Staking Infrastructure: Custody, Yield, and Compliance for ETH
Ethereum Korea One: Genesis · Day 1 · 2026-09-28 · 18:56 · In English
What needs to be in place for institutions to stake ETH? In the staking infrastructure panel at Ethereum Korea One: Genesis, DSRV, Optimum, and Lido examine Ethereum staking through custody, compliance, yield, and the Korean market.
Speakers
- Byeongyun Seo, Co-CEO, DSRV
- Kent Lin, COO, Co-Founder, Optimum
- Samuel Chong, Institutional Lead, APAC & MENA, Lido
- Youngseok Yang, CEO, Nodeinfra (moderator)
About this session
Moderated by Youngseok Yang, CEO of Nodeinfra, this panel covers the prerequisites for institutional staking, the tension between permissionless validation and compliance, and the thought experiment "What if staking yield goes to zero?" You will hear the panelists' differing views on whether staking is infrastructure or a financial product, and whether Korea should have sovereign staking infrastructure.
Key takeaways
- Byeongyun Seo (DSRV) said institutions feel staking is "taking on one more layer of risk" beyond custody. Seo named three core issues: who is accountable if a validator is slashed, whether it triggers any regulatory problem, and how to recognize rewards that arrive by the second in accounting and audit reports. Seo also noted that Korea has not yet defined such standards.
- Samuel Chong (Lido) cited two recurring points of friction in conversations with APAC institutions: whether they can interact with smart contracts, and whether they can use a permissionless validator set. The former requires gradual engagement and education with regulators. The latter can be addressed through native staking with a dedicated node operator, or through Lido's institutional product, stVaults, which lets institutions choose their node operators, custodians, OFAC sanctions compliance, and stETH issuance volume.
- Kent Lin (Optimum) described Ethereum staking as "infrastructure with a financial product as a wrapper." Even if yield went to zero, explorers, trading houses, and solo stakers would keep running nodes, but Lin felt that alone would not be enough to sustain Ethereum.
- Samuel Chong said, in a personal view, that staking is less a financial product than "akin to working for a salary" for participating in consensus and settling transactions. Yield will not drop to zero overnight and will find balance as stakers enter and exit. Chong expects institutions with roughly $300 billion of assets settled on Ethereum (stablecoins at $160 to $170 billion, DeFi at $100 billion, RWAs at $20 to $25 billion) to want a voice in the validation process even without yield.
- Optimum is a data acceleration network launched on Ethereum mainnet about 12 weeks ago, and roughly $3 billion of staked ETH is already connected, speeding up block and attestation propagation. Lido is the largest Ethereum liquid staking protocol, with TVL of about $26 billion.
- Byeongyun Seo stressed that public blockchains have become a global network like the internet, so rather than building a separate network, Korea has many areas to capture value on top of them, such as RPC nodes (All That Node), stablecoins, and tokenized assets. Seo's position is that sovereign blockchains are not essential.
Chapters
- Opening and panel introductions
- Panelist introductions: DSRV, Optimum, Lido
- Prerequisites for institutional staking: accountability, regulation, accounting
- Permissionless validation vs. compliance
- If yield goes to zero: infrastructure or financial product?
- Does Korea need sovereign staking infrastructure?
- Closing