Ethereum Treasury Selling

The Ethereum Foundation started staking about 70,000 Ether in late February, then kept selling Ether in April anyway, which tells you staking did not replace treasury sales so much as sit next to them. (blog.ethereum.org) (cryptoslate.com) The Ethereum Foundation is the non-profit that funds research, grants, and other work around the Ethereum network, so when it moves coins, traders watch it the way stock investors watch insider sales. (ethereum.foundation) On February 24, 2026, the foundation said the 70,000 Ether staking rollout would send rewards back to its own treasury, which sounded like a shift from selling inventory to earning yield on inventory. (blog.ethereum.org) Staking in Ethereum is the system where coins are locked to help run the network, a bit like putting cash into an interest-bearing account that also helps keep the bank open. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake system had nearly 30% of circulating Ether locked by January, according to CryptoSlate’s reporting. (blog.ethereum.org) (cryptoslate.com) That is why the April sales landed badly for a specific group of Ethereum bulls: they had been hoping treasury staking meant one less regular seller in the market. CryptoSlate reported yesterday that the foundation was still offloading Ether after the staking move. (cryptoslate.com) This is not a new argument around the foundation. In September 2025, it publicly disclosed plans to convert about 10,000 Ether over several weeks, and said the money would fund research, grants, and charitable donations. (cryptoslate.com) That earlier sale drew backlash because critics said the foundation should borrow against Ether or use decentralized finance tools instead of sending coins to market. CryptoSlate reported that the foundation had previously borrowed $2 million in GHO stablecoins on Aave using wrapped Ether as collateral. (cryptoslate.com) The April selling matters because protocol treasuries are not passive piggy banks. A treasury with hundreds of thousands of Ether can act like a recurring source of supply, even if each individual sale is small. (cryptoslate.com 1) (cryptoslate.com 2) It also changes the simple “staking is bullish” story. If one arm of the treasury is locking coins for yield while another arm is still selling coins for cash expenses, the net effect is closer to treasury management than to a clean supply squeeze. (blog.ethereum.org) (cryptoslate.com) That is why traders keep circling back to two boring words: yield and hedging. If treasury holders are going to keep monetizing Ether, then strategies that earn staking rewards while reducing price risk start to look less like fancy finance and more like the normal plumbing of a maturing asset. (blog.ethereum.org) (cryptoslate.com)