Name: How Leading Platforms Are Turning Staking Into Revenue
Uploaded: 2026-05-13T17:16:19.562Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 8 s
Description: How Leading Platforms Are Turning Staking Into Revenue

Transcript for "How Leading Platforms Are Turning Staking Into Revenue": Alrighty. Welcome, everybody. In the interest of time, we'll kick this right off at, at twelve. I'm Miles Jackson, sales director for staking at Fireblocks. Before we dive in, one quick note on, the q and a. So on the right hand side, you'll see a panel. Feel free to say hello, tell us where you're joining from. The q and a panel on the left is, just for us. Your questions will go only to speakers, not to the other attendees. Please feel free to use that one throughout the session. You don't have to wait until the end. We do have fifteen minutes of live q and a reserved at the close, and the more you send in early, the better we can make it for everyone. Super excited to to chat with everybody today. We have folks from Fireblocks, Figment, Uphold, and Etoro all on the same call to talk about what it actually looks like to build staking to a live production platform. There are organizations that have done it, and we're gonna hear the real story. Actually, it is. Because the audience on these calls spans a wide range of backgrounds. At its simplest, staking is the act of committing digital assets to support the operation of a blockchain. Think of it as somewhere between earning interest on a savings account and lending capital to earn yield. Your assets are put to work, the net fit the network benefits from the commitment, and you earn a return. Something valid not regulated platforms, fintechs, or institutional trading desk. That's changed. The participants on this call, banks, institutional firms are proof of that. Stakings now move into the bank. And for the platforms on the call, it's no longer a question of whether to offer it. It's a question of how to build it right and make that promise. But there's a tension. Building staking is hardly the looks. The platforms that have done it well made a series of deliberate infrastructure decisions early on that determine what was possible later. The ones that rushed it were tried today, the three organizations on this panel represent what I call three distinct staking archetypes. An institutional validator who has made operational efficiency the core of their offering, two platforms who have turned staking into a customer engagement and monetization engine, with two meaningfully different approaches to how they structure their economics. We're gonna cover the decision tree that led each of them here, what they had to solve for that they didn't anticipate, and where staking as a product goes from here. Let me introduce our panelists now. Josh Deems is head of revenue at Figment, one of the world's leading institutional stake. With me particularly as we get into the forward looking session. Josh, welcome. Marcos, Miles. yep. Marcos Santayana is VP of digital asset services institutional at Uphold. Marcos, good to have you. Thank you. Thank you. And lastly but not least, Guy Bourbon is taking an operations lead at Etoro. Guy, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Miles. Actually, does additional tech how much, is it? Miles. You're you're I just my audio is cutting really badly in and out. Awesome. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Maybe maybe fade your video. for a second. Will do. So I'll I'll dive into Fireblocks. We're the infrastructure layer. We enable platforms to stake directly from their secure vaults. No SDKs. No external scripts. But before we get into the workflow simplicity, I wanna dwell on something more important, custody. There are two ways to stake. The custodial model, where your clients or users' assets are moved to a third party exchange or custodian who stakes on their behalf, and the noncustodial model, where assets never leave your platform. Fireblocks is noncustodial. When your users stake through a Fireblocks power platform, those assets stay in your vault. The staking transaction sign using our MPC, CNP wallet infrastructure, which means that the private key is never held in one place, never exposed, and never transferred. It's the same institutional grade security model that protects your custody operations applied directly to staking. On top of that, every staking transaction flows through the Fireblocks policy engine. You define who can initiate a stake, what amounts require multi approval sign off, which vault accounts are eligible, and all of it's governed by rules that your own team sets and controls. For regulated platforms, it's an audit trail and a compliance framework built into the infrastructure itself. The industry's learned some hard lessons lately about what happens when platforms hold customer assets and make decisions that aren't theirs to make. The infrastructure behind staking has to be held to the same standard as the custody infrastructure itself. Now one of the most useful ways to think about Now one of the most useful ways to think about staking as a revenue model, especially those of you coming from a traditional finance background, is through the lens of fixed income. Guy, I know you've, used this framing a lot in our prior conversations. So, so let's start there. Make the case for us. Why is a bond a useful mental model for staking, and where does the analogy hold? Yeah. Thank you, Miles. First of all, you guys hear me well. Right? Awesome. So, there is some difference between, corporate bonds and the and the staking. But in general, staking, when you, stake an asset, you actually receive, rewards on a pretty consistent, manner, and you can, pretty much predict, your rewards, your your, you can predict that during the year. It's very similar to coupons, but it's not a 100% as predictable as coupons because coupons is 100% predictable. But, here is a little bit less. There's some, changes between the networks and and, etcetera. But, yeah, I think, Miles, this is the the the main reason why, Yeah. why we can see the similarities between those two. And, Miles, I would just I would just tack on. When we talk to a lot of institutional investors, One of the oh, can you hear me? I was gonna say from. We hear you, Josh. Great. So one of the things that institutional investor were were challenged with, prior to staking is there was no there was no way to to value a crypto asset using a discounted cash flow model. But staking rewards effectively pay cash flows, and they're not exactly cash flows. They're rewards. But, you you know, it in in for locking up your tokens and providing security, and and and chain settlement to a network. So when you're