Vitalik Buterin Justifies 45-Day Unstaking Queue as Vital to Ethereum’s Defense

Vitalik Buterin has finally responded to concerns about Ethereum’s 45-day unstaking queue, explaining that it is important to the network’s defense.

His comments follow an ongoing debate within the crypto community over the long waiting time.

Buterin’s Defence

The controversy began when Galaxy Digital’s Michael Marcantonio publicly criticized Ethereum’s lengthy exit queue via X, calling it “troubling.” In the now-deleted posts, he compared the network’s unstaking process to that of Solana’s, which only needs two days.

“Unclear how a network that takes 45 days to return assets can serve as a suitable candidate to power the next era of global capital markets,” read the post.

Robert Sagurton, co-founder of FogoChain, commented that waiting 45 days or even 2 days for a withdrawal felt too long, suggesting that slow banks are even beating them at UX. Another X user responded by clarifying that bank withdrawals are not the same as unstaking.

Buterin weighed in on the debate, saying that staking is about “taking on a solemn duty to defend the chain.” He compared it to a soldier leaving the army, noting that some friction in quitting is necessary since the unit cannot function if its members can walk away at any moment.

The metric spiked to a two-year peak of 2.6 million ETH due to institutional accumulation late last week, and has remained high since then. Data from the validatorqueue website shows that Ethereum has an exit queue of 2.5 million ETH, with an estimated waiting time of approximately 43 days and 6 hours.

Meanwhile, there is 442,541 ETH waiting to enter the network, with an expected activation delay of around 7 days and 16 hours. Validator participation also remains strong, with more than 1 million active validators. In total, 35.6 million ETH has been staked, accounting for nearly 30% of the entire token supply.

The Ethereum co-founder admitted that the current staking queue design is not necessarily “optimal”, but emphasized that if the constants were reduced naively, it would make the chain much less trustworthy from the point of view of any node that does not go online very frequently.

Community Backlash

Elsewhere, Marcantonio’s comments received some backlash from the X crypto community. Former Consensys product manager Jimmy Ragosa suggested that the wave of criticism against the chain was causing its partners to reconsider their business ties with Galaxy Digital.

Educator Anthony Sassano said he would advise against working with the firm, stressing that deleting tweets did not change the fact that its DeFi lead misunderstood the industry and preferred spreading Ethereum FUD rather than presenting facts. On the other hand, Mike Dudas defended Galaxy, noting that while some stakeholders might distance themselves, the firm had already shown its ability to create value with Solana by connecting to several participants.

Following the events, crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro claimed that the company pressured its head of DeFi to delete posts attacking the network, describing the behavior as manipulative.