CoinShares PLC launches OnChain asset management business through strategic enterprise distribution partnership with Safe Labs and Railnet. Published on 10/14/2026 at 02:21 am EDT S&P Capital IQ CoinShares PLC announced the first commercial deployment of its OnChain Strategies business through a strategic enterprise distribution partnership with Safe Labs, the entity behind Safe{Wallet}, and Railnet, the on-chain infrastructure layer developed by Kiln. The partnership enables Safe's enterprise users, including organisations such as the Ethereum Foundation and Circle, to access CoinShares' professionally managed stablecoin yield strategies while retaining full ownership and control of their assets. The launch marks the beginning of a new distribution route for CoinShares, extending the Company's asset management capabilities beyond exchange-traded products and directly onto blockchain infrastructure. The strategies combine decentralised finance (DeFi) yields with yields generated by tokenised real-world assets (RWAs)? bringing traditional, off-chain sources of return on-chain alongside native crypto yields within a single professionally risk-managed framework. OnChain Strategies introduce a complementary distribution channel, allowing CoinShares to deliver professionally managed investment strategies directly through blockchain infrastructure while applying the same disciplined investment process and risk framework that underpin its regulated asset management business. Safe is the first major enterprise distribution partner for this model, which CoinShares intends to expand over time across additional wallets, exchanges, fintech platforms and institutional infrastructure providers. In this model, CoinShares neither takes custody of client assets nor commits balance sheet capital. Instead, it designs the investment strategies, manages the associated risk framework and earns recurring fees on assets delegated to smart contracts. The result is a highly scalable, capital-light business capable of generating recurring revenues while requiring limited incremental capital or operating investment. Safe smart accounts collectively hold more than USD 60 billion in self-custodied digital assets across more than 63 million accounts, making Safe one of the largest smart account platforms in digital assets. Of this, approximately USD 7.5 billion is held in stablecoins? equivalent to roughly 2.5% of the circa USD 300 billion global stablecoin market. The partnership immediately provides CoinShares with access to an established enterprise distribution ecosystem without the need to build proprietary wallet infrastructure. Under the partnership, Safe enterprise users can allocate stablecoin holdings into CoinShares-managed strategies directly from their existing Safe accounts while retaining ownership and control of their assets throughout the investment lifecycle. Redemptions are subject to the liquidity and settlement mechanics of the underlying strategies. CoinShares is responsible for designing the investment strategies and managing the associated risk framework. Railnet provides the on-chain operating infrastructure through Kiln's existing integration with Safe, while Safe provides the enterprise-grade account layer where client assets already reside. (C) S&P Capital IQ - 2026

History of Ethereum staking and validator exit queue dynamics. The evolution of staking and withdrawal mechanics. The Shanghai/Capella upgrade on April 12, 2023, enabled users to reclaim staked ETH from the Beacon Chain. Before this upgrade, users could not access their staked ETH. The network now manages two different types of withdrawal credentials. Legacy validators, or Type 1, have an effective balance capped at 32 ETH. Network rewards above this 32 ETH threshold automatically sweep to a dedicated withdrawal address every few days. These automatic sweeps do not require gas. Compounding validators, or Type 2, use credentials introduced during the May 2025 Pectra upgrade. These accounts have a maximum effective balance of 2048 ETH. Rewards compound into the validator's balance to increase its weight, though users must trigger partial withdrawals below 2048 ETH manually via the execution layer. This process requires gas. Validators can exit the network through two distinct methods. Users with validator keys can sign and broadcast an exit message via their consensus node without paying gas. Users with withdrawal credentials can trigger an exit from the execution layer, but this requires a transaction and costs gas. Once an account reaches the withdrawable state, the account balance transfers to the withdrawal address during the next sweep. This sweep process is continuous and automated. The proposer of the next block builds a withdrawal queue of up to 16 eligible withdrawals. The system moves through validator indices in a cycle similar to an analog clock, starting at index 0 and progressing through the more than 1.2 million registered accounts as of April 2026. You should check with your provider if you use a staking pool. The September 2026 exit bottleneck. Security breaches in September 2026 forced a massive exit queue that disrupted the previous year's stability. The NPM supply-chain attack and the SwissBorg breach caused the staking provider Kiln to exit all its validators on September 9. This single action added 1.6 million ETH to the waiting line. Consequently, the validator exit queue reached 2.5 million ETH, a backlog worth $11.25 billion. This queue pushed the withdrawal wait time to 46 days, which exceeds the 18-day wait seen during the August peak. This sudden congestion stands in total opposition to the status in early 2026, when the exit queue dropped by 99.9% from its September 2025 peak of 2.67 million ETH. The network handles roughly 256 ETH per epoch, and this limit applies to both entries and exits. Because the network processes 256 ETH per epoch, the entry and exit queues create a deliberate bottleneck that prevents sudden, massive shocks to the validator set during periods of extreme volatility. After a validator exits, a fixed 256-epoch delay of approximately 27.3 hours must pass before funds become withdrawable. Once they are withdrawable, account balances transfer during the next sweep, which adds another 0 to 10 days of waiting. Staking demand and the entry queue. While the exit queue faces a 46-day backlog, the entry queue experiences a 43-to-45-day wait, and these opposing pressures create a complex environment for traders and validators trying to manage liquidity. Approximately 2.48 million ETH waits to enter staking. The network limits exits and entries to 57,600 ETH per day, which is roughly 1,800 validators daily. Total staked ETH remains at 40.9 million across 885,000 active validators, which is 33.56% of the total supply. Ethereum-related ETFs saw heavy activity, with cumulative net inflows reaching $10.48 billion by mid-July 2026. The high demand for staking persists because participants look beyond the 2.64% APR. Some users anticipate future network fee growth when on-chain activity increases. Validator rewards also come from priority fees and MEV. Ethereum still commands the largest share of weekly commits and active contributors according to BlockchainReporter. This developer engagement reinforces demand for the asset that underpins settlement. The massive entry queue signals that new participants continue to enter the ecosystem even as exit queues fluctuate. Will the entry queue eventually stabilize as the new cohort of validators settles into the network? Churn limits and the restaking cycle. The current backlog of exits reflects a shift in market sentiment following profit-taking and regulatory updates. Benjamin Thalman of Figment notes that some stakers exited to take profits after ETH climbed 160% since April. He also points to rising ETH exposure from digital asset treasuries and crypto ETFs. If 75% of the current exit queue decides to re-stake, 2 million ETH will enter the activation queue. This creates a much longer timeline for new participants. The total wait time for new stakers involves several distinct layers of delay. The current activation queue is 13 days. Adding the 35 days required for the 2 million ETH from those currently exiting and the 81 days for the 4.7 million ETH from ETFs, the total delay reaches 129 days. This math assumes no other ETH holders enter the queue through corporate treasuries. The network limits the number of validators that can enter or exit within a set timeframe to ensure stability. This capacity remains tied to the number of active validators on the network.