Ethereum stakers may soon be able to unlock their holdings, which is also known as “unstaking,” following the Ethereum Merge event that locked their holdings.
Request can take a long time to arrive
In a tweet Coinbase has announced that it may take several weeks to months for the request protocol to be processed on its platform. This applies to requests for refunds that may increase after the upcoming update of the Ethereum network in April.
The “Merge” of Ethereum from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) took place in September 2022, but stakers were unable to withdraw their stakes. As a result of this merger, staking providers such as Coinbase have enabled users to stake ETH on their platform, but withdrawing the funds is temporarily unavailable.
Coinbase noted that staking requests will be processed on-chain and that the company will only act as a conduit of sorts to pass unspooled ETH to customers once it has been released by the protocol.
Expected to take place in mid-April, Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade will allow users to withdraw their staked ETH. ETH holders can also wager more without being subject to an indefinite blocking period.
Unstaking will be available to everyone at once
The unstaking feature will be made available to all Coinbase customers at the same time. Its requests are in turn forwarded to the Ethereum protocol and queued here based on when they are received.
Once the upgrade is complete, users will be able to submit unstaking requests from their Coinbase accounts, which will be available in approximately 24 hours. However, it is important to note that there can be significant wait times after the application is submitted.
While Coinbase cannot provide an exact time frame for the strike to be reversed as they have no control over the process, they have provided an estimate based on the time it takes for the Ethereum network to process transactions. However, customers must be willing to wait and be patient.
Finally, Coinbase offers its users another staking option called “cbETH” as a derivative of staking ETH on the platform, effectively allowing stakers to trade ETH while it is still tied up, with the promise of redeemability at a later date.