SEC Green Light on Liquid Staking Sends ETH Past $4K, Spurs Broad Staking and Layer-2 Rally

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) clarification around liquid staking continued to lift asset prices across the staking sector this week, with ETH rising to $4K for the first time since December on Friday.

Several layer-2 networks have also been the beneficiary of ETH's recent ascent. Ethereum scaling solution Optimism's native token (OP) rose 8% in the past 24 hours to cement a weekly gain of 13%, rival network Blast also experienced a uptick of 6.3%.

Mantle, which uses optimistic rollups to process transactions off-chain before settling them on the Ethereum mainnet, was the leader of the pack, with the MNT token jumping by 50% in the past week.

The staking sector in general has outperformed the wider market, with LDO up 12.3% and ETHFI up 5.4% in the past 24 hours.

The clarification comes after a very brief "altcoin season" last month that led to a series of significant moves for altcoins against their bitcoin trading pair.

The SEC's clarification on liquid staking could open the floodgates to institutional capital, which has been open to investing in assets like ether but not acquiring a yield through DeFi due to it previously being a regulatory gray area.

Rebecca Rettig, part of Jito’s legal team, hinted that liquid staking tokens could become a part of an ETF following the SEC's announcement.