Seba Bank, a popular Swiss bank that received $110 million in investments in a Series C round earlier this year, today announced a new service for institutional clients interested in crypto: Ethereum (ETH) staking.
Non-retail clients who hold more than 32 ETH, currently about $50,000, will receive monthly rewards. The bank will not operate directly but will have a validator working on its behalf.
“The launch of our Ethereum staking services will enable institutional investors to play a key role in securing the future of the network”,
said Mathias Schutz, the bank’s chief technology solutions officer.
Summary
Seba Bank in the crypto world
As early as 2019, Seba Bank was approved by FINMA, or the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, to provide cryptocurrency-related services to its clients. Initially, the crypto services were aimed only at customers residing in Switzerland, while subsequently, from the end of the year 2019, it had started to be able to accept Italian users as well.
In August 2021, Seba Bank had also announced the expansion of its crypto services to DeFi, with the addition of support for the tokens of Aave (AAVE) and Chainlink (LINK).
In 2021, Seba Bank had been included in the list compiled by Swiss CV VC of the unicorns of the crypto industry, i.e., those companies that have reached a market valuation of more than $1 billion.
The Ethereum Merge
The fact that it was just today that Seba decided to announce this important news for clients is perhaps no coincidence since Ethereum is attracting interest these days because of the Merge.
Just yesterday, the Bellatrix update took place, a hard fork that prepares the Ethereum blockchain for the real transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, thanks precisely to the so-called Merge that will take place in mid-September, between the 13th and 15th, as the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, pointed out just yesterday in a post on Twitter.
The merge is still expected to happen around Sep 13-15. What's happening today is the Bellatrix hard fork, which *prepares* the chain for the merge. Still important though – make sure to update your clients!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 6, 2022
Bellatrix is an update that changes the Consensus Layer, which is that of the new PoS-based Beacon Chain. Whereas the one that will perform the actual Merge will be Paris, which will take place simultaneously on both the Consensus Layer and the so-called Execution Layer, i.e., the old PoW-based blockchain.
Seba Bank is not the only one supporting staking
In this way, Ethereum will go from needing miners to needing validators for staking, and so Seba Bank has already been willing to position itself in this regard.
Back in 2021, it seems it was Sygnum (another Swiss unicorn) that had also announced staking support for what was then called Ethereum 2.0 in July of that year, along with companies like Blockdaemon and Bison Trails.
