The Market Has Spoken - "Liquid Staking" is the FutureFollowing this week's inflation report and the much-anticipated "The Merge" on Ethereum's ecosystem, the crypto markets took a massive dip - in particular, ETH itself. This is the classic "buy the rumor, sell the news" pattern as the hype towards the merge date neared, then the massive-selloff right after.
But not all coins were in the red - COSMOS (ATOM) did very well this week, and showed a very strong decoupling pattern from the rest of the pack. Why? Because they currently offer the best staking rewards (15%+!) out there, beating both the banks and its competitors by a very large margin. If you wanted to sell ETH but stay in crypto, it was the most obvious option to go with, at least on paper.
ETH2 has the problem of being illiquid (there is no set date for when you can withdraw your funds), as well as expensive - which will likely lead to the coin struggling over the long-term as coins that offer low-fee liquid staking (ADA, XTZ, DOT, MATIC, AVAX, etc.) has had a much longer time. ETH2 "final form" isn't likely to happen any time soon (some say as long as 6 years) so they are currently behind the curve of industry standards, not ahead. Whether they can catch up to the rest is yet to be seen.
Now that ETH has de-coupled itself from proof-of-work, we're going to start to see public attention towards different aspects of Web3 and DeFi - and staking rewards is likely to be the talk of the town, especially as we go further into the recession.
