On September 29, the exit queue for Ethereum reached nearly 166,000 $ETH. Within just a few days, this number surged past 850,000 $ETH, after which it began to decrease.
Ethereum regulates the flow of staked assets entering or exiting the validator network through a mechanism known as churn, currently set to 256 $ETH per epoch for both inflows and outflows. Each epoch lasts approximately 6.4 minutes, thus facilitating the clearance of around 57,600 $ETH daily from each side.
The total amount of staked $ETH stands at approximately 43.7 million, representing nearly 36% of the total supply. There are currently 866,944 active validators.
The yield on staking is approximately 2.6%.
Lido Estimates a 45-Day Re-entry Period for Withdrawn Stakes
The withdrawn $ETH from MetaMask could further extend the waiting period for re-entry.
Lido characterizes these exits as temporary, expecting to reclaim a majority of the staked assets. They estimate the re-entry process could take up to 45 days.
The last of the affected validators should begin exiting, though not fully withdrawing, by October 7, according to a report from Cryptopolitan on October 1.
“Your Secret Recovery Phrase, your keys, and the assets in your wallet were unaffected by this incident because they CANNOT be,” stated Joseph Lubin, founder of Consensys, on X. MetaMask emphasizes that its staking is non-custodial and does not provide withdrawal keys to users.
As a precautionary measure, Lubin mentioned that the company rotated its validator keys. Validators that have been rotated must exit and re-enter the queue to resume staking.
MetaMask has alerted users to remain cautious of phishing attempts and to safeguard their secret recovery phrases.
At the time of this writing, $ETH was priced around $2,715, a 0.4% increase over the past 24 hours. Given this price, the approximately 523,000 $ETH exiting from MetaMask’s validators amounts to about $1.42 billion.