holding liquid staking tokens (LST). Nearly half of institutional investors who pledge ETH tend to use only one integrated platform, such as Coinbase and Binance. Meanwhile, 60.6% of survey participants also use third-party staking platforms. The report states that one-fifth of institutional investors surveyed allocate over 60% of their investment portfolios to Ethereum or ETH based LST. The survey targets include exchanges, custodians, investment companies, asset management companies, wallet providers, and banks. The report shows that the key characteristics considered by respondents when choosing a pledge provider are reputation, supported network scope, price, difficulty of participation, competitive cost, as well as professional knowledge and scalability. Liquidity and security are also the most important characteristics for institutional investors when deciding whether pledging is feasible. In the range of 1 to 10, the average importance score of liquidity is 8.5, reflecting investors' concerns about exiting a large number of LST positions when necessary. At the same time, the security score is higher, with an average importance score of 9.4, due to concerns about withdrawal efficiency being affected by market fluctuations. In addition, 61.1% of respondents indicated that they are willing to pay additional fees for enhancing security and fault tolerance capabilities. Geographic location also plays a role, with half of institutional investors considering the location of validators to be important when choosing a staking platform.