Ethereum’s staking exit queue has grown to about 45 days, and that has many people talking. Over 2.5 million ETH sit in the exit queue right now, waiting to be unstaked. This number is down a little from recent highs, but it still means that anyone who wants to withdraw their ETH has to wait more than a month. Ethereum also has more than 1 million active validators, and about 35.6 million ETH are locked up in staking, which is around 30% of the total supply. The long exit queue shows how much demand there is for leaving, and it has become a point of debate.
Michael Marcantonio, the head of DeFi at Galaxy Digital, criticized Ethereum’s staking withdrawal process. He posted on social media that a 45-day wait makes Ethereum less useful for global markets. He said that traditional finance expects faster results and compared Ethereum to Solana, which only takes about two days to unstake tokens. He asked how institutions could trust a system with such long delays. His criticism quickly spread across crypto Twitter and raised questions about whether Ethereum’s design fits the needs of large investors.
Vitalik Buterin stepped in to defend the system. He compared Ethereum staking to a soldier’s duty to defend the chain. He said that unstaking is like a soldier deciding to leave the army. In his view, friction in the exit process is not a mistake but a design choice to protect security. He explained that if validators could leave instantly, the network would be less trustworthy. Ethereum needs validators to stay online and keep the chain safe. Buterin also admitted that the system is not perfect, but he argued that cutting the wait time would make the chain weaker.
The idea of a validator’s duty has been central to Ethereum since staking began. Validators promise to stay active, process transactions, and secure the chain. If too many validators exit at once, the network could face risks. That is why Ethereum uses an entry queue and an exit queue to control the flow. At the moment, the entry queue has about 464,000 ETH waiting, with an 8-day activation delay. These delays help balance security with growth, but they frustrate people who want more freedom to move their assets.
The response to Marcantonio’s posts was sharp. Anthony Sassano, an Ethereum educator, said he would not do business with Galaxy Digital after the remarks. He claimed that Marcantonio showed a weak understanding of DeFi fundamentals. Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro also spoke out, saying the deleted posts felt like “psyops” and that the backlash made Ethereum look stronger, not weaker. Many in the community argued that Ethereum’s staking exit queue is part of what makes the system secure, even if it is slow.
After the pushback, Marcantonio deleted his critical posts. Galaxy Digital has not given any public response. The firm recently invested $1.5 billion into Solana and even became the first Nasdaq-listed company to tokenize shares on that network. This made some in the Ethereum community question whether the criticism was linked to those investments. The debate shows the tension between traditional finance, which values speed and efficiency, and blockchain networks, which value decentralization and security.
Ethereum’s staking exit queue may be long, but it also shows that the network has deep validator participation and strong community support. More than 1 million validators continue to run nodes and defend the chain, carrying out what Buterin called their solemn duty. The network may not match Solana’s two-day unstaking period, but it maintains a model designed to protect against sudden exits and to keep 30% of the supply locked in for security. Whether institutions accept this trade-off will shape Ethereum’s future, but for now the staking process stands as both a challenge and a defense of the chain.
