The Bitwise Staking Report (Q4 2026)

Proof-of-stake networks are becoming more capable, and the range of assets and services built on them is growing. Q3 2026 brought a major market upturn, alongside the continued emergence of sectors like tokenized stocks, perpetuals, and cross-chain settlement—and new entrants like Robinhood, whose chain generated over $50 million in fees in its first quarter.

Underneath this activity at the protocol level, stake is up, while costs and rewards are down. Ethereum ended the quarter with more stake securing it than at any point in its history. Both Ethereum and Solana are also far cheaper to use than they were a year ago, but the reward for securing them fell again this quarter. Growth got cheaper—and it was mostly by design.

Key takeaways:

• Ethereum staking hit an all-time high: 43.80 million ETH, or 35.9% of supply. Net inflows of 1.99 million ETH made it a sixth consecutive quarter of growth.

• Stake rose while yields fell. Solana ended the quarter with 69% of supply staked at a 5.99% gross yield, down from 6.38%. NEAR saw 46% staked at a 4.87% yield, and Ethereum 35.9% at 2.63%, down from 2.81%. Hyperliquid had 436 million HYPE staked at 2.24%, broadly unchanged.

• Validator counts fell on both Ethereum and Solana, for opposite reasons. Ethereum's dropped from about 1.1 million to 881,000 as operators consolidated under Pectra—fewer validator records, the same ETH behind them. Solana's fell under cost pressure from 696 to 659, roughly 30% lower than a year ago.

• Onchain traditional markets are growing fast. Tokenized equity volume on Solana reached $6.93 billion, up 45%, and non-crypto markets made up 36.5% of Hyperliquid’s perpetuals volume. On Robinhood Chain, average daily Stock Token volume rose 22x from July to September.

The full report breaks it down by network: Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid, Robinhood Chain, and NEAR.