At the beginning of October, the queue for exiting Ethereum staking surged to a yearly high of 786,000 ETH, representing approximately 2% of the total staked coins. The withdrawal process currently takes over 13 days.

Source: Validator Queue.

Conversely, around 1.5 million ETH are queued for entry into staking, with waiting times extending to about 25 days.

The entry and exit rates for validators in Ethereum are intentionally limited to prevent drastic fluctuations in the network's security parameters. Under the current restrictions, approximately 57,600 ETH can enter or exit the blockchain each day.

The increase in the exit queue is likely linked to the temporary shutdown of several MetaMask validators following a security incident. The company attributed the situation to issues within its infrastructure.

Security researcher Kaden estimates that this proactive exit may have affected around 17,000 validators with approximately 523,000 ETH involved, though project representatives have not confirmed these figures.

after some onchain sleuthing, i think this is what happened: 19 metamask validators had won block rewards, and 18 of the rewards were not paid to the correct fee recipient but instead to this tornado funded account: 0x98B9231de84334c1d48BA0b72CF13f92484924A3 ~17k validators proactively exited, ~523k eth total, unknown whether the attacker had the ability to change all fee recipients it appears that 3 of the exploited validators have not yet been exited, and that 821 potentially impacted validators in total have yet to exit, unclear why attacker only stole ~0.36 eth in rewards and likely never had the ability to withdraw any staked eth. however, depending on how the attacker managed to get signing access, they could potentially cause the validators to be intentionally slashed

— kaden.eth (@0xKaden) October 1, 2026

It is worth noting that on August 12, validators accounting for 28.83% of SOL in staking were simultaneously disabled due to a routing failure at the infrastructure provider TeraSwitch.

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