decrypt.co
BlackRock's iShares Staked Ethereum Trust has reached $254 million worth of assets under management after launching a week ago. That means investors have bought $146 million worth of shares since the fund debuted, on top of more than $100 million seeded in the fund.
BlackRock launched the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ETHB) on Nasdaq on March 12, with the seed capital coming from BlackRock Financial Management, an affiliate of iShares. The new fund stakes between 70–95% of its $ETH holdings and passes 82% of resulting rewards to investors through monthly payments, with the remaining 18% split among the trust, custodians, and staking service providers.
The fund's validators include Figment, Galaxy Blockchain Infrastructure, and Attestant. ETHB charges a 0.25% sponsor fee, discounted to 0.12% for its first year on up to $2.5 billion in assets. It entered a market where Grayscale and REX-Osprey had already launched competing staked Ethereum products.
Ethereum did have a bullish rally above $2,300 earlier this week, but but has since fallen alongside Bitcoin and the rest of the market. At the time of writing, $ETH was changing hands for $2,126 after having dropped 4% in the past day.
The Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF added staking in October 2025 and renamed the fund to reflect its new staking activity in January. The fund saw mixed results its first week as a staking ETF, seeing a net outflow of $32.5 million. But Grayscale had the misfortune of adding staking to its ETF the same week that a Bitcoin flash crash triggered a $19 billion leverage wipeout last October, dragging down the rest of the crypto market.
Meanwhile, the Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF was formed in April 2024, although it didn't initially launch with staking. That wasn't added until October 6, 2025, the same week the ETHE fund added staking.
The BlackRock offering is different from both the Grayscale $ETH funds because it was conceived and launched with staking, rather than adding the feature later.