staking Ethereum or you're staking Solana, to Guy's point, there are there are some predictable flows of of rewards. Those are generally, per blockchain protocols have inflation, which is, you know, new chain new blockchain, blockchain token issuance, new Ethereum issuance, new Salon issuance. And then blockchains generally reward stakers, with some of the transaction fees. So, you know, yes, there is a there is a a reward source that kind of looks like corporate bond in some ways, and there is some predictability of it. You can you know, most chains have a set inflationary schedule. But the advantage to staking also is you actually earn some of the transaction fees that are, paid by users of the Blockchain works, which is a little bit different from a corporate bond. There's no, you know, set interest rate when you decide to stake Ethereum or Solana. You know, there's it it's a it's determined based on how badly people wanna send transactions over the Solana blockchain or the Ethereum blockchain. And so they do the the reward rates do fluctuate, but they do allow investors to look at, a, and and discount the cash flows of a crypto asset in the same way they would discount the the cash flows of any other financial instrument. So it's for the first time, you know, one of the primary reasons we're now seeing it during salon and others, show up in institution portfolios is because of this. Awesome. Thanks, Josh. And I think that framing sets up something important on the risk side. Just as a bot holder thinks about credit default risk, platforms taking on behalf of their users need to think about validator risk, and that's where choosing the right validator partner becomes critical. Josh, if you don't mind, tell us who Figment is, track record scale, and what what makes Figment the validator of choice for institutional partners. Yeah. So, so staking is is you know, it it's not without risks. The primary risk exists on Ethereum where, you know, if you there is something called slashing and, you know, what the reason you would use a, a, an an institutional grade service provider is to prevent against risks like that. So you have, you know, at Figment, we're a 120 people. We're a series c backed company. We're a global. We're technically headquartered in Canada, but we see about 6% of the Ethereum and Solana in both of those respective networks staked on our validators. So we're b two b by nature, so we provide staking services to firms like Fireblocks, and for their end customers to come and stake to us. So Uphold and Intuar are really good examples of that, especially as as we see more neobanks, adopt staking as a part of their digital asset offering. But, you know, the primary benefit that you get from staking through an institution provider like us is operational rigor, performance, and security. So those are kind of the three things that that we align ourselves to. You know, we've been we were the first validator on the Solana network, one of the first validators on the Ethereum network. So we've been on these networks from day one. And, you know, we've gone through the the lengthy, process of getting, you know, audit grade, SOC one, SOC two compliance on on our validator infrastructure. And even more so, we've built out we'll talk about this throughout throughout the flow of the of the conversation today. The tools that institutional investors need to, track the rewards that they're earning, stake in a way that they're com they're confident that, you know, there's not going to be a bump in the night. The funds aren't going to be lost. There's not gonna be something that happens that causes excessive amounts of downtime or performance issues, and that we're gonna be at the forefront of things that are happening on all these different networks. So for Solana, for instance, and and Ethereum at Figment, you know, given our focus in in in in scale on staking only, so we're a staking only company, we have people who are dedicated to, researching these blockchains, knowing, you know, well in advance of things that are going to be changing and and how that might impact our customers while also thinking about, like, the technology underpinning the validator and making sure that our clients are always at at at, you know, at the, at the top of the line in terms of new validator client technology that that's being rolled out. So those that that's kind of the mix, Miles. And I would say just lastly, on a risk from a risk management perspective, you know, we have a we have a principle here called safety over live nest. It means to never put customer funds or customer validators at risk of of being slashed. And we'll we can talk a little bit more more about what that means and certainly, you know, probably a two zero one version of this webinar, we can we can definitely dive into that. But that comes from, you know, our our our, our DevOps practices, while also having a, an insurance policy that covers against these types of things, actually happen in practice. So, you know, institutional staking provider in a nutshell, enterprise grade, about 6% of the two largest blockchain networks respectively. And we work really, really closely with Fireblocks and customers like Uphold and eToro to to power their staking infrastructure. Thanks, Josh, for the background. I'd, like to now move on to each or an uphold, set the foundation for the two platform panelists before we get into their stories. Marcos and Guy represent two different paths to the same destination, different user bases, geographies, and regulatory environments. And as we'll get into it, meaningfully different approaches to how they structure the economics of staking. Marcos, could you give us a quick picture of, uphold and and and where the product and staking sits in your product today? And then, Guy, same for you as well. Yeah. Definitely. So, yeah, thanks, Miles. So Uphold is a digital asset trading platform. We have licenses across The UK, US, and and The EU. Actually, in The UK, we are an FCA registered firm, but operationally, we're a principal OTC desk with the retail arm. So we don't have our own order book. We actually source liquidity from over 30 different venues, serve retail, enterprise, and institutional customers, and everything we build, including staking, must be catered to these three audiences simultaneously. We've recently started building out kind of like a API platform in order for a quick plug and play solution for these for these products. But really staking has become one of our core products. It was really helped that we've received the clarity in The US, particularly, and the growth that we've seen since since we've opened up staking has been phenomenal. So excited to dive into