Mara Schmiedt says institutions are getting serious about staking

Cryptocurrency staking is widely popular in the industry and Mara Schmiedt says financial institutions are now taking it seriously.

Alluvial Chief Growth Officer Mara Schmiedt revealed in a recent interview that institutions are getting serious about cryptocurrency staking. 

Staking gives crypto investors the opportunity to make passive income and it is less risky compared to trading cryptocurrencies. 

Crypto staking involves placing cryptocurrency assets in a locked wallet for the purpose of validating transactions in Proof-of-Stake blockchains.

Although Mara Schmiedt admits that institutions are getting serious about staking, she added that certain issues such as operational security, onboarding and warm up periods, activation queues and withdrawal periods must be addressed before the growth can be realised. She said;

“Institutions are getting a lot more serious about participating in the space and participating in staking. In order to facilitate that mixed adoption curve, we need the right products and capabilities to welcome that adoption and to drive it.”

Schmiedt is an expert in the field having previously worked as head of sales for Coinbase Cloud, where she extended staking services to institutional clients. 

She noted out that capital efficiency and liquidity are crucial to well-functioning capital markets. However, she lamented that protocols are not focused on these areas but instead on security standards and the measures used to enforce them. She said;

“I think that is one of the biggest hurdles that I see today for the adoption of staking more broadly. Today protocols are not trying to optimise for that.”

Schmiedt said Alluvial is focused on addressing liquidity challenges using a collaborative industry-specific approach. 

She said Liquid Collective as a collaborative effort and already had members from industry-leading companies including Kraken, Coinbase, Figment, and others. Schmiedt said;

“We want to build something that allows our integrators to build the most user-friendly access and experience so that we can support a very broad range of end users. A KYC, AML-enabled protocol that effectively creates the right compliance checks at the point of deposit and withdrawal.”

Ethereum’s recent migration to a proof of stake has likely brought more attention to staking services in the cryptocurrency space.