SEC approves spot Ethereum ETFs [pdf]
sec.gov
sec.gov
The 19b-4 rules form change and the S-1, which is the individual listings.
They have done the former here.
It only took 4 days between the 19b-4 approval and S-1 approval for BTC but you should expect it to be weeks for the S-1 forms.
So the SEC has not yet approved spot Ethereum ETF's. They could ban S-1's base don staking or based on not being able to declare they wouldn't hold any tornado cash based coins, etc.
What's most interesting about t his is the about face the SEC did about 3 days ago.
Up until then ETHE traded at a 30% NAV discount and then suddenly snapped to about a 6% NAV discount early this week. Its rumored that this was as a result of a policy change in the white house and the delay in releasing this document today was due to the speed in which the SEC "changed their mind" and they needed a bit more time to write an approval for the rule change amendment.
Expect Staking to be disallowed as a concession for atleast the initial wave of ETF approvals. Also expect the SEC to allow ETHE to convert and the other ETF applications to all happen on the same day like they did with the BTC ETF's.
In case anyone is wondering, like I did, what "ETHE" is, it's Grayscale's Ethereum ETF ticker:
How would "the ecosystem" prevent this?
> concentration of tokens
How do you expect this to happen?
Yeah, not sure it was possible given the incentives.
> How do you expect this to happen?
Institutions will stake their tokens and have disproportionate voice in the consensus. Whenever the US government tell them to do something fishy, they will oblige and no one can do anything. That's not surprising, though: this deficiency in PoS has been well known for a long time.
It's incredibly unlikely institutions will ever own enough ETH to have a disproportionately large share of the token supply, even as a collective. The cost of ETH would rise increasingly as any entity gains more ownership, such that what you're describing would become prohibitively expensive.
In any case, as hanniabu stated, this is not how Ethereum's proof of stake works. Mere token ownership doesn't give you a say on protocol consensus. You would need to run validator nodes, and control 51% of staked tokens. And as noted earlier, that second step would cost you north of $200B (theoretically) in today's numbers, likely north of a trillion in practical terms.
Editing to add:
> Yeah, not sure it was possible given the incentives.
It's a decentralized network. No one entity gets to determine what any other entity does with their tokens, so long as it's legal. That really is the point.
Then the network will hard fork and we will have SETH (the sell-out ether) and regular good ole ETH.
It's up to Vitalik now to determine our fate , let's destroy em from the inside.
/sarcasm
Contrary to BTC, ETH is not deflationary if it's not traded on chain. The deflation comes from the burn mechanism.
So concentrating ETH in ETFs would decrease the price over time due to inflation since the ETH is traded without transferring it.