by Staking technology provider Kiln has closed a $17.8 million fundraising round with companies like Consensys and Kraken Ventures. The company envisions “exponential” growth in demand for ETH staking services from institutional clients in the future.
Kiln is a software-as-a-service provider focused on enterprise-grade staking solutions across 16 different proof-of-stake blockchain protocols. Its infrastructure allows users to bet on-chain while maintaining custody of assets across separate solutions as well as cloud platforms and validator clients.
An announcement shared with Cointelegraph described the growing institutionalization of cryptocurrency staking as a trend in the market. According to Kiln, this drives the need for “validator-agnostic APIs and services” to enable multi-vendor staking.
Cointelegraph sat down with Kiln Co-Founder and CEO Laszlo Szabo to unpack the need for multi-faceted staking services. According to Szabo, major exchanges and service providers like Coinbase, Ledger, and Binance serve an increasingly institutionalized staking market and must interact with multiple staking providers to spread operational risk:
“The legacy solution is to manage relationships with staking providers independently, leaving it up to product and engineering teams at major companies to integrate different staking providers into their workflows.”
Integrating new protocols for staking now requires custom staking and unstaking transactions for each individual protocol format, as well as running data reward collection infrastructure and custodian API integration personalized.
This is one of the main reasons why Kiln has created a suite of products for wallets, custodians and exchanges to manage multi-vendor staking.
Ethereum’s recent transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus also leads Sazbo to believe that demand for ETH staking will “grow exponentially.” His firm cited data from other PoS protocols that see between 50-80% of assets staked, compared to the 12.5% of total ETH supply currently staked in the Beacon Chain contract.
Kiln already serves institutional clients such as Ledger, Binance US and GSR. He intends to go to market with these companies focusing on the institutional segments, including funds and banks.
Szabo also told Cointelegraph that the company is in talks with major traditional financial institutions that are preparing comprehensive crypto-related products and are exploring staking:
“They are already past the discovery stage and are making significant progress even though the processes are long with this type of player.”
Ethereum’s recent transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus has also led the company to believe that demand for ETH staking will “grow exponentially.” The company cited data from other PoS protocols that see between 50-80% of assets staked, compared to the 12.5% of total ETH supply currently staked in the Beacon Chain contract.
Ethereum staking has become an integral part of the day-to-day operation of the PoS smart contract blockchain. There are a number of staking options available to potential users, but a full 32 ETH is required to become a network validator and provide staking rewards.
Daily users looking to stake a smaller amount of ETH can participate in pools or solutions offered by centralized exchanges.
