• Sygnum bank has launched Ethereum 2.0 staking.
• Clients’ can generate a yield as high as seven percent per annum.

Sygnum Bank, the world’s first digital asset bank has officially launched Ethereum 2.0 staking. To start, clients can generate a yield of up to seven percent per annum from their existing wallets. According to the official announcement, Sygnum has integrated this service into its banking platform designed to be simple and user-friendly.

Staked Ethereum will be protected with the highest available security and will be held in clients’ individual accounts, taking full advantage of the fully segregated wallet and institutional-grade custody.

📣 NEWS: Sygnum first Bank to offer Ethereum 2.0 staking.

Sygnum Bank clients can now conveniently and securely stake Ethereum through Sygnum’s institutional-grade banking platform and generate a yield of up to 7 percent per annum currently.https://t.co/HmGzjkw9pT

— Sygnum Bank (@sygnumofficial) July 6, 2021

The Total Value Locked (TVL) of the Defi sector has grown by more than three times since the start of the year as the majority of the decentralized products and services are based on Ethereum.

Head of Accounts and Custody at Sygnum Bank Thomas Brunner, in a statement, mentioned that this development is for the benefit of the long-term investors.

Sygnum clients can participate in the new proof-of-stake Ethereum and benefit from potentially higher staking rewards now. This is a compelling choice for long-term investors in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Sygnum seeks to support more DeFi assets

Ethereum 2.0 is the long-awaited upgrade of the Ethereum network and has been designed to drastically reduce its environmental impact while it increases efficiency. Scalability and security are part of the main area of focus to position the network for any future growth.

Ethereum 2.0 is the second-largest Proof-of-Stake network by stake capitalization with $13.5 billion. It is only behind Cardano which has a staked capitalization of $31.8 billion.

According to Thomas Eichenberger, Head of Business at Sygnum bank, Ethereum staking emerges as “the core element for digital asset portfolios which can now be accessed in a convenient, secured and regulated setting.”

This further expands Sygnum’s offering of attractive, regulated yield generating products to meet the needs of clients to accumulate other forms of return in addition to capital appreciation.

In August and October 2019, Sygnum Bank obtained its banking license in Switzerland and its capital markets services license in Singapore respectively.

In November 2020, the bank approved staking service for Tezos (XTZ) and later offered a fixed-term deposit product for its Digital Swiss Franc Stablecoin, DCHF.

The bank has over the past few months sought to launch regulated banking services for eight leading tokens as well as provide support for DeFi assets. As it stands, Sygnum is strongly competing with popular native staking providers and centralized exchanges like Kraken.

Whales can be bashful and clever creatures, but when you manage to catch one in action it’s a sight to behold — consider, for instance, the single entity responsible for depositing 100k ETH into the Eth 2.0 deposit contract from 133 different addresses last week.

Deposits into the ETH 2.0 staking contract have been picking up as of late, with 100k ETH pouring into the Eth 2 deposit contract on a single day last week. It caught the attention of the crypto space and, like most stories about on-chain activity, looking at the actual transactions and associated accounts can shed light on what went down. In this case, it seems the 100k ETH influx can be traced back to a single Ethereum address and a wallet that is responsible for funnelling upwards of 258k ETH ($541.8 million at 2100 per ETH) into the deposit contract.

Searching for the mega whale who is mega bullish ETH and Eth 2.0

Given the relatively steady increase the deposit contract has seen since launching in December, it is likely a single entity was behind last week’s unexpected surge. But can we prove it? Can it be reasonably shown that a single entity was behind the 100k ETH worth of deposits?

Unfortunately, actually finding the transactions and addresses on-chain was not a quick “first page of Etherscan” find.

In hopes of getting a quick win, the first place we checked was the largest total deposits made by a single address to the deposit contact. While this strategy did find one address that had recently deposited some 12,800 ETH across 400 transactions to the deposit contract, unfortunately, it was not the address of interest, as the date of the transactions (June 20, 2021) is a couple days too early and the amount is only ~13% of the total 100k ETH, even though “only ~13%” in this case is still over $26.8 million (at $2100 per ETH). It is clear that if the 100k ETH had come from a single entity, they were more discreet than a straight 100k YOLO deposit from one address.

A deeper analysis was required, so we downloaded the transactions to the deposit contract from Etherscan for June 22, 2021 and uploaded them into Excel. The data was clear.

From the data pulled for June 22, 2021, there were 1163 addresses that deposited a total of 32 ETH into the deposit contract, 133 addresses that deposited 800 ETH into the deposit contract, and 11 other addresses that deposited other various multiples of 32 ETH.

For those unfamiliar, ETH 2.0 is the protocol change Ethereum has been planning since launch that will transition Ethereum from a proof of work to a proof of stake network. Proof of stake validators will secure the network and receive ETH for doing so. One validator starts off as 32 ETH and is currently acquired by sending 32 ETH to a deposit contract on Ethereum mainnet, the current proof of work chain.

Depositing is a one way bridge since the full amount of ETH including any interest earned is not accessible until the network merge, which is currently unlikely to happen until late 2022.

With the same total deposit amount of 800 ETH on the same day from 133 addresses, our confidence grew that the 100k ETH had in fact come from a single address. To confirm this, there had to be some similarity between the addresses. Sure enough, a quick look revealed that each address was funded by a common address.

Eureka! A whale sighting.

The picture of our whale was starting to become more clear. Let’s take a high level look at how they executed their operation:

• In each of the new addresses, 800 ETH was deposited into the deposit contract - 25 deposits of 32 ETH. The remaining 10 ETH was sent to cover gas costs and once the deposits had finished the leftover ~9.86 ETH in each address was sent to a common address. These funds were eventually sent to the deposit contract.
• They laid the foundation for their plan with a casual 100k ETH transaction ($210 million at $2100 per ETH) on June 16th. In a juxtaposition for such a large amount, the transaction was in no rush to go through, taking 1 minute and 41 seconds to confirm. The ‘somewhere between standard and fast’ gas price channels some serious, “Well, I don’t want to over pay for this transaction” vibes that, while understandable for most plankton using Ethereum, is more surprising coming from such a behemoth of a whale.
• Using the 100k ETH in the new wallet they funded 133 fresh wallets over an 8-minute span, each with 810 ETH for a total of 107,730 ETH.