BlackRock's ETHB staking ETF is live and Grayscale's ETHE holds $3.5B. Five more issuers — Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Invesco, 21Shares, and VanEck — now await SEC approval.
The competition for Ethereum staking exchange-traded funds is accelerating in 2026, with two products already operating and five more from some of Wall Street's largest names awaiting decisions from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. BlackRock's iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ticker: ETHB) debuted on Nasdaq on March 12, 2026, joining Grayscale's Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE), which launched in October 2025 as the first product of its kind in the United States. For investors tracking Ethereum, the rapid buildout of institutional staking access carries implications far beyond yield — touching supply dynamics, institutional demand channels, and the long-term positioning of ETH as a productive asset.
The Regulatory Shift That Opened the Door
For most of 2024 and into 2025, staking inside a registered U.S. investment vehicle occupied a legal gray zone. The core question was whether staking rewards constituted a security — and whether pooling ETH inside an ETF to earn those rewards amounted to an unregistered securities offering. When the SEC approved the first spot Ethereum ETFs in May 2024, it sidestepped the staking question entirely, requiring issuers to agree not to stake their holdings as a condition of initial approval.
That changed on March 17, 2026. The SEC and CFTC issued a joint interpretive release classifying staking rewards from named digital commodities — with Ethereum chief among them — as non-securities under federal law. The ruling removed the primary legal barrier that had delayed staking ETF approvals for over a year and signaled a shift in how the two agencies intend to regulate proof-of-stake networks going forward.
The regulatory clarity was further reinforced by IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-31, issued in November 2025, which established a safe harbor clarifying that staking rewards would be taxed as ordinary income at the time of receipt rather than upon sale. That removed the remaining tax uncertainty that had complicated institutional adoption of staking products inside registered investment vehicles.
How Spot Ethereum ETFs Set the Stage
Before staking was added to the equation, the spot Ethereum ETF market that launched in May 2024 had accumulated approximately $18 billion in collective AUM by early 2026, receiving an estimated $9.6 billion in net inflows during 2025 alone. BlackRock's non-staking iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) led the category with over $11.1 billion in AUM, demonstrating that institutional demand for Ethereum exposure through a regulated wrapper was substantial even without a yield component.
Adding staking capabilities transforms the product's value proposition. A spot Ethereum ETF without staking delivers only price exposure — you own ETH held in trust, with no income generated. A staking ETF adds a native yield stream, making Ethereum's investment profile closer to that of a dividend-paying equity or income-generating bond in the eyes of institutional allocators who hold mandates to generate returns from assets, not just price appreciation.
BlackRock and Grayscale — The First Movers
Grayscale moved first. Its Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE) launched on October 6, 2025, and accumulated approximately $3.5 billion in assets under management by April 2026. On January 5, 2026, Grayscale distributed $0.083178 per share to ETHE shareholders — the fund's inaugural staking distribution, covering rewards earned from October 6 through December 31, 2025. The payout validated the product's core premise and gave the market its first concrete data point on what Ethereum staking yield looks like inside a U.S. ETF wrapper. Grayscale also operates a lower-cost sibling product, the Ethereum Staking Mini ETF (ticker: ETH), with a 0.15% annual fee and approximately $1.2 billion in AUM.
BlackRock launched ETHB on March 12, 2026, seeding the product with $107 million. That figure grew to $254 million in AUM within the first week of trading. The fund stakes 70 to 95 percent of its holdings through Coinbase Prime and charges a promotional sponsor fee of 0.12% annually on the first $2.5 billion in assets for the first 12 months — rising to 0.25% thereafter. By contrast, Grayscale's ETHE carries a 2.5% annual fee, a structure that has made BlackRock's lower-cost product increasingly attractive to fee-sensitive institutional allocators.
The fee gap is consequential. At a gross Ethereum staking yield of 3.1 to 3.3 percent, ETHE's 2.5% annual fee absorbs nearly the entire gross return, leaving investors with net income of roughly 0.5 to 0.8 percent annually. ETHB's 0.12% promotional fee allows nearly all of the gross yield to flow through to shareholders — a meaningfully different income outcome from the same underlying exposure.