that. Thank you. Yeah. At eToro, we also have a license in, all around the Europe. We also have in The UAE, and, we operate all, in The US we offer staking to all those regions with some restrictions depending on the on the country. In The Pa we offer Staying for the past five years or or so and we have and we offer this to multiple customers and regions. Besides that, we we offered, for the past, I think, six years, staking. And we in the past two, three years, we we try to make this product, bigger and larger and grow and grow it, as much as we possibly can, under the the restrictions that we have. And, also, we've been, we did IPO almost about a year ago. So start doing staking in an, public company, changes things a little bit. But, we still do it, because it's it's been a an amazing, product, and it works, very well with the compliance and all the relevant, departments. Thank you to you both. I mean, I would like to just jump into the business case. There's usually a moment where staking moves from a backlog item to a real internal conversation. Marcos, what was the moment for uphold, and what did that case look like when it was brought to the table? So I guess for us, there was constant feedback from our user base to open up staking, you know, on all proof of stake assets like Ethereum, Solana, we hold, you know, fairly large amount on the platform. For the majority of our user base, it was incredibly frustrating that they could only hold the platforms but not actually utilize them. So we always felt that pressure. Obviously, one of the biggest things was kind of the regulatory uncertainty. There was obviously the big case in The US, Coinbase versus SEC, where where they, you know, it was unclear where where, yes, staking stood as a product. So the clarity around that helped us enormously. And, of course, we wanted to build, like, a sticky product that, you know, would keep uphold users on platform, keep them engaged with with their holdings, and, obviously, earn on their assets. Once we, you know, had the clarity, went through the processes of turning it on, finding the right partners that we needed to, it's really been exceptional growth. We've seen that the average staking user actually is about four times as valuable as a non staking user on the platform. They're also much more likely to diversify their holdings. And, it has just been a really incredible success. And I think one of the best aspects that we've seen is that even in this downturn, actually, the staking product and staking users just seems it's been really sticky and continued to grow. So it's not something that only grows during an upmarket, but it's been a real success especially in this year with diversified, stream revenue. That's great to hear. And then same question for Etoro. And I'm also curious. where the compliance and regulatory p is on? Yeah. Yeah. I, you got a little bit lag, but, first of all, I have to agree with, Marcus. The difference there's a huge difference and a huge revenue stream coming from, staking unlike trade regular trading because in staking, you don't care about the volumes. You don't care how much the the client, trade or not trade because as long as they hold the asset, they will gain rewards and you will gain and you as an institution will gain, income from pretty predictable, revenue from the from that. Besides that, regarding the what did you ask beside that? I I lost you for a second. I? think it covered it. Mostly just, you know, whether you had to, clear the regulatory hurdles before the business case moved on or if you ran those in parallel, as you built the product internally. Yeah. We started, we we had to start with, with in our road map with the with the actual business case, how much, can we actually generate from that to to present to to the to the c level management that this, products are, worth, fighting for. And then going to the regular, regulatory, and compliance officers, there was a a huge work there. I I will not go into the specifics, but there's a a a lot of work doing with the to make sure this product is, comply with the with all the regulations. I can also say that that that's the there's there's always a difference between each and every asset. There's regulations that approved, for example, Ethereum, but didn't approve, the TRON, TRX. So every asset is a is a is like a whole new world that you need to to move forward with across the departments. But once you you present the the business case behind it, it it it gives the the the the backwind that you need to to move forward with those assets. Miles, I would just add on here that, you know and, Guy, that's completely agree with everything you said. We end up having and and oftentimes presenting, cases for staking programs in front of regulators in various jurisdictions across the globe. And The US was the was the slowest, but might maybe the most methodical to to end up adopting, staking and allowing for staking to occur in, a neobank or exchange like program. And there was guidance that came out last year. It's nonbinding issued by the SEC, but hopefully it gets codified and, fingers crossed, the round of clarity act that's, going to the senate floor tomorrow, in the bill markup. But, that allow that basically says staking does not constitute the creation of a security. And then, just a couple of months ago, actually, just a few weeks ago, the SEC came out and and delivered, like, effectively a joint statement with the, with the CFTC on, a token taxonomy, which basically allows, you know, proof of stake assets to be staked for end customers at large brokerage platforms, without the need for any additional regulatory licensing. The staking provider doesn't need a regulatory license in order to do that. So, you know, it it really cleared the path. It was something we were waiting for for a really long time. Again, it's nonbinding SEC guidance, but, you know, gave platforms enough comfort, to move forward with with launching staking programs. And we've seen, you know, tons of of these come to market probably in the last couple of weeks. You know, not as early as you Toro and uphold, but, you know, certainly, the the regulatory, pathways have opened up in The US and and and broadly. Awesome. Thanks for that insight. And you actually both teed up my, next set of questions pretty well, so thank you for that. You know, most platforms don't launch across 10 assets on day one. Where did you each start? What drove that decision? Was it demand? Were you looking at user balances, the regulatory clarity? You know, there's operational aspects like liquidity, lock up tolerance, or was it a combination of all of the above? What was and then what's been the criteria for expanding