The Vault x P2P.org: What institutions ask about staking

Some context first. A net 705,000 ETH entered staking over the past 30 days, according to Staking Rewards, and the staking ratio now sits around 32% of supply. So the "should we stake" debate is, for most institutions, already over. What is very much not over is the operational question underneath it, and that is where the interesting conversations tend to happen.

Here are three questions that keep coming up, and how I answer them.

Who actually holds the assets?

The client does, the whole way through. P2P.org runs non-custodial validator infrastructure, so it never takes possession of anything, and assets never leave The Vault's custody environment at any stage: delegation, rewards, unstaking. Everything stays protected by the threshold MPC cryptography our in-house research team built, which, I will admit, is still the part of all this I am proudest of.

Why does staying inside custody matter so much?

Because moving assets out of custody is never just a transfer. It is new counterparty due diligence, new key management questions, audit trails scattered across providers, and a conversation with a risk committee that nobody looks forward to. For a family office this is friction; for a regulated institution it is often a hard no. The demand for staking was always there. The willingness to pay that operational price was not. Our whole integration exists to delete that price, not to argue it is worth paying.

Where do the rewards go?

Into the client's custody account, automatically or via a claim within the platform depending on the network, and they show up in the same reporting and reconciliation tools as the rest of the portfolio. Unglamorous, I know. But this is the detail treasury people light up at, because it means staking income lands in existing accounting processes instead of spawning a parallel workstream. Institutional infrastructure should be boring in exactly this way.

That is really the whole story. Staking used to come with a trade-off between yield and control, and institutions, quite rationally, kept choosing control. Now they do not have to choose. Judging by the conversations we are having, plenty of them had been waiting for someone to remove that choice altogether.