Five Issuers Waiting in the Queue
With BlackRock and Grayscale operational, five issuers have pending staking amendment filings with the SEC awaiting approval:
- Fidelity — seeking to add staking to its Fidelity Ethereum Fund, one of the largest non-staking Ethereum ETFs in the U.S. market
- Franklin Templeton — already the lowest-fee Ethereum ETF issuer at 0.19%, likely to replicate that edge in a staking product
- Invesco — targeting a staking vehicle as part of its expanding crypto ETF lineup
- 21Shares — a digital asset ETF specialist already distributing staking rewards through its TETH product in European markets
- VanEck — one of the pioneering issuers of spot Ethereum ETFs in 2024, now seeking to add staking to its U.S. lineup
These five filings were initially expected to clear SEC review by the end of Q2 2026. That timeline slipped when the SEC paused approximately 24 ETF applications in May 2026, including all pending staking filings, to evaluate staking-yield funds and altcoin basket products as novel categories. A 60-day public comment period opened in May 2026, with comments due through early September 2026.
The Yield Math Investors Need to Understand
Ethereum's proof-of-stake network currently rewards validators at approximately 3.1 to 3.3 percent annually in gross staking yield. What reaches ETF investors is lower: fund fees and operational costs are deducted along the way, leaving net distributions to shareholders in the range of 1.9 to 2.6 percent annually depending on the fund's expense ratio. The ETHE-versus-ETHB comparison illustrates exactly how much the fee structure matters at this yield level.
Fee compression in Ethereum staking ETFs carries greater consequences than in traditional equity index funds. When the underlying return is a yield of 3 to 3.3 percent rather than uncapped equity appreciation, a 2 percent annual fee difference is the difference between meaningful income and barely covering a fund's own expenses. Investors comparing staking ETFs should place fee structures at the center of their due diligence.
It is also worth noting that Ethereum staking yields are not fixed. They fluctuate based on the number of active validators and overall on-chain transaction activity. As more ETH is staked — by ETFs and other participants — per-validator rewards compress. Investors should model the gross yield as floating within a range of approximately 2.5 to 4 percent over time, rather than treating current yields as a permanent baseline.
What the SEC Pause Means for the Timeline
The May 2026 pause was not a denial. The SEC did not indicate that any of the five pending applications were deficient or likely to be rejected. The pause is procedural — a mechanism the agency uses to develop a formal rule framework for a novel product category before approving a wave of competing applications simultaneously. That approach avoids regulatory inconsistencies between issuers and gives the agency time to address unresolved questions around staking custody, yield disclosure, and investor suitability.
Market participants widely expect the five pending approvals to be issued together — likely in Q3 or Q4 2026, once the comment period closes and the SEC completes its review. That approach mirrors how the agency handled spot Bitcoin ETF approvals in January 2024, when it cleared 11 issuers simultaneously to avoid conferring a first-mover advantage on any single firm. A simultaneous approval would immediately transform a two-issuer market into a seven-issuer competitive market.
What This Means for ETH Investors
The expansion of Ethereum staking ETFs is structurally positive for ETH across several dimensions that go beyond simple price catalysts.
The supply-side effect is the most direct: staking ETFs require issuers to lock ETH in validator nodes to earn rewards. With an estimated 28 to 30 percent of all outstanding ETH already staked on the Ethereum network, incremental institutional demand through ETF wrappers adds further pressure on liquid circulating supply. As more products come online and accumulate assets, more ETH moves off exchanges and into staking positions — a historically supportive dynamic for price.
The demand-side effect is equally significant. Staking ETFs extend Ethereum's accessible investor universe to institutions — pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, university foundations — that are prohibited from directly holding or staking cryptocurrency but are permitted to hold SEC-registered investment products generating income. Every dollar flowing into ETHB or ETHE from this cohort represents incremental demand that does not exist in the spot market.
The fee competition that will follow five new entrants into the market will likely push net staking yields higher for ETF investors over time, making the products more attractive relative to alternatives. Combined Ethereum ETF assets — staking and non-staking — stood at approximately $18 billion earlier this year. How quickly that figure expands as five more staking products enter the market is one of the defining data points for Ethereum's institutional adoption story in the second half of 2026.