Will ETF demands absorb ETH’s $12b queued unstake?

There's a growing spotlight on Ethereum as a blockchain and ETH as the underlying asset positioned to benefit from growth of the smart chain.

In recent times, Ethereum has particularly been popular for being favored for the tokenization of real world assets.

Out of $30.23 billion in tokenized real world assets, excluding stablecoins, Ethereum has a market share of $8.99 billion or 30.64% as reported on RWA.xyz.

That said, tokenization isn't all Ethereum has been popular for in 2025. The same year has seen increased debates and concerns shared over Ethereum's declining revenue as a L1 blockchain with the growth of numerous supposed scaling solutions — EVM L2s.

In the second quarter of 2025, on April 09 precisely, ETH’s market value fell to $1,472.60 as heated debates of lost revenues to L2s populated major crypto media platforms.

In the months after, improved crypto regulations and increased and publicly disclosed institutional interest drove ETH’s price to a new all-times high of $4,953.73, approximately 336% price growth since April's crash.

Nearly a 4 weeks later, ETH is in the middle of another position where it's market performance is questioned, some call it fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), others believe it's simply concerning.

A significant portion of the almost $12 billion ETH awaiting withdrawal may be sold to lock in profits, considering Ether’s 100% gains over the past year.

Ethereum’s exit queue surpassed 2.6 million ETH worth $12 billion last week, with a 44-day wait time.

This marked the largest amount of Ether ever set for withdrawal by the network’s validators.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum staking entry queue reached its lowest level in four weeks, adding to fears that a surge in the exit queue could lead to a major sell-off.

More than 512,755 ETH, worth around $2.3 billion, were waiting to be staked at the time of writing, down from 959,717 ETH on Sept. 5, indicating a slowdown in demand for staking Ether. – Cointelegraph report

What to expect from ETH going into Q4?

I think that for starters, an ETH selloff is merely speculations. Yes, there's an unstake queue with asset counts that is concerning but nobody can tell why anyone is choosing to unstake their ETH.

Many are asking if spot ETH ETF’s demands will absorb this.

We can't say for sure. According to data from coinmarketcap.com, spot ETH’s best month was July, 2025, where the market saw an inflow totalling $4.86 billion.

This is less than 45% of pending unstake.

That said, there are other reasons why ETH unstake would grow.

For example, in May, Ethereum increased its staking limit (cap) to 2,048 ETH through the Pectra upgrade, it's latest hard fork.

For all we know, validators could be looking to size down nodes counts and cut costs by increasing individual node stake from the previous low cap of 32 ETH.

Growing into Q4, ETH’s price could perform better than people are expecting and the queued up ETH for unstake will likely have little to no market impact, unless of course, the event itself is traded against and not the tokens itself hitting the market.

Posted Using INLEO