About 1.22 million ETH was waiting to start staking on Ethereum on 19 October, and the line moved slowly. The Ethereum staking queue for new validators held 1,218,551 ETH with an estimated wait of 21 days and 4 hours, according to validatorqueue.com, read at about 10:50 UTC. On the other side, 809,405 ETH was queued to leave, a wait of 14 days and 1 hour. At $2,423 per ether (10:36 UTC), that is roughly $2.95 billion waiting to get in and $1.96 billion waiting to get out, our own estimate from those figures.
Both queues are long by the standards of this year. Neither says much about fresh demand or a rush of sellers.
Most of the movement since late September traces back to a single event: the precautionary exit of validators run by MetaMask’s staking service, many of them for Lido, which began after MetaMask disclosed a security incident on 30 September. The entry queue was also long before that, at about 2 million ETH in early September. What nobody has published is a breakdown of who is in the entry queue today. We looked, and found none.
Le Journal du Coin read the same live figures on Monday morning and framed them as proof that last week’s ether ETF outflows did not drain Ethereum. The numbers are right. The link between the two is not shown by any source we found.
The Ethereum staking queue on 19 October, in figures
The table below gathers the live readings from validatorqueue.com, which does not print a timestamp on its page, and the protocol limit that sets the pace of both queues.
| Measure | Value on 19 October 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Entry queue | 1,218,551 ETH, wait about 21 days 4 hours | validatorqueue.com, about 10:50 UTC |
| Exit queue | 809,405 ETH, wait about 14 days 1 hour | validatorqueue.com, about 10:50 UTC |
| Total staked | 43.7 million ETH, 35.78% of supply | validatorqueue.com, about 10:50 UTC |
| Active validators | 829,823 | validatorqueue.com, about 10:50 UTC |
| Staking yield (APR) | 2.56% | validatorqueue.com, about 10:50 UTC |
| Churn limit | 256 ETH per epoch each way, about 57,600 ETH a day | CryptoSlate, 15 October |
| Value of entry queue | about $2.95 billion at $2,423 (10:36 UTC) | Coindaro estimate |
| Value of exit queue | about $1.96 billion at $2,423 (10:36 UTC) | Coindaro estimate |
The wait times follow directly from the churn limit. Divide 1,218,551 ETH by 57,600 ETH a day and you get 21.2 days; 809,405 ETH gives 14.05 days. The site’s estimates match that arithmetic, which is a useful check on a page that shows no time of update.
The count of active validators has fallen too. It stood at 829,823 at about 10:50 UTC on Monday, against 866,944 on 5 October, the figure Cryptopolitan reported that day. A fall of about 37,000 in two weeks is what you would expect when tens of thousands of validators leave and their replacements are still in line.
Why the exit queue spiked: MetaMask and Lido
On 29 September the exit queue was close to 166,000 ETH, Cryptopolitan reported. The next day, MetaMask, the Consensys wallet, disclosed a security incident affecting part of its staking infrastructure and began removing validators as a precaution. In an update on 1 October, reported by KuCoin, it said it had found no indication that MetaMask wallets or customer funds were affected. The sum at stake in the incident itself was tiny: about 0.36 ETH in block-production payments was diverted, KuCoin wrote.
By 2 October the exit queue had reached 850,736 ETH, its high for the year so far, KuCoin reported. On 5 October it stood at 786,275 ETH with a wait of 13 days and 16 hours, which a KuCoin news flash called the longest wait of 2026. A later KuCoin note put it at about 870,130 ETH and 15 days on 10 October. Monday’s 809,405 ETH, read at about 10:50 UTC, is lower, but not by much.
The size of the spike comes from a precaution, not a run. According to a Cryptopolitan report of 5 October, Consensys founder Joseph Lubin said the company had rotated its validator keys as a precaution. Rotated validators have to exit and then rejoin the queue to stake again, the report explained. Lido called the exits temporary and expected to get most of the stake back, Cryptopolitan added. MetaMask says its staking is non-custodial and that it does not hold customers’ withdrawal keys.
How much ETH was involved is an estimate, not a disclosure. Security researcher Kaden first put it at about 17,000 validators holding 523,000 ETH, KuCoin reported, and Cryptopolitan used the same figures, saying all of them ran for Lido. A Bitquery snapshot of 1 October counted 16,965 validators with about 565,056 ETH that had exited or joined the exit queue; in that count, 7,191 validators holding about 252,288 ETH were linked to Lido, according to KuCoin. The estimates disagree on Lido’s share. MetaMask has confirmed none of these figures and has not detailed the cause of the incident in the sources we read.
Lido expected the last affected MetaMask-operated validators to finish exiting by 7 October, and estimated that the full cycle of exit, withdrawal and re-entry could take about 45 days, KuCoin reported on 10 October. Lido also said holders of stETH, the token of the Lido liquid staking protocol, had nothing to do. We could not open Lido’s own notice, so this part rests on secondary reports.
KuCoin summed up what a long exit line means for the market: the queue is “a protocol-controlled delay, not evidence that withdrawals have already reached liquid wallets.” An exit is not a sale, and KuCoin’s later note made the same point: the queue counts pending withdrawals, not sell orders. Nothing in the sources shows what happened to the ETH once it left these validators.
