Original Author: Nancy, PANews
In recent days, Ethereum has made a strong green candle, boosting the morale of "E Guards" and quickly warming up market bullish sentiment. This powerful rally not only brought a comprehensive recovery to the Ethereum ecosystem but also further heated up market expectations for the ETH spot ETF staking function, with related staking projects becoming a focus of capital pursuit.
Ethereum's Strong Rebound, ETF Staking Expectations Driving Confidence Recovery
Recently, Ethereum has seen a continuous strong rebound, with its total market value surpassing Alibaba and ranking 39th in global asset market value. The related surge topic even topped the Douyin hot list, becoming a market focus.
According to CoinGecko data, as of May 12, Ethereum's price rose to $2,521, hitting a two-month high, with a 7-day increase of 40.4% and a weekly market value surge of over $87.58 billion. Meanwhile, Coinglass data shows that Ethereum's monthly return in May has reached 39.53%, not only creating the strongest single-month increase since 2025 but also significantly exceeding the median (18.43%) and average (31.15%) increases in May over the years. This strong rebound not only ended Ethereum's three-month consecutive decline but also became a turning point for market sentiment recovery, demonstrating a synchronized recovery in capital flow and investment confidence.
On-chain capital flow further verifies this trend. Artemis data shows that in the past 7 days, the Ethereum ecosystem attracted $1.2 billion in capital inflow, ranking first among all blockchains. The net inflow exceeded $490 million, far ahead of other mainstream public chains.
This rebound is considered to be the result of multiple resonating factors, including marginal improvement in macroeconomic policies, price correction of previous overly bearish sentiment, imminent Pectra upgrade, continuous narrative expansion, and positive expectations for Ethereum spot ETF staking.
Among these, ETF staking function expectations have become one of the key catalysts. In the past few months, multiple institutions have actively sought SEC approval to introduce staking mechanisms in crypto ETF products. Although the SEC recently postponed approvals for institutions like Fidelity and Grayscale, related discussions are accelerating.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms and preserving the original formatting.]In the past two months, EigenLayer has been continuously advancing in technical upgrades, developer ecosystem, and application expansion. In mid-April, EigenLayer's Slashing mechanism was officially launched on the mainnet, requiring operators and stakers using EigenPod CLI to perform checkpoint upgrades, and allowing Application Verification Services (AVS) to directly implement punishment conditions on the mainnet. Shortly after, EigenLayer announced the upcoming Redistribution feature, bringing new capabilities to its Slashing upgrade. This feature allows decentralized verification services (AVS) to reallocate funds after staking funds are penalized, rather than directly destroying them, supporting more complex use cases such as lending and insurance protocols. The first batch will support non-ETH assets (such as LSTs, EIGEN, USDC, and AVS tokens), with ETH not yet included, planned to be launched on the Ethereum mainnet in June. In recent days, EigenLayer announced participation in the Ethereum Pectra upgrade on May 7th to support network improvements, planned to introduce new features like validator integration for EigenPods, and announced plans to host a "Berlin Hacker Village" to attract global developers to build next-generation verifiable applications.
Rocket Pool: From Node Incentives to Ecosystem Integration, Driving TVL and Token Price Increase
Rocket Pool is also one of the closely watched Ethereum staking protocols. According to defillama data, Rocket Pool's TVL has reached $1.74 billion, rising by approximately 56.3% in the past month. Meanwhile, Coingecko data shows its native token RPL has increased by about 67.5% during the same period.
In the past two months, Rocket Pool has primarily focused on technical upgrades, community governance, and DeFi ecosystem expansion. For instance, in March, Rocket Pool announced distributing 133 ETH to node operators and emphasized that the pool is free to join with no usage fees, attracting more participants; in April, Rocket Pool released a Smart Node update and held a community call to discuss DAO funding through bridge fees, share quarterly product development roadmap updates, and promote rETH integration in DeFi protocols; in May, Rocket Pool actively pushed node software updates to support the Pectra upgrade.
Symbiotic: TVL Breaks $1 Billion, Raises Tens of Millions in Funding
The restaking protocol Symbiotic primarily emphasizes modular security and capital efficiency. According to defillama data, Symbiotic's TVL has exceeded $1.09 billion, rising by approximately 45% in the past month.
Over the past two months, Symbioticfi has continued to advance its universal restaking protocol and recently made positive progress in funding. In April, Symbiotic announced completing a $29 million Series A funding round, with participation from institutions like Paradigm, CyberFund, Pantera Capital, and Coinbase Venture. In the same month, ether.fi announced launching a $40 million crypto venture fund, with Symbiotic being one of its first investment projects.
SSV Network: Token Price Rises Over 90% in a Month, Active Validators Exceed 100,000
According to its official website, as of May 12th, SSV Network's TVL has exceeded $8.9 billion, with ETH staking amount approaching 3.467 million. Coingecko data shows that its token SSV has risen by as much as 91.6% in the past month.
Recently, SSV Network announced that its active validators have exceeded 100,000, accounting for about one-tenth of Ethereum validators, with this tweet receiving support and retweets from many partners including Lido, Renzo, Kraken, ChainLayer, HashKey Cloud, Nansen, Swell, and Eigenpie. Simultaneously, SSV Network announced on May 6th that SSV 2.0 testnet is online on Hoodi, aiming to significantly enhance Ethereum ecosystem security by introducing the "bApps" concept, reducing developers' security costs by up to 90%, and providing risk-free returns for validators, thus unlocking more value for the entire ecosystem.