since? Marcos, I'll, I'll throw you first. Yeah. It really is a a combination of of everything you mentioned. I think what we did start with were the primary assets that have been established, deepest liquidity, you know, consistent staking, documentation. That was really the theory of Solanas. Since then, we've really started looking to expand. I mean, we we're trying to compete against competitors that are, you know, scaling incredibly quickly. So we do try and have as diversified offering as as possible. Whenever we look to open up a new product, we always have to ensure that we have the support of a of a Figment or Fireblocks to ensure that, you know, we're we're we're really kind of just the customer facing platform. We thankfully, rely on on professionals such as yourselves to to handle the the core infrastructure. But, yeah, so we we started off with the the kind of the more mainstream assets, but we are always looking for for new assets that we can open on the platform. Awesome. And then, Guy, you know, where did you start, you know, evaluating your options for assets? Yep. We started back in the day when the ADA was about, 2 or $3, and, TRX was both both we started with both assets for a long time. When Ethereum was able to be withdrawn, we also, started staking Ethereum and Solana, and then moved on to other assets. Currently, we offer about 10 assets and more to come in the future. But to the back to the decision making, we start with the as I can definitely agree with Marcus, there's a combination of a of a couple of things. One of them is, the revenue stream, and we take out from this the, lock up, the liquidity management behind the lock up that which will get, sooner in the in the webinar. Also, how much clients own and, and and is there an incentive from the client's perspective to add a a new, stakeable, asset to the to the product? After we go we we we do this, we go, to the operational side. Is is it feasible? Is it supported by our custodians and our staking providers? And then after we have a very good business case, we move it forward to the compliance and legal teams and the risk teams, and then we move forward to to launch it. Awesome. And I want want you to hold your thoughts on the operational build before we get into the next part. But, Josh, from Figment's perspective, when you're onboarding a new platform, what does a sensible asset sequencing strategy look like? Where do you typically advise people to start? Yeah. I think it kind of mirrors, like, what you see from a market pack from a market cap perspective on the larger proof of stake token. So, you know, Ethereum is is easily the, you know, the most interesting and largest network that institutions have generally heard about. We were laughing internally yesterday because we were on with the chief operating officer of a very, very large multinational bank and heard them say the word Glamsterdam, which just was was a great moment. Glamsterdam is the upcoming Ethereum upgrade. So, you know, Ethereum has certainly crossed into the mainstream. It is, it is generally the asset that people start with first. The next is Solana, and Solana has a different, has a different reward profile than Ethereum. It actually has a higher rewards rate, and it also has no slashing. So Ethereum, like what I would talked about before, if you double sign a transaction or double sign a block as a validator, you can get, penalized for doing so and lose some of the principal, on that particular validator. Solana does not have that same risk. And so, you know, when you argue about what is the true risk free rate of crypto, obviously, the answer is none. But Solana might actually have a better case for it than Ethereum because there is no, there's no penalty for, double signing a block. It just wouldn't be included. And so, the reward rate tends to be higher. So, you know, when we talk to a lot of of firms who are doing, you know, or or banks and and others that are modeling out their their onboarding flow, it's okay. Our our client demand is mostly around Ethereum. Solana is a great fast follow because it's actually going to be more profitable for us with with less risk. And it's it's general generally more easy to operate a validator because it's, one validator to many staking addresses, whereas Ethereum is one staking address to one validator, which we'll we'll talk about a little bit further. Sequencing beyond that gets muddy, I'd say. There's certainly a case to be made to look at Avalanche, Polkadot, Cardano, some of these other assets. Unfortunately, Bitcoin, you can't stake, or you can't stake in a way that would be profitable for your users. So, unfortunately, that that does not get included in in the analysis, but the majority of our customers start with Ethereum, move to Solana, and then there's a tale of others that they end up wanting to support, over time. So and and and, you know, certainly, are looking at other ways to, to add yield into into their customers' hands while they're while they're holding these tokens on those platforms. So that's that's the general sequencing framework, Miles. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Now I like to walk through the build. Once you have that alignment and the compliance sign off, you know, how do you actually build a scalable staking operation? And then specifically, Wi Fi or Blox and Figment. You know, there's other options in the market. What made this the right combination to move forward? Start with Marcos. I'm I I guess why we we we went Fireblocks and and Figment has just released established reputable partners. Like, we it would have been a huge lift for uphold to really go in and hire the expertise, bring that all in house, build the infrastructure. Whereas we had the opportunity to rely on, you know, partners such as yourselves to quickly build a staking product that scaled, right, became an actual revenue driver. If we had built that all in house, I mean, we'd we'd still be working on on getting our staking product live. Whereas now it's actually one of the key the key, offerings that we have on the platform. Again, so we the biggest hurdle for us has always been the the reward attribution, reconciliation, and just ensuring that we have clean data that that, you know, is being credited to customers and also kinda satisfying our compliance and and audit functions. But but that was one of the key aspects. It was just kind of ensuring that we had the right partners in place that we could securely manage our customers' funds. You know, as as Josh mentioned, there are genuine risks of slashing. You know, we didn't really wanna venture into that, you know, put our customers onto that risk. So we were able to, you know, just rely