Who is in the entry queue? Nobody has said
This is the gap in Monday’s story. No public source breaks down by depositor the 1,218,551 ETH that sat in the entry queue at about 10:50 UTC on Monday. The queue data shows amounts and waiting times, not names.
Some of it should be MetaMask and Lido validators coming back after the rotation, since that is what a rotation requires. How much is not known. If all 523,000 ETH of the lower estimate had already re-entered, it would be about 43% of Monday’s 10:50 UTC entry queue, but that is a hypothesis built on an unconfirmed number, and no source says the re-entries are complete or even well advanced.
It would be tempting to point at the obvious candidates: ether ETF issuers that now stake, treasury companies such as BitMine or SharpLink that hold large ETH positions, Coinbase, or ordinary deposits into Lido. We found no source that supports or rules out any of them. Anyone who names them as the buyers behind the queue is guessing.
One fact does point to demand that predates the incident. In early September, weeks before MetaMask’s disclosure, the entry queue held about 2 million ETH and the wait was around 35 days, KuCoin reported. By Monday at about 10:50 UTC, that line had shrunk by roughly 780,000 ETH. Over the past four days alone it fell by about 64,000 ETH, from 1,282,776 ETH on 15 October (22 days 6 hours) according to CryptoSlate. On 14 October at 21:17 UTC it was 1,260,628 ETH. The figures move a little from one outlet to the next, as each reads the queue at a different moment.
ETF outflows and the staking queue: no link shown
US spot ether ETFs lost $320.1 million in the week of 12 to 16 October, according to Farside data cited by crypto.news and relayed by Le Journal du Coin. We covered that week in our piece on why ether ETFs lost more than bitcoin ETFs.
Reading the staking queue as a verdict on those outflows runs into two problems. The exit queue is mostly the MetaMask rotation, and the entry queue was long well before the outflows. ETF redemptions, if they touched staked ETH at all, would be expected on the exit side, and that side has shrunk since 10 October. No source we found connects the two, so we do not.
How the Ethereum staking queue works
Staking on Ethereum means locking ETH in a validator that proposes and checks blocks, in return for rewards. Each validator needs at least 32 ETH. To keep the set of validators stable, the protocol caps how much stake can enter or leave per epoch, a period of about 6.4 minutes. Today that cap is 256 ETH in each direction, or about 57,600 ETH a day, CryptoSlate wrote on 15 October. Anything above that waits its turn.
Leaving takes longer than the queue figure suggests. Once a validator has exited, a withdrawability delay of 256 epochs, about 27.3 hours, still applies, according to CryptoSlate. Validatorqueue.com also showed a sweep delay of about 7.2 days on Monday, the time the withdrawal sweep takes to pay out. Someone joining the exit queue at 10:50 UTC on Monday should therefore count on more than three weeks before the ETH is spendable.
Waiting to enter has a cost too. ETH in the entry queue earns no rewards. At a 2.56% annual yield, 21 days of waiting is worth about 0.15% of the stake, or roughly 0.048 ETH on 32 ETH, by our calculation. That is small for one holder and real for a fund putting hundreds of thousands of ETH to work.
The 2025 record was three times larger, and had a similar cause
Monday’s exit queue is far from the record. On 10 September 2025 the queue jumped from under 1 million ETH to more than 2.6 million ETH in a single day, Blockworks reported on 15 September 2025. The cause was the staking provider Kiln, which had begun an orderly exit of all its Ethereum validators. “We took immediate action once we identified a potential compromise in our infrastructure,” Kiln said.
The pattern is close to this October’s: an operator worried about its own setup pulls validators, and the queue swells for weeks. The 2025 peak was about three times this year’s high of 850,736 ETH.
EIP-8061 would speed up exits, not entries
A proposal now in Last Call could change the exit side. EIP-8061 would let the exit limit scale with the amount staked, roughly four times today’s rate at 36 million ETH staked in its authors’ example, while keeping entry at 256 ETH per epoch, CryptoSlate reported on 15 October. Its Last Call deadline is 1 November 2026. It is proposed for the Glamsterdam upgrade, which CryptoSlate expects on mainnet in the fourth quarter of 2026; no activation epoch has been set.
For a future episode like MetaMask’s, that would shorten the trip out. It would not shorten the trip back in, so a rotation would still leave validators waiting in the entry line. Glamsterdam reaches the Hoodi testnet on 26 October.
Dates to watch
- 26 October 2026: Glamsterdam goes live on the Hoodi testnet.
- 1 November 2026: end of the Last Call period for EIP-8061.
- Around 21 November 2026: the end of Lido’s window of about 45 days for affected validators to exit, withdraw and re-enter, if counted from 7 October (our count).
- The entry queue dropping under 1 million ETH, which would mean a wait of about 17 days at the current limit, and the exit queue falling back under 500,000 ETH.
Until MetaMask or Lido publish how many validators have re-entered, the share of the entry queue that is new money will stay an open question.