After the consensus was converted from PoW to PoS, $ETH gained staking rewards, creating an "maturity mismatch" arbitrage opportunity between its own LST liquid staking tokens and LRT liquidity re-staking tokens.

As a result, leveraging, circular lending, and maturity arbitrage of ETH staking rewards have become the largest application scenarios for lending protocols like Aave, forming one of the foundations of current on-chain DeFi.

Indeed, the biggest application scenario in current DeFi is "arbitrage."

However, don't panic or lose heart; traditional finance is the same.

The problem is that the maturity mismatch of ETH has not brought additional liquidity or other value to the blockchain industry, or even to the Ethereum ecosystem itself; it has only led to continuous selling pressure, as the ETH staking rewards obtained by institutions ultimately need to be cashed out.

The selling pressure and ETH buying interest create a subtle offensive and defensive relationship. Although Vitalik dislikes the excessive financialization of blockchain, he has personally opened this Pandora's box.

We can make an intuitive comparison between ETH and its liquidity tokens and the maturity mismatch in traditional bank deposits and loans.

Maturity mismatch is most commonly seen when banks absorb short-term deposits to issue long-term loans. This process resolves a fundamental contradiction in economic activity: the misalignment of liquidity preferences.

A credit-based monetary system creates broad money through loan issuance, "monetizing" future productivity in advance. Despite the existence of cyclical bubbles, the core indeed serves the growth of the real economy.

Without banks as intermediaries for maturity transformation, social investment capacity would be strictly limited to the stock of long-term savings.

Maturity mismatch allows banks to concentrate idle funds by taking on liquidity risk and convert them into productive capital.

The risk lies in bank runs. Thus, there are central banks as lenders of last resort and deposit insurance systems to counteract risks. But in reality, this socializes the maturity risk, transferring it to society as a whole.

In the DeFi space, maturity arbitrage is pure leveraged arbitrage, not value creation.

Institutions stake ETH in Lido as stETH, use stETH as collateral in lending protocols like Aave to borrow ETH, and then repeat the first step for circular lending.

Through this method, ETH PoS staking rewards are amplified; as long as the borrowing cost is lower than the Ethereum staking rewards, there is profit to be made.

The borrowed ETH is not used to develop dApps or purchase assets but is immediately funneled back into the staking contract.

Although the Ethereum PoS mechanism becomes safer with increased funds, the "circular staking" conducted by institutions through Lido and Aave is essentially an arbitrage behavior against the network security budget.

With the Dencun upgrade, the mainnet Gas consumption is insufficient, ETH has returned to an inflationary state, and the institutional selling of staking rewards has formed structural price suppression.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake once proposed the concept of "Minimum Viable Issuance" (MVI). If 15 million ETH staked is enough to withstand a nation-level attack, then the current 34 million staked is actually an overcapacity of security.

In this context of "overcapacity security," the newly added ETH inflation is no longer a necessary security expenditure but has turned into an inflation tax on holders.

This is the current situation. The number of on-chain stablecoins has consistently reached new highs, and ETH has been continuously issued, but the largest scenario is in circular lending arbitrage within lending protocols, which has not supplemented liquidity to the market.

Therefore, Vitalik may not realize that Ethereum's transition to PoS is actually a "gamble." What is being gambled?

First, it is the ETH staking rewards versus U.S. Treasury yields.

After the transition from PoW to PoS, ETH gained staking rewards, effectively turning into a perpetual bond. Currently, the stETH APY is 2.5%, which is lower than U.S. Treasury yields. In other words, ETH staking rewards are in a "negative spread" state compared to U.S. Treasury yields.

For institutions, buying ETH is less attractive than buying U.S. Treasuries or tokenized U.S. Treasuries. In other words, the current price of ETH is actually reflecting a discount relative to its disadvantage against U.S. Treasury yields.

Secondly, RWA brings externalities. The total value of staking tokens determines the cost of attacks and directly affects network security. Therefore, there may be a resonant upward relationship between the total value of on-chain RWA and the total market value of ETH.

Finally, whether one is optimistic about Ethereum is a stance, but one can also choose a neutral perspective—just focusing on the present.

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