on on the likes of Figment to ensure that that that is always a risk, but very minimal at least. I can definitely add to that that, security, when we're talking about blockchain, is the most, important thing because we've seen lots of exploits, different, angles. And, I'm I came from the operational, team, and I work with Fireblocks manually, myself for a very for a long time and also with the Figment. And I and working with both the Fireblocks and their MPC and Figment as the, institutional grade, staking provider, and their collaboration between each other made the end user, for at this point, eToro and the operational teams and, and, work much easier, much smoother, and, with very minimal, technical issues and, and, and, operational risks, it makes the the, the operational flow much, easier and much faster. And, and besides that, if I'm talking about the the, staking provider, we some of our assets are being, staked internally, though we have a internal, infrastructure, and some are, staked with the with the state providers. The re one of the reasons for that is I, again, agree with Marcus here that building your own validator can be a very, tough challenge. And, because they are slashing risks and they're, very different risks for in each, network, you will have to have the, the exact expertise just for each and every network by itself. And, working with the with the state provider and an institutional grade state state provider makes it much smoother, faster, with go to market timeline, and, and it it saves a lot of, time and effort. Thank you to you both. And, don't mind me hopping in and out of the camera. I wanna make sure the questions come through clearly. But, Josh, I wanna bring you in here on the operational efficiency angle because it's often the piece that gets underestimated. When platforms. come to Figment without proper infrastructure in place, what does their operational picture actually look like? What are the manual workflows, the bottlenecks, the risk? And then when Fireblocks are and Figment are working together inside a client stack, what concretely gets replaced? And then what does that translate to in turn in real terms for the businesses? Yeah. So, Miles, the two biggest things so, obviously, the first question we ask every customer when they're coming to us is, who's your custody provider? How are you how are you holding the tokens? And even if actually they've they've they've they've started before that, right, it's it's proving out the business model, which which Gaia, Marco, certainly went through. And and and, Marco, is your comment about, earning four x the amount of revenue off of your staking users, I just that's gonna stick with me, and I'm probably gonna use that, going forward. That's just an incredible stat. I'm not not totally surprised. Generally, when people come to us, it's, you know, after they've decided or have explored custody, generally, you know, more often than not, they are working with Fireblocks because of the ease of use between the two platforms. And, you guys have done an incredible job building, you know, just what we think is the the top the top custody infrastructure across the space and the easiest to to, to really roll out when we're talking to other customers, not just Etoro and Uphold, but others that that would like to use the the same stack. The first the the two biggest operational challenges are going to be, transaction signing. So when you just when you elect to stake, an asset, you know, being able to offer that to a platform's end users in a way that's, you know, kind of done almost automatically. You know, everything's obfuscated behind the scenes. There's exposed APIs so that the end user you know, if my family member is is looking to stake a token, they just wanna be able to click a button like, hey. Stake Ethereum. Stake Solana. They don't wanna have to go through, like, building the transactions, sending the transaction to the blockchain. You know, kind of the the ongoing process of doing that can be a lot, and it it can be technical. So, you know, the solution first is, you know, we've obfuscated that away with Fireblocks, and we've built, a suite of APIs and also, a transaction signing schema that effectively allows for users to build and and and submit transactions without them having to have deep, you know, cryptography expertise. It's it's it's extremely user friendly and and and quite often, and I'm sure Guy and and Marcus can attest to this, you can really just expose a button to your end users, on how on on, you know, to stake a specific asset. The other thing is on reporting. And so reporting kind of in my mind has two flavors. One is what's the general, you know, amount of rewards that this particular customer or suite of customers have earned by staking tokens? That allows you to, you know, report your revenue, determine how much you're taking as your fee, and have an accurate understanding of, you know, how well the validator is performing relative to other other validators in the network. There's a whole host of reasons you would want, you know, to understand the amount the the rewards that are being earned from an internal perspective. But I'd say even more importantly is to be able to show your end users this is how much you've earned on a monthly basis or a weekly basis, whatever your reporting frequency is, and show them, you know, it's not just, you know, your your Ethereum, your Solana, your Avalanche is not just sitting there idle, and be able to trust that your provider is is is giving you, you know, the the inaccurate picture of, how much your your how much rewards your users are earning. Those are the two biggest things I think that that, get solved outside of, like, managing the operations behind the validator is making it really easy for people to sign, a transaction to basically get their assets staked, and then make it really easy for them to understand how many how much they've earned in rewards. If you can't do those two things right, you're gonna have a really hard time convincing people to use your platform. And I'd say everything that goes on, you know, everything that's that's beyond that, you know, would be the bells and whistles that we can we can tack on. But but from, you know, the most core perspective, align custodian, align how your users are going to actually stake in your interface. And then, you know, we can design co design with with Fireblocks a way that you're consuming the rewards data both for your internal business planning purposes and also so that your users, you know, you can be excited about the fact that they're earning, you know, 7 percent on Solana and 3% on their Ethereum holdings that are that are staying on your