Nearly 14 days. As of Monday morning in Asia, that’s how long you’d wait to pull ether out of Ethereum’s staking system. It’s the longest exit line of 2026, and most of it comes from a single company taking a cautious step after a security scare.
The exit queue grew more than fivefold in three days last week. It reached roughly 851,000 ETH on Oct. 2, up from about 166,000 ETH on Sept. 29. With ETH at $2,719.38, that’s a lot of capital stuck in line.
The peak was about 2% of the 43.6 million ETH staked. It also cleared the previous 2026 high of roughly 476,000 ETH, set during a surge in May.
One operator, most of the line
The cause is MetaMask. Most people know it as a cryptocurrency wallet, but it also runs staking services, including validators for Lido, a service that pools users' ether for staking.
MetaMask disclosed a security incident on Sept. 30 that affected part of its infrastructure. It then started withdrawing the affected validators as a precaution. An Oct. 1 update said its investigation had found no indication that wallets or customer funds had been affected.
The size of that withdrawal is still an estimate. Ethereum security researcher Kaden estimated at the time that the precautionary exits covered roughly 17,000 validators holding about 523,000 ETH. MetaMask hasn’t confirmed those figures, so treat them as a researcher’s count and not an official one.
The bottleneck is built in
The line exists because Ethereum is designed to have one. Staking means committing ether to validators, the computers that check Ethereum transactions, and earning rewards for it. The network caps how quickly validators can join or leave so that its security can’t shift suddenly.
Under current limits, about 57,600 ETH can enter and about 57,600 ETH can exit each day. Any large move turns into a queue. And leaving the queue doesn’t put coins in your wallet right away: there’s a separate withdrawal process after that.
By Monday the line had shrunk a bit. About 786,000 ETH, worth just over $2 billion, was still waiting to exit.
A round trip that takes weeks
Most of this ether isn’t leaving Ethereum. It’s one operator’s coins taking a temporary detour. Lido expects the ether to come back gradually: the affected validators exit, their balances are withdrawn, and the coins go back into staking.
That round trip has a cost. Lido estimated the whole process could take up to about 45 days, and the affected validators miss rewards while they’re out of service. Lido expects the last affected MetaMask validators to stop staking by Oct. 7. After that, their coins join the queue to start staking again.
Lido’s message to its users was short. “No action is required from stETH holders,” Lido said last week, referring to the token that represents users’ stake in the service.
The entry line tells a different story
Demand to get into staking has been cooling, and that’s unrelated to MetaMask. About 1.5 million ETH, worth roughly $4 billion, was waiting to enter on Monday, with an estimated wait of roughly 25 days.
In early September, the entry queue held about 2 million ETH and the wait was about 35 days. So the line to get in is shorter than it was a month ago, and the line to get out is the longest it’s been all year.
If you hold stETH, the official word is that you don’t need to do anything. Just expect MetaMask’s returning coins to land at the back of an entry queue that’s still about 25 days long.
