Tezos (XTZ) continues upwards as crowd gets cozy with staking

On Nov 7th, Coinbase introduced staking rewards to their platform and have selected Tezos (XTZ) to be the first token to be supported.

With Coinbase staking rewards:

You can begin earning rewards on your crypto. The current estimated annual return for Tezos staking on Coinbase is ~5%. You’ll see your pending rewards increase in real-time in the app, and once your initial holding period completes (35–40 days), you’ll receive rewards in your account every 3 days.

You will always maintain control. Your Tezos always stays in your wallet; you just earn rewards while keeping your crypto safely on Coinbase. You can opt out any time you want.

Shortly after the Coinbase announcement, OKEx too announced that they will be supporting XTZ staking.

Price action

XTZ's price went up more than 30% following the surprise announcements.

XTZ's price was also trading at a premium over at Coinbase for a short period before arbitrage bots closed the gap. At one point, it even went as high as $1.90 USD.

Social volume

Just when XTZ social volume was getting rather quiet (been 3 months since last major spike), the new staking announcements have seen mentions of "XTZ" or "Tezos" at a 6 month ATH.

Previous major social volume spikes coincided with price spikes and Coinbase announcements mainly responsible for the moves. Talk about the Coinbase effect, it's still alive it seems!

Crowd reactions

• There is a tezos earn intrest coin base, just got my first 5 XTZ 😊
• xtz 20k sat soon
• Hi. How can I stake XTZ on Trust wallet?
• Boom xtz Tezos! Hope you listen at 0.88$ i told you to stock!
• wow xtz last nigt i buy this coin because of okex listing
• Hello, is there any trading group for XTZ?
• You can get some free XTZ from Coinbase now too
• Dope, 40 TPS beats the shit out of ETH and tezos governance is way better so I’m a big fan.

Care to stake?

With the spotlight on Tezos, it is now ranked #6 in staking ratio (Total staked) compared to other PoS projects out there. Indicating that majority of the network (70.93%) are actively securing it which leaves little for speculation.

Interesting staking behaviour was also observed prior to Coinbase's announcement. During the period of 3rd Nov to 6th Nov, the Total staked % fell from 71.15% to 69.20%. That's almost 2% of the supply that decided not to participate in securing the network. Does makes one wonder whether they were moved to exchanges to take advantage of the price action.

Following the staking announcements, Total staked % eventually made its way back up and is now at 70.9%. This gradual climb over the past few days (as compared to the sharp drop prior) and increased enquiries around "how to stake" suggests new retail folks are starting to stake XTZ.

Currently, it appears that Tezos' activity is mainly around securing the network and rewarding participants. It's great for a start (it's a young network afterall) but further use-cases should be observed for adoption. E.g more usage of smart contracts on the network.

Will be interesting to see how active the network is and what type of transactions are happening in the next few months.

Would you like to see on-chain metrics for Tezos? Let us know here!