platform. Awesome. Thanks. And I'm sure everyone on the call is is already doing the math on their side, so let's keep the conversation on the economics piece. Both of your fee structures are worth exploring. They're different models, and they both work differently for your business models. You know, Guy, walk us through eToro's reward structure, how it works, and and why you decided to build it the way you did. Okay. To understand, first of all, the the fee structure, at Dittoral, we have a membership. The membership, moves from, Bronze Club to Diamond Club, and each one of them, there's a a a different set of, fees for the for the client. The fee starts from, 55% to, 10%. This means that when a client received their funds, they receive it after, eToro, took their share. And this it helps, grow the the membership, aspect. More and more clients wants to be in a higher tier because they know how much, asset how much, how less they will pay, as fees. So it it staking basically and and this, fee structure actually helps a client to Awesome. to to increase in the in the in the to to grow in the in the membership. And then Marcos uphold went different direction. What was the thinking about that? And and what does it do for how you communicate value to your users? Yeah. We went yeah. As you said, a different model. We operate on a flat fee. So we take a spread between the gross on chain yield and what we pass to the customer. With that spread, we we do distribute the that covers the the note of the service fees, custody costs, compliance overhead, and so forth. We're pretty transparent about it, and that's kind of why we chose that direction. We think it's just really easy for any user just to get familiar with it. As Josh said that, I many of our users in particular, they just wanna open the app, click stake. It's pretty easy function there. You'll just say, like, stake Ethereum. You'll see the API that you'll receive. You'll also you'll also have, a clear indication of our the spread that we would capture and the risk profiles that you'll take. You can also, like, click to learn more. But it's just really try to be as straightforward as possible, to commit the the the fee that we would take on on all on all assets would be the same. Thank you. And so how do you actually talk to your retail users about staking? Lock up periods, the validator mechanics, the fees, reward timing, none of it's particularly intuitive for someone new to staking and digital assets in general. What's the language that's worked for both of you? How do you handle the what if I need my money back conversation? Guy, you know, going back to the bond maturity analogy here, how has your messaging landed with users? And then we'll pass to Marcos after. Yeah. So first of all, we have on our website, staking page and, and q and a there. But, I I there's a a difference in eToro because in eToro, none of the, assets that are being staked from the client perspective, they're not locked. Meaning, the client can buy and sell the assets whenever they want, and they will not need to even unstake. The asset will be, flexible. This means that they can just buy and sell whenever they want. So the lockup period, even though it's mentioned on theory, we can, assets can be locked. But, in practice, this does not happen because we keep our liquidity, buffer very similar to, how ETFs work, with, with cash, with the keeping, some some sort of cash. The the this is how we work, and and we communicate to client this with marketing emails, letting them know, first of all, how many rewards they receive on a monthly basis, and the yields and etcetera, and also on the on the website. We do get some questions, once in a while regarding the slashing and the lockup periods. But at eToro, we we we do not, take the we we mostly take the risk. And so far, what we tell to the client is that those kind of situations, even though are possible, are very unlikely because we have a very, strong, infrastructure behind it. Yeah. That's we've, yeah, we we we've explored both models and and that makes a lot of sense. I know that a lot of platforms are are still in that, on that direction. We've kind of been a bit slower to gravitate towards that model. We we do still kind of follow the staking, terms on platform. So almost right below our commission, you would also see, like, how long it may take for your your tokens to be unbound. Of course, that can be stressful and really volatile market for some customers, but they're always aware of the of the risks and also that there there is an unbonding period that their tokens will be locked for, you know, a day, two days, three days, depending on the asset. We try and be as transparent and clear on that as possible. I know there's been a whole lot of, changes in The UK particularly around Finprom, so we are obligated to be very transparent on that front. There's also the ability for them to click to read more if they wanna go into the deep dive into the risks of staking, understand slashing, and more more deeply. But, yeah, those are the core assets. We try and keep it as simple as possible. We really try to hide it at the complexity as much as we can. They really don't want to dive into the technical details for the most part, but we at least make it very easy for for a user that that wishes to. Awesome. And then, Marcos, I'll, I'll keep it in in in your lane. You talked earlier about outcomes. You've looked at the data on staking users versus non staking users, at Uphold. What does that picture look like? You know, the lower churn rate, holding larger balances, engaging more. What's the behavior story there? Yeah. For us, it it genuinely has been an incredible success. And, really, it still is probably the the most asked question, just open up more yield opportunities on the platform. But as I mentioned, from a revenue perspective, we have found that a user that stakes on the platform is is four times as valuable. Also, our the amount of users staking over the last twelve months has grown about five x, which is, like, truly remarkable. I think that shows how sticky they have really have been because the market's been, you know, very volatile. Prices have been going down, but yet the number of users staking has actually just continued to increase and remain stable. So it's been a a real success story on that on that front for Sherpa. So Mason here. And then, Guy, same question for you, Turo. And then specifically with your your tiered structure, how does that move the needle on engagement? And then what's been the benefits for for staking from your side? Yeah. So, clients did, move forward in the with the with the membership, and, it it helped a lot. The the fee structure helps a lot in the moving in, being clients more eager to to increase in the in the in the club tier. Besides that, we have well, I I lost my, my channel of thought. Can you repeat the question for a second? No worries. Just and, you know, what if what is the benefit been for implementing staking into the product? You know, specifically, I know you said, like, it drives people to the memberships. Have you seen increased balances or, larger engagement from your user base? Yeah. So one of the things, we we currently do is, we call it, crypto position, which clients can, add crypto from outside of eToro into eToro, and they they don't only need to, deposit cash. So staking also, helps on this front because a client that, at the moment holds, for example, Solana and doesn't know how to stake by themselves or, doesn't trust, to do to do this on their own, they put their Solana into eToro, for example, and they can stake at eToro very easily. And, basically, the there's a, just a toggle inside the the website that you just click on it, and you stake your asset. You don't need to think anything besides that. You don't need to go to the blockchain technicalities. Everything is very smooth there. Awesome. Thank you. And I know we're, a little bit over the allotted time for the the webinar itself. Before we get into q and a, I really wanna wrap it up with a quick lightning round and a super quick demo. But for the platforms watching today who haven't started yet, what's the one thing that you wish you had told someone before you built this? And then, Josh, I'll I'll let you go last. But from your perspective, what do you advise clients to be aware of early in the process? Let's start with Marcos. Sorry. It froze a little bit there. I think it was it just it been such such success for us. I think we probably wish we had been a bit more aggressive with it. And the key the key for us really has been about establishing the right partnerships to go forward. Without that, it would have been an incredible uplift and incredibly challenging, and we would have had to really, kind of invest a lot of resource into it. With you know, by working with the right partners, we were able to open up a very a great product, and we've had, you know, a lot of success as a platform. So it's it it is about finding the right partnerships. From my perspective also, I think you have to build a very, strong, infrastructure, from the operational side, from the monitoring side, from the reporting side. And once you establish all three, you can and and you establish it in a scalable way. You don't need a very big team. You you can have you can do this with a very lean teams and outsource, the the biggest hurdles to our, a staking provider and a custodian. And then from this point, you can move forward very, very fast, and scale, even faster. And and, Miles, I would just add on to the end. I don't think it's ever too early to get started. And I think, you know, one of the things that we see is is we talk to we talk to customers in different, stages of of, you know, maturity in terms of launching a type of of staking product to their end customer. And, because of our platform and Fireblocks platform, there's high degree of customization that we can do if there's certain things that, out of the box, don't meet your needs. And you might not even know what does or does not meet your needs yet. So my my biggest, words of encouragement to platforms getting started is you don't need to be an expert in staking. You don't need to be an expert in staking risk management. You don't need to be an expert in custody in order to add these features and and, you know, start earning, rewards for your customers. We can literally help you guide you through that entire process. We have you know, Figment is a 125 people. Most of those people are engineers. Most of those people are working on on platforms like, uphold and eToro on a daily basis and deeply involved in the Solana ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem. They're, you know, Red Hat security experts. You know, they can tell you how they pen test our our infrastructure, or they can tell you how, they financially audit. Our our our our infrastructure gets audited from, an operational perspective. You know, if so long as your business team is has made the commercial case for it, we can then start to to to help you guys along in in any way, shape, or form. So it's never too early is is my biggest piece of advice. Yeah. I definitely echo that from from everyone's perspective. I know we're, we're getting close to time, so I wanna share just a really quick video of what staking looks like, from the Fireblocks console, and then I promise we'll get into your questions and answers very quickly. But as I pull this up, everything that you're about to see is also available via Fireblocks APIs, staking, unstaking, withdrawals, reward tracking. It can all be automated and integrated directly into your platform workflows. So whether you're a team that wants to manage staking through the console or build it into your product programmatically, the the infrastructure supports both. Give me one second. Hey, guys. It looks like, Miles is having some technical issues. Josh, is there. is there any way that you could run through the demo? I don't have access to the demo, Samantha. I've I've, unfortunately, don't have I don't have it on my on my screen. Why. don't we go some of the yeah. Let's. go into the questions, and we can we can send a link to it after in the email. Absolutely. There was one question that came in, that was really good on how does direct staking via Fireblocks, it, or or through a platform like Uphold and eToro compare to ETF staking in terms of yield and simplicity? I would say and and, Marco, Skye, I'm sure you guys have thoughts on this. The, an ETF is you know, they're going to charge a management fee, and they're not going to be staking a 100% of the assets, you know, in in in at the end of the day, like, you don't have title to those assets that are underpinning the ETF as a as a token holder. So some people appreciate that because of the simplicity of being able to log in to their brokerage account and being able to buy, you know, someone's ETF that has staking rewards embedded into it. But I would say, you know, native staking is certainly, you know, more you're you're directly interacting with the protocol. You're earning a reward stream directly. It really, I'd say, depends on on on the on on what your goals are, the type of account that you're going to be staking from. Fireblocks does custody, the assets and is able to custody the assets of ETPs. Figma is staking a large number of the ETPs, on behalf of, you know, the issuers. But I'd say, you know, the majority of customers we still see today are are going direct through platforms like Etoro and Nuffolds. Guy and Marcus, I'm not sure if you guys have any other thoughts there. No. I I completely agree with you, Joshua. I, eventually, there are benefits in a in an ETF. For many countries, it's from the even the taxation, problems. But on the other hand, when you do it native staking, you remove some sort of a middleman, which is BlackRock or whatever, whoever makes the the ETF. I think that's the the benefit here. That's the main benefit. Yeah. And sorry. I've slowed down a little bit. But, yeah, kinda echoing what they said. A a lot of our users, we have, like, a very, I guess, more maybe crypto native user base and and they really appreciate in actually owning the assets, and I think that's kind of the main differentiator for for us on this. I'm just going back on the questions. My favorite one is so far is, Goldcast getting a refund. Because, unfortunately, yeah, we have had some some technical difficulties, and sorry about that, guys. Hopefully, it's still been informative. There are, one or two other questions. Parker had a really good question, and I can I can take a stab at it and see how everyone else, responds or thinks? But token prices are down, in 2026, although we've seen a little bit of a rebound over the past couple of weeks. And, there was a, there is for for those who aren't aware, there is a a a a kind of component of crypto called decentralized finance, DeFi, which is, you know, tokenized lending and borrowing, you know, without, you know, needing to use a middleman effectively. It's protocol based tokenized lending and borrowing. And there was a hack, with a DeFi system a couple of weeks ago that led into sort of large scale contagion, in a large from a large lending pool called Aave. And, I think if anything, you know, Parker's question is how does staking recover its momentum? So the the the first thing that I'll that I'd like to share is staking was not impacted at all. If anything, you know, staking was working while DeFi was broken. And so you have, a much safer way to earn yields while your assets remain in custody, in your custody, in Fireblocks custody. When you state to Figma's validators through Uphold or through Etoro, you know, your assets are not leaving their original, the original place where they're being held. And so we think there's a lot of safety in that. Certainly have not seen large scale hacks of, of validator infrastructure. There have been staking providers that have been hacked, for for poor operational management, but there has not been, you know, wide scale contagion where, like, Ethereum validators have been slashed across the board. So I think staking gains a lot of momentum when we see DeFi fall down. When you're paying, you know, when you're when you're, out trying to outperform staking by 200 or some odd basis points, but you're taking 2,000 basis points of career risk in order to do that. It doesn't seem worth it to me. So I think we're seeing a lot like a a flight to safety, which, you know, tends to be, you know, just come back to to where you can earn 7% on Solana and 3% on Ethereum, give or take. And that's that's by participating directly in protocol staking. Guy, Marcus, I'm not sure if you you guys agree or or disagree. Yeah. Definitely. There's a huge, difference that many don't understand between delegating your funds and transferring them. And in many places and in many with many, professional professionals that I spoke with, there there is some, understanding gap between delegating your funds to a to a validator when you remain in full custody of your of your, of your asset and transferring it outside of your wallet. There's a huge difference. And in staking, you remain, as Joshua said, a 100% your assets are remain a 100% under your custody, under your, supervision. And that's a hue that's the that's, I think, the main point here. Yeah. And I'll I'll jump in. Apologies once again for for Goldcast and the connection issues. But, you know, what I would have shown in the demo is when you state directly from Fireblocks through your self custodial vault infrastructure, you're subject to all of your TAP policies, whatever approval flows that you've set for your organizations. And so you can say who can approve, when, and for what assets, and that never leaves your your custody. So there's additional layers of security when you work with Fireblocks and Figment and and stake your assets that way. Miles, there's one last thing I wanna just quickly address before you guys go to wrap it up. John has asked a question, on our reaction to the Clarity Act, which is the market structure bill that's going to the senate floor tomorrow for markup. He's asking, or saying that the the bill seeks to prohibit deposit like staking yields. What are our plans to address this? So I think that that's, John, appreciate the question. That's not a 100% accurate. So there are, what's called stablecoins, which are dollarized tokenized versions of of a US dollar or whatnot. The Clarity Act is seeking to determine if, intermediary platforms can offer yield on stablecoins, unrelated to the yields that are earned from staking infrastructure. So they're talking more about, platforms, like, that are that are issuing stablecoins, earning treasury yields on top of those tokens. It does not address staking yields, and, you know, we've had numerous conversations with the SEC, with the house, with the senate, across government, to make sure that everyone understands that staking is a, is a is a fundamental technological service that allows these blockchains to exist, and the rewards are the incentive mechanism for people to stake. It it has nothing to do with, you you know, earning yields on stablecoins. So we're we we have no no concerns about, the language as the Clarity, Act is drafted right now. Yeah. And I say from that perspective, we echo Josh and Figma's sentiment as well. I know that we're slightly over time. Appreciate everyone who took time out of their day, during a lunch hour to come sit down, talk with us about staking. This has been great. We've broken down how platforms can reliably build a scalable staking product from the ground up. Thank you to Josh at Figment, Marcos at Uphold, Guy at Etoro. But I know we've only scratched the surface. For everyone watching, if you wanna go deeper on what staking infrastructure could look like for your specific platform, the link to book time with Fireblocks and and the rest of the team is in the chat. We'd love to walk you through it. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you all. Thanks, Thank. you very much, everybody. Thank you, thank you